The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The last few years have shown what intense feelings of hatred and antipathy are capable of flowing through the souls of the peoples of the Earth. In his life of feeling, at any rate, no one can blind himself to the truth that earthly life can never progress fruitfully along such paths. And so it may be useful today to speak of elements which, in the light of spiritual-scientific knowledge, can unite at all events the whole of civilised mankind.

Knowledge and feeling, of course, are two very different matters, but spiritual-scientific knowledge is much more intimately bound up with the whole being of man, with his innermost nature, than are the abstract truths current in the world of materialism. The truths of Spiritual Science are able to kindle ideas, feelings and impulses of will in human beings. Inner strength develops from a spiritual-scientific knowledge of the elements uniting the different peoples of the Earth and this also intensifies feelings of sympathy and mutual love.

Just as it is true that in the course of evolution man has progressed from an instinctive and unconscious to a conscious life, to a full and free understanding of his mission, so, as regards the future it must be said that vague sentimentality alone will not suffice to unite the peoples of the Earth. A conscious and mutual understanding of what the one may expect of the other—that is what is needed.

In another sphere of life it is comparatively easy today to see the necessity for this unification of men all over the Earth, for we have but to look at the disastrous things that are happening in the world of economics. When we seek for the root cause of these disasters and destructive tendencies, we realise that a striving to make the whole Earth into one economic sphere is an unconscious urge in the whole of mankind today. On the other hand, the peoples of the Earth have not yet reached the point of ennobling their national egoisms sufficiently to enable a collective economy of the whole Earth to arise out of the economic values they individually create. One nation tries to outdo the other in matters of economic advantage. Unreal points of view thus arise among the peoples, whereas the new instincts of mankind call out for a common economic life of the whole Earth—in effect an Earth economy. The leading minds of the times are forever laying stress upon this. There is indeed a striving for a uniform Earth economy in contrast to the separate national economies which have existed right up to the twentieth century, and it is this opposition of the national economies to an Earth economy that has caused the present havoc in economic life.

When it is a question of one nation understanding another or assimilating its spiritual riches, it is not enough simply to travel among other peoples or to be led there by destiny. Mere knowledge of everyday dealings between man and man will never bring about mutual understanding between the peoples. To travel and live among other peoples is not enough, any more than cursory observation of a man's gestures and movements enables us to understand his whole being. It is true that if one has a feeling for such things, a great deal may be conjectured about the inner being of another man from his gestures and movements, but if circumstances are such that his speech is understood, the knowledge is much more fundamental, for one can then receive from him what his own inner being wants to communicate. Is it then possible for something akin to this transmission of inner force, of inner being, to arise between peoples and nations? It cannot inhere merely in speech or language or in those things we observe in the daily life of the peoples, for this is but the intercourse between man and man. Something which transcends the individual human element must be revealed by knowing and understanding another man. We are really faced with a difficulty when we want to speak intelligibly of a nation or people as an entity. Is there anything as real as an external object, as real as external life, which justifies us in speaking of a nation or a people as an entity? We can speak of an individual human being merely from sense-perception of him; but for sense-perception a nation or a people is only a totality of so many individuals. Before we can recognise a nation as a reality we must rise to the super-sensible—it is the only way.

Now a man who undergoes spiritual training, who develops those forces of super-sensible knowledge which otherwise lie slumbering in his daily life, will gradually begin to see a nation or a people as a real being—of a super-sensible order, of course. When he perceives the spiritual, a foreign people is revealed to him as a spiritual being, a super-sensible reality, which—if I may use a somewhat crude expression—pervades and envelops the sense-nature of the individuals belonging to it, like a cloud. Supersensible knowledge alone enables us to penetrate into the real being of a nation or a people, and super-sensible knowledge cannot be acquired merely from the observation of daily life. I want to speak in outline today of how Spiritual Science strives to gain a really profound knowledge of the relationships among the peoples of the Earth. And here it is above all necessary to understand the being of man in the light of Spiritual Science. In a previous lecture here, as well as in my book Riddles of the Soul, published a few years ago, I said that man, as he stands before us in daily life, is not a unitary being, but that three divisions or members, clearly distinct from each other, are revealed in his bodily structure.

In the human organism we have, in the first place, all that is related to and centralised in the head system—the so-called system of nerves and senses. By means of this system man has his sense-perceptions, his thoughts and ideas. Today, as the result of an unenlightened science, it is thought that the whole being of Spirit and soul in man is based upon the system of nerves and senses—is, in fact, a kind of parasite upon the rest of the organism. This is not so. If a brief personal reference is permissible, I may say that more than thirty years' study of the nature and being of man—a study which has always tried to reconcile Spiritual Science with the results of natural science—has led me to confirm this threefold nature of the human organism. It is a general assumption of modern natural science that the life of Spirit and soul runs parallel with the life of nerves and Senses. In reality it is only the thought-life of man that is bound to the system of nerves and senses. Sentient life (feeling) is bound up with the rhythmic processes in the human organism. The feeling-life of man is connected directly with the rhythms of breathing and blood circulation, just as the life of thought and perception is connected with the system of nerves and senses. Similarly, the life of will is connected with the metabolic system (digestion and assimilation) in man. The seemingly lowest division of the human organism—the metabolic system (in the sense of a process, of course, and not of substance)—is the bearer of man's life of will.

In his nature of soul and Spirit, man is also a threefold being. The spiritual will, the feeling-life of the soul, the thinking, ideation and perception directed to external material phenomena—these are the three members or divisions of man's nature of soul and Spirit. These three members correspond to the three members of the physical organism—to the system of nerves and senses, to the rhythmic life of blood circulation and breathing, and to the metabolic life.

Now if we observe human beings in any given regions of the earth, we find that in terms of this threefold organisation they are by no means absolutely the same the whole Earth over. Another great error in modern thought is to imagine that one common social programme could be issued for the whole of the Earth and that men could adjust themselves to it. Human beings are individualised, specialized, in the different regions of the Earth. And those who would learn to know the true being of man as he lives on the Earth must be able to develop love not only for an abstract, universal humanity—for that would be merely an ‘idea’ of humanity, a dead, empty idea. Those who would really understand their fellow-beings must develop love for the individual forms and expressions of human nature in the different regions of the Earth.

In the short time at our disposal it is impossible to characterise all the individual peoples. All that can be done is to consider the main types of earthly humanity. We are led, in the first place, to a very characteristic type and also one of the very oldest—to the oriental, as expressed in many different ways in the ancient Indian peoples and in other Eastern races. This oriental type reveals one common element, especially in the Indian people. The man of the East has grown together, as it were, with the Earth which is his own soil. However clearly it may appear that the oriental has received the Spirit with intense devotion into his heart and soul, however deeply oriental mysticism may impress us, if we study the racial characteristics of the oriental, we shall find that the lofty spirituality we so justly admire is dependent, in his case, upon the experiences of the will flowing in the human being, the will that is, in turn, bound up with the metabolic processes. However paradoxical it may appear at first sight, this very spirituality of the oriental peoples, and especially of the ancient Indian, is something that—to use a crude expression—wells up from the metabolic processes. These processes are, in turn, connected with the processes of Nature in the environment of the oriental. Think of the Indian in very ancient times. Around him are the trees and fruits, everything that Nature in her beauty and wonder gives to man. The oriental unites this with the metabolic processes within him in such a way that the metabolism becomes a kind of continuation of all that is ripening to fruit on the trees and living under the soil in the roots. In his metabolic nature, the oriental has grown together with the fertility and well-being of the Earth. The metabolic process is the bearer of the will—hence the will develops in the inner being of man. But that which develops in the innermost being, in which man is firmly rooted and by means of which he relates himself to his environment—this does not enter very vividly into consciousness. A different element streams into the conscious life of the oriental. Into the feeling and thinking life of the oriental—especially of the most characteristic type—the Indian—there streams something that to all appearance is experienced in the metabolic processes in a material sense. In its spiritual ‘mirror-image,’ however, it appears as spiritual life.

Thus when we enter into all that has come forth from the soul and the thought of the really creative peoples of the East, it appears as a spiritual product of the Earth itself. When we steep ourselves in the Vedas that we pervaded by the light of the Spirit and speak with such intensity to our souls, if we respond to the instinctive subtlety of Vedanta and Yoga philosophy or go deeply into such works as those of Lao Tzu and Confucius, or are drawn to devote ourselves to oriental poetry, oriental wisdom, we never feel that it flows in an individual form from a human personality. Through his metabolic processes the oriental grows together with Nature around him. Nature lives and works on, seethes and surges within him, and when we allow his poetic wisdom to work upon us, it is as though the Earth herself were speaking. The mysteries of the Earth's growth seem to speak to mankind through the lips of the man of the East. We feel that no Western or Central European people could ever interpret the inner Spiritual mysteries of the Earth herself in this way.

The highest types of oriental peoples seem to move over the face of the Earth, expressing in their inner life something that really lives under the surface of the Earth. This grows up from below the Earth and bursts forth in blossoms and fruits, just as it does in the Spirit and soul of the man of the East. The inner essence of the Earth becomes articulate, as it were, in the oriental peoples. We can therefore understand that in accordance with their whole being, they have less feeling for the physical phenomena on the surface of the Earth and the external facts of the material world. Their innermost nature is one with the sub-earthly forces of which the external sense-phenomena are the outcome. They are therefore less concerned with what is taking place on the surface of the Earth. They are ‘metabolic-men.’ But the metabolic processes are expressed, in their case, in the life of soul and Spirit.

Now when an ideal arises before the peoples of the East, what form does it take? The injunction given to pupils by oriental sages was somewhat as follows: ‘You must breathe in a certain way; you must enter into the rhythm of life.’ These teachers instructed their pupils in certain rhythms of breathing and blood circulation. The way in which they taught their pupils of the higher life of soul is highly characteristic. The whole organisation of man as we see him in the ordinary life of the East, belonging to an Asiatic people, and especially to a Southern Asiatic people, is based upon metabolism. When he forms a concrete ideal of how he can become higher man, he develops his rhythmic system, by an act of free-will he strives for something that is higher, that is not given him by Nature.

Now the strange thing is that the further we pass from the Asiatic to the European peoples, and especially to those of Middle Europe, we find an outstanding development of the rhythmic system in the ordinary daily life of man. The peoples, not of Eastern or of Western Europe, but of Middle Europe, possess as a natural characteristic that for which the Indian strives as his ideal of a superman. But it is one thing to have to acquire a quality by dint of self-discipline and free spiritual activity, and another to possess it naturally and instinctively. The man of Middle Europe possesses by nature what the oriental has to develop from out of his metabolic life which is inwardly connected with the Earth. Thus, what is for the oriental an ideal, is for the European a natural possession of daily life; his ideal, therefore, must necessarily be different. The ideal of the European lies one stage higher; it is the life of thought bound up with the life of nerves and senses.

There is a quality of unbridled phantasy in the artistic creations of the oriental. It seems to rise from inner Earth activity, just as vapour rises from water into the clouds. The inner, rhythmic ‘wholeness,’ which is the essence of the life of Middle Europe, enabled the ancient Greek people—who accomplished so much for the whole of modern civilisation—to create what we call European Art. The Greek strove for all that makes manifest the inner harmony of earthly man. The material elements and the etheric-spiritual elements are balanced—and the ‘middle’ man is expressed. The creations of oriental phantasy always run to excess in some direction or other. It is in the artistic conceptions of Greece that the human form was first imbued with harmonious roundness and inner wholeness. This was because man realised his true being in the rhythmic system. When the man of Greece set himself an ideal, it was one he strove to reach by dint of inner discipline of soul, by dint of education. He used the organ of thinking just as the oriental uses the organs connected with rhythm in the human being. The Yogi of India endeavours to regulate his breathing according to the laws of Spirit and soul so that it may bear him above the level of ordinary humanity. The man of Middle Europe trains himself to rise above the instinctive processes of the rhythmic system, of the blood circulation, of the breathing, to what makes him truly man. Out of this the life of thought is developed. But these thoughts, especially in the highest type of Middle European, become merely an ‘interpreter’ of the being of man. This is what strikes us when we turn to the productions of European culture after having steeped ourselves in those of oriental humanity. In the highly spiritual creations of oriental culture we see, as it were, the very blossoming of earthly evolution. Human lips give expression to the speech of the Earth herself. It is not so in the man of Middle European nor was it so in the ancient Greek.

When the man of Middle Europe follows the promptings of his own true nature, when he is not false to himself, when he realises that self-knowledge is the noblest crown of human endeavour, that the representation of the human in Nature and in history is a supreme achievement of man—then he will express as his ideal everything that he himself is as a human being. The very essence of the man of Middle Europe is expressed when he gives free play to his own inherent being. Hence we can understand that the wonderful thought expressed in Goethe's book on Winckelmann could arise only in Middle Europe. I refer to the passage where Goethe summarises the lofty perceptions, profound thought and strong will-impulses of this wonderful man into a description of his own conception of the world, for it is like the very sun of modern culture: “In that man is placed on Nature's pinnacle, he regards himself as another entire Nature, whose task is to bring forth inwardly yet another pinnacle. For this purpose he heightens his powers, imbues himself with perfections and virtues—summons discrimination, order and harmony and rises finally to the production of a work of art.” Man's own spiritual nature gives birth to a new being.

This application of all the forces to the understanding of man himself is especially manifest in the man of Middle Europe—when he is true to his own being. It is only in more modern times that this has fallen into the background. The man of Middle Europe has every motive to consider how he should develop this veneration, understanding and penetration of what is truly human.

If we now look at the East and its peoples from a more purely spiritual point of view, we shall find that the oriental peoples, just because they are ‘metabolic men,’ develop the spirituality which constitutes the connection between the human soul and the Divine. If man's nature is to be complete, he must bring forth, in his inner being, those qualities with which he is not endowed by the elemental world; in his own consciousness he must awaken the antithesis of all that he possesses by nature. Thus the oriental develops a spirituality which makes him conscious of the connection between the human soul and the Divine. The oriental can speak of man's connection with the Divine as a matter of course, in a way that is possible to no other race, in words that touch the very heart. Other peoples of the Earth may subjugate and conquer oriental races and try to instil into them their own idiosyncrasies, laws and regulations, but they do, nevertheless, assimilate what the East has to say about the connection of man with the Divine as something which applies to themselves also.

In modern times we have seen how Western peoples, steeped in materialism though they may be, turn to oriental philosophers such as ancient Laotze to Chinese and Indian conceptions of the world, not so much in search of ideas but in order to find the inner fervour which will enable them to experience man's connection with the Divine. Men steep themselves in oriental literature much more in order that their feelings may be warmed by the way in which the oriental speaks of his connection with the Divine than for the sake of any philosophical content. The abstract nature of the European makes it difficult for him really to understand oriental philosophy. Again and again people who have studied the sayings of Buddha, with all their endless repetitions, have expressed the opinion to me that these sayings ought to be abridged and the repetitions eliminated. My only answer could be: ‘You have no real understanding of the true greatness of oriental philosophy, for it is expressed in the very repetitions which you want to cut out.’ When the oriental steeps himself in the sayings of Buddha, with the repetitions which only irritate people of the West, he is on the way to his ideal the rhythmic recurrence of the motif. The same phrase is repeated over and over again. Now, as we have seen, the oriental lives naturally in the processes of the metabolic system. When he gives himself up to the recurring phrases of Buddha, there arises within him a spiritual counterpart of the system of breathing and blood circulation; he has brought this about by dint of his own free endeavours.

If a European really tries to understand all that is great and holy in the oriental nature, he gains a knowledge which will elude him unless he consciously develops it. It is quite natural that the European should want to eliminate the repetitions in the sayings of Buddha, for he lives in the breathing rhythm and his ideal is to raise himself to the element of thought. When the thought is once grasped he wants no repetitions—he strives to get beyond them. If we are to study these oriental repetitions, we must, in effect, develop another kind of quality—not an intellectual understanding but an inner love for what is expressed in individual forms by the different peoples. Our whole attitude should make us realise that the particular qualities which make one people great are not possessed by the others, and we can understand these qualities only when we are able to love the other Peoples and appreciate the full value of their particular gifts.

It is just when we penetrate into the inner nature and essence of the Peoples of the Earth that we find the differences of their individual natures. And then we realise that the all-embracing sphere of the ‘human’ is not expressed in its entirety through any individual man, or through the members of any one race, but only through the whole of mankind. If anyone would understand what he is in his whole being, let him study the characteristics of the different peoples of the Earth. Let him assimilate the qualities which he himself cannot possess by nature, for only then will he become fully man. Full and complete manhood is a possibility for everyone. Everyone should pay heed to what lives in his own inner being. The revelation vouchsafed to other peoples is not his and he must find it in them. In his heart he feels and knows that this is necessary. If he discovers what is great and characteristic in the other peoples and allows this to penetrate deeply into his own being, he will realise that the purpose of his existence cannot be fulfilled without these other qualities, because they are also part of his own inner striving. The possibility of full manhood lies in every individual, but it must be brought to fulfilment by understanding the special characteristics of the different peoples spread over the Earth. It is in the East, then, that man is able to express with a kind of natural spirituality his connection with the Divine.

When we turn to the peoples of Middle Europe, we find that what is truly characteristic of them is hidden under layers of misconception—and these must be cleared away. Think of all the great philosophers who, having thought about Nature and God in a human sense, have with almost no exception raised another question as well. Nearly every great German Philosopher has been occupied with the question of equity, of rights as between man and man. The search for equity, misunderstood and hindered though it be, is a characteristic of the Middle European peoples. Those who do not recognise this have no understanding of the peoples of Middle Europe, and nothing will divert them from the prevailing materialism (which has quite another source) back to what is fundamentally characteristic of true Teutonic stock.

Just as the man of the East is the interpreter of the Earth because his spiritual life is a blossom or fruit of the Earth herself, so is the Teuton an interpreter of himself, of his own being. He faces himself questioningly, and because of this he faces every other man as his equal. The burning question for him, therefore, is that of equity, of right. Wherever Teutonic thought has striven to fathom the depths of the universe, in men such as Fichte, Hegel or Schelling, it has never been a question of adopting the old Roman tradition of equity but of investigating its very nature and essence. The abstract results of these investigations, to be found in Fichte, Hegel, Schelling and Humboldt, are fundamentally the same thing as we find in Goethe when he seeks along multifarious paths for the expression of the truth, harmony and fullness of man's nature. In this sense Goethe is the representative of the Teutonic, Middle European nature. Just as the oriental faces the Earth, so does the Middle European face man, with self-knowledge.

If we pass to Western Europe and thence to America, we find the figure of the true Westerner expressed in abstract thinking. To use a figure of speech employed, I believe, by that deeply spiritual writer, Rabindranath Tagore, the Westerner is pre-eminently a ‘head-man.’ The oriental is a ‘heart-man,’ for he experiences the process of metabolism in his heart; the Middle European is the ‘breath-man.’ He stands in a rhythmic relationship to the outer world through the rhythmic processes within him. The Westerner is a head-man and Tagore compares him to a ‘spiritual giraffe.’ Tagore loves the Westerner, for when it is a question of describing characteristics, sympathy and antipathy do not necessarily come into play. Tagore compares the Westerner to a spiritual giraffe because he raises everything into abstractions—into abstractions such as gave rise, for instance, to the ‘Fourteen Points’ of President Wilson. Speaking in the sense of spiritual reality, one feels that the Westerner's head is separated from the rest of his body by a long neck and the head can only express in abstract concepts what it offers to the world. A long path has to be trodden before these abstract concepts, these husks of words and ideas, finds their way to the heart, the lungs and the breathing system, and so to the region where they can become feelings and pass over into will.

The characteristic quality of the Western man inheres, then, in what I will call the thinking system. The ideal for which the Middle European strives—which he endeavours to attain as a result of freedom, of free spiritual activity—does not have to be striven for by the Westerner and especially not by the American through this free Spiritual activity, for the Westerner possesses it instinctively. Instinctively he is a man of abstractions. As I have said, it is not the same to possess a quality instinctively as to strive for it by dint of effort. When it has once been acquired it is bound up with man's nature in quite another way. To acquire a quality by dint of free spiritual activity is not the same thing as to possess it instinctively, as a gift of Nature.

Now here lies a great danger. Whereas the Indian in his Yoga philosophy strives upwards to the rhythmic system, and the Middle European to the thinking system, the Westerner, the ‘spiritual giraffe,’ must transcend the merely intellectual processes if he is not to lose his true humanity. As I recently said quite frankly to a gathering attended by a number of Westerners, this is the great responsibility facing the West at the present time. In the case of the Middle Europeans it will be a healthy, free striving that leads them to spirituality, to Spiritual Science. The whole nature of Western man will be lost in an abyss, if, as he strives to rise beyond the thinking-system, he falls into an empty ‘spiritualism,’ seeking for the qualities of soul in a region where the soul does not dwell. Here lies the danger, but also the great responsibility. The danger is that the Westerner may fall into soul-emptiness as he strives to transcend the qualities bestowed on him by Nature; his responsibility is to allow himself to be led to true Spiritual Science, lest by virtue of his dominant position in the world he should lend himself to the downfall of humanity.

It is a solemn duty of the peoples of Middle Europe—for it is part of their nature—to ascend the ladder to spiritual knowledge. But on their path of ascent from the rhythmic, breathing-system to the thinking-system, they gain something else in the sphere of the human. The danger confronting Western peoples is that they may leave the sphere of the human when they set up an ideal for themselves. This really lies at the root of the existence of the many sectarian movements in the West—movements which run counter to the principle of the ‘universal human’ at the present time.

In the oriental, whose metabolic system is so closely related to the Earth, a spiritual activity along the paths or Nature herself arises. The man of the West, with his predominantly developed thinking-system, turns his gaze primarily to the world of sense. It is as though something under the surface of the Earth were working in the oriental; the man of the West seems to pay heed only to what is above the Earth's surface, the phenomena which arise as a result of sun, moon, stars, air, water and the like. The thought-processes themselves, however, have not been derived from what is happening at the periphery. I said in a previous lecture that the spiritual in man cannot be explained by the study of the earthly world around him. The spiritual fruits of the Earth arise in the very being of the true oriental and he knows himself, as man, with the living Spirit within him, to be a Citizen of the whole Cosmos—a member not only of the Earth but of the whole Cosmos. The Westerner, with his more highly developed thinking-system, has been deprived of this Cosmos by modern science, and is left with nothing but the possibility to calculate it in mathematical and mechanical formulae. The Westerner must realise that the origin of his soul is cosmic, that indeed he could not exist as a thinking being if this were not so, and he must also realise cold, barren mathematics is the only science which remains to him for the purpose of explaining the Cosmos. The outpourings of the Earth herself have become part of the very being of the oriental—his poetic wisdom is like a blossom of the Earth. The Middle European has to recognise that his essential human quality is revealed in man and through man. In effect the human being confronts himself.

The qualities of most value in the man of the West are those bestowed not by the Earth, but by the Cosmos. But the only means he has of approaching these cosmic, super-sensible gifts is by mathematical calculation, by equally dry spectral analysis or by similar hypotheses. What the Middle European seeks as an expression of equity between man and man is sought by the Westerner through his dedication to economic affairs, for the human rights he values as an expression of the spirit seem to him to emerge only as the fruit of economic life. Hence it is not surprising that Karl Marx left Germany, where he might have learnt to recognise the nature of man in a Goethean, humanistic sense, and went to the West, to England, where his gaze was diverted from the truly human element and he was misled with the belief that what man can know is nothing but an ideology, a fact of economic life. This is not a truth in the absolute sense, but is fundamental to the nature of the man of the West, just as it is fundamental to the oriental peoples to behold Nature side by side with the being of man and then to speak of the connection of the human soul with the Divine as a self-evident fact. That is why many men of the West who feel the necessity for looking up to the Divine—for, as I have already said, all men feel the need at least to become complete man—are aware of a longing, even when they try to conquer oriental peoples, to receive from them what they have to say about man's connection with the Divine. Whether we apply this to smaller races and individual peoples, or confine ourselves to what is typical everywhere we see that man in his whole nature is not expressed in the members of any one people or race. Full manhood is as yet only an urge within us, but this urge must grow into a love for all humanity, for those qualities we do not ourselves possess by nature but can acquire if we sincerely seek for knowledge of the nature of other peoples of the Earth.

The internationalism prevailing in the age of Goethe assumed this form. It is this kind of internationalism that permeates such thoughts as are found, for instance, in The Boundaries of the State by William Von Humboldt. It is the striving of a true cosmopolitanism which, by assimilating all that can be acquired from a love extended to other races, ennobles and uplifts the individual people; knowledge of one's own race is sought by assimilating all that is idealistic, great and beautiful in other peoples of the Earth. It is because of this that in Germany's days of spiritual prime there arose from out of the rhythmic life of her people a lofty cosmopolitanism which had been sought from among all other peoples. Just think how Herder's search took him among other peoples, how he tried to unravel the deepest being of all peoples of the Earth! How penetrated he was by the thought that permeating the individual ‘man of flesh’ there is another man, greater and more powerful, who can be discovered only when we are able to pour ourselves out over all peoples.

We cannot help contrasting this spirit, which at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the germ of greatness in Middle Europe, with the internationalism of today. In its present form, internationalism is not a living pulse in the world; it is preached throughout the world in the form of Marxism—and Marxism believes only in human thinking. Internationalism nowadays is a more or less weakened form of Marxism. There is no longer any inkling of the differentiation of full and complete humanity over the Earth. An abstraction is set up and is supposed to represent humanity, to represent man. Such internationalism is not the first stage of an ascent but the last stage of a decline, because it is devoid of all endeavours to reach after true internationality, which always ennobles the individual stock. The kind of internationalism which appears in Marxism and all that has developed from it is the result of remaining stationary within a one-sided and wholly unpractical system of thought that is applied merely to the world of sense and has not penetrated to the real national qualities. True internationalism, by contrast, springs from a love which goes out to all peoples and races in order that the light received from them may be kindled in the deeds, concepts and creations of one's own people. Each individual race must so find its place in the great chorus of the peoples on the Earth that it contributes to the full understanding which can alone unite them all in real and mutual knowledge.

In this lecture it has not been my object to speak of matters which might seem to indicate a ‘programme.’ I wanted to speak of the spiritual-scientific knowledge that is kindled in the spiritual investigator as a result of his higher knowledge of the communal life of man on the Earth, for this true communal life is indeed possible.

One can, of course, speak from many different points of view of what is necessary for the immediate future of humanity; one can speak of this impulse or that. But it must be realised that a spiritual comfort flowing from the knowledge I have tried to indicate, more in fleeting outline than in detail, may be added to all that can be said in regard to social, political or educational affairs. It is a comfort that may flow from knowledge of the rhythm, I say expressly the possible rhythm, of the historical life of humanity.

This lecture should show you that the hatred and antipathy in the world today can indeed be followed by international love with healing in its wings. This is indeed possible. But we are living in an age when all that is possible must be consciously, deliberately and freely striven for by men. There must be knowledge of the conditions requisite for uniting the peoples of the Earth, in order that, as a result of this knowledge, each individual people may help to make the waves of love follow those of hatred. Human love alone has power to heal the wounds of hatred. If mankind has no wish for this love, chaos will remain. That is the terrible alternative now facing men who have knowledge. Those who realise its terrors know that the souls of men dare not sleep, for otherwise, as a result of the powerlessness caused by the sleep into which the souls of the peoples have fallen, the healing waves of love will not be able to flow over the waves of hatred.

Men who realise this will acquire the kind of knowledge that flows from a spiritual conception of the relationships between the peoples. They will take this knowledge into their feeling—love for humanity will be born. They will take this knowledge into their will—deeds for humanity will be accomplished. The evolution of the age, with all the terrible paralysis that is appearing at the present time, places a solemn duty before the soul: to gather together all that can unite mankind in love and array it in opposition to the destructive elements that have made their appearance in recent times. This quest for loving unification, for unifying love is not merely a vague feeling. To those who understand the conditions of life today, it is the very highest duty of man.

Dear attendees! Before I begin with the lecture, I would like to apologize to the esteemed attendees: My voice has suffered a little lately due to a very common cold. It could be that it suffers disturbances during the lecture and would do all sorts of somersaults. I kindly ask for your understanding in this regard. I hope that my voice will improve during the lecture.

What I would particularly like to emphasize in the first part of these reflections on social issues is the true nature of what actually lives in the social demands of the present. For a discerning person, when he considers human affairs, especially the affairs of the human life itself, it very, very soon becomes clear how that which man actually wills and strives for in the most comprehensive sense masks and hides itself externally in all sorts of forms that do not directly represent that which actually lives as an impulse in the soul.

Therefore, one must particularly try to explore the true nature of what actually lives in human souls when faced with social phenomena.

Social issues – no one, esteemed attendees, will be able to deny that they have been discussed for decades, not only discussed within circles in which one discussed this or that more or less seriously, that they were discussed by the world parties, world classes, world destinies. Much, much has been achieved in the second half of the nineteenth century in terms of what can be taught to solve these pressing issues that have become truly burning in the present.

In particular, however, it is the terrible catastrophe that has befallen humanity in recent years, which, with regard to what is alive in the social question, could have a galvanizing, enlightening effect on many a human soul.

One could see, dear honoured attendees, how the social question played into this war catastrophe, one could say, right where the most immediate causes of this war catastrophe came into question. Much of what is connected with the starting point of this war catastrophe will, one may still doubt today, be the subject of a social pathology, or rather, the subject of a social psychiatry. But much of the mental state of personalities who had a part, a living part, in the initial currents of this catastrophe can be traced back to their fear, to their whole relationship in general, to what they saw coming as the modern proletarian, social movement.

They understood little of what was alive in this social movement; but they saw it coming. What had a determining influence on those judgments, which were partly responsible for this terrible catastrophe, was not so much what was alive in this social movement, which had only just emerged in 1914, as what had become established in some of the souls of leading personalities under the influence of the emerging social movement.

Then again, esteemed attendees, on the one hand we see many things developing during the last four and a half years. So that, I would say, certain leading circles continued to fear the approaching social movement. But on the other hand, we see how hopes are being raised that what could not come from other world currents might perhaps come from the international socialist world movement, a balancing of the disharmonies that have come to light in this catastrophe. And now, now that this catastrophe has developed into a crisis, which short-sighted minds may mistake for an end, but which is by no means an end, now a large part of educated Europe is faced with the historical, with the actual necessity of taking a stand on what is hidden in the social problem. And must one not, when one follows these things with an unprejudiced eye, must one not say: something tragic is befalling the minds of precisely those who must now feel compelled to comment on the social problem from the immediate present? For decades, through diligent thought and diligent observation of social phenomena, some believed they had grasped a judgment, a power of judgment. Now that the question has become urgent, now that the question in the life of facts, let us say, is growing more urgent with each passing day: unbiased observation cannot say otherwise! And so at least one thing seems to emerge, especially from the role that social movement has played in the last catastrophic events of humanity – one thing seems to emerge from all this: that for a long, long time, people of all classes, of all professions, will have to deal seriously with what is today called social demand. This may justify, esteemed attendees, that I, who has been allowed to speak about subjects in spiritual science for years here in Bern, take the opportunity to speak about this social problem in the narrower sense, based on the foundations of this spiritual scientific research. If I may start with a personal comment, I would just like to say this: it is certainly not, as some might believe, from a purely theoretical method of knowledge, but rather from a theoretical work of knowledge that I would like to speak here about the social problem, as this social problem came to me when I through years among proletarians teachers at a workers' training school was, and from there, to teach and work had just among the proletarian population itself in the trade union, in the cooperative and also within the political movement, instructing, teaching.

Yes, esteemed attendees, I had the opportunity to observe what I believe is of primary importance to observe if one wants to understand the social question. Above all, I had the opportunity to observe, to witness, what I would call the proletarian state of mind.

Those who get to know this proletarian state of mind may be struck by the following conviction: You see, dear attendees, much that is urgent, astute and industrious has been written precisely the field of socialists and non-socialists in the course of the last few decades - actually already in the second half of the nineteenth century, and then through the twentieth century, as far as we have progressed in this twentieth century. This extensive literature expresses what is being thought within the modern proletariat as a social question.

If we compare what is expressed in the literature with what an unbiased observation of life reveals to those who can observe this life, we first discover a strange, highly conspicuous and instructive contradiction within the modern proletarian social movement.

Nothing is heard more often in literature, in speeches, in articles by socialist writers and agitators than a certain underestimation of everything intellectual, everything spiritual! The socialist side in particular emphasizes that everything that man thinks, everything that man somehow works out spiritually in himself, that this is nothing more than, so to speak, I would say, the cloud that rises from the great, only realities of the economic struggles of mankind.

How the individual classes struggle with each other economically, what takes place in economic life, that is the only true reality. Like clouds, those formations that develop as human thoughts arise, arise as that which is called knowledge, that which is called art, and so on.

Am I saying something particularly new to anyone who has somehow dealt with these things when I express this assertion in relation to all socialist literature and all socialist work? Because, dear attendees, a vivid observation shows that within the entire historical development of humanity, there has never been a party movement, a class movement, that has started from thinking, from knowledge, as intensely as the particular proletarian-socialist movement! Yes, it can be said, without exaggeration, that the modern socialist movement is the one that seeks to rest, in a quite unique way, on what is scientifically based. However strange it may sound, the modern socialist movement is the one that, in contrast to all other similar movements in world history, starts from a scientific basis in the most eminent sense, from a foundation of ideas!

As there are so many contradictions in life, indeed, as life itself consists of the interaction of contradictions, so – one could say – it is also there. People consciously say: We think nothing of thoughts; in the unconscious lie the reasons from which this movement has emerged: from thought. One has only to observe with true love for the facts and with true love for the observation of human nature to see how the proletarian soul was touched by an understanding of such difficult, such exact precision - at least an attempt at exactness is made - such exact thought work as that of Karl Marx ; one must see with love for the facts, with love for the observation of human nature, how the proletarian mind has been tried in an astute way to understand where Karl Marx, the leader of the modern proletarian movement, the theoretical leader, was actually mistaken.

It can be said that if you were a little tired of the superficiality of so-called bourgeois intellectual circles within contemporary human society and entered the circles of the proletariat, you could already notice the transition – the transition from the superficial, lightly veiled scientificity of an education that is only superficially constructed, to the intense striving to get behind the secrets of the immediate life that surrounds you in the modern proletarian world. One sensed, I would say, the approach of a terrible disaster, by the fact that one saw how little inclination there was, especially among the intellectual, leading people, to find understanding for what really lives in the proletarian soul.

One could feel a pang of heartache when one saw the paths the leading class of humanity took to look into the proletarian soul: they went to the theater to see Hauptmann's “Weavers.” Aesthetic enjoyment of proletarian situations – that was what they sought as understanding.

They had little conception of this – or they sought little conception. The real secret is that the modern proletariat has been penetrated by the strictest scientific thinking, the heaviest scientific artillery, which many intellectuals today avoid because it is uncomfortable for them, and this thinking has been able to penetrate the modern proletarian soul; one seeks little thought about the fact that this is so. If one took things seriously, one could feel for decades that there was too little understanding for what was emerging as the looming disaster.

Now, esteemed attendees, what is the reason for the contradiction that I have indicated, that on the one hand the thought is almost denied by the modern proletarian and that, however, this proletariat is entirely based on thoughts, has a sense and interest and attention for the thought life - what is the reason for this contradiction? I believe that observation of life shows that this contradiction lies in the fact that this movement is not so much concerned with what people imagine, what these economic or social goals are, but that it is more a matter of what the soul of the living person who belongs to the modern proletariat actually is.

And I must say: No word has spoken more intensely to my soul than all the astute discussions of economic issues, which I believe I can dignify; but more indicative of what lives in the time, has always seemed to me to be a word that can be heard everywhere within the modern proletarian movement: it is the word that says: the modern proletariat has advanced in the development of humanity to class consciousness. What does it actually mean, as the word is used directly? It wants to say: the modern proletarian does not live instinctively as—say—in the old patriarchal life, in the old craft life, as an apprentice or journeyman; the modern proletarian worker does not live instinctively within the social structure; but he lives in such a way that he knows what he means within this social structure, how he is a special class—precisely the class of employees in relation to the other classes, the classes of the employers. That he does not merely live instinctively within this social structure, in the way he knows he is placed within it, but has something of class consciousness, is what the word “class-conscious proletariat” is initially intended to express.

But when you get right down to it, the term “class-conscious proletariat” is just a mask for something else entirely. We would recognize this other thing if it were not for the fact that modern humanity has lost not only the ability to recognize the full reality of the course of human events, but also the concepts that necessarily had to be discarded. Today, I would say, people are almost obsessed with a very comfortable instinct for knowledge. This instinct for knowledge aims to link cause and effect in the simplest possible way everywhere: there is the cause - there is the effect; the effect follows from the cause. And then it continues, possibly in a very subjective way, perhaps adding to justify this straightforward progression of knowledge along the thread of cause and effect: “Nature doesn't make leaps.” Of course, anyone with even a little insight knows that nature makes leaps everywhere. But such a word is simply used up. Nature does develop successive green color leaves after green color leaves; but then it makes the leap to the green sepal, and then the even greater leap to the petal, then to the stamens and so on. And so one would notice refutations of the convenient sentence “Nature does not make leaps” in all of life, in all of nature's processes.

Where would we end up if we were to observe human life in such a bare way as it develops in the physical world, so bare that we follow events in a straight line according to the immediately preceding cause and the immediately following effect? Do we not see in the individual human life how a particular crisis occurs when the teeth change around the seventh year? Do we not see how a significant crisis occurs when a person reaches sexual maturity? Do we not see how, in between, there is more of a calm succession of cause and effect? And how then, at the change of teeth, at sexual maturity - there are also other crises in later years, even if they are less noticeable - all these things show how, in such times, nature truly makes leaps. In this respect, an unbiased observer of natural processes will still have a great deal to do in the future. By throwing overboard, and rightly so, what belongs to ancient metaphysics, one has at the same time lost the possibility of viewing historical development in such a way as to see and perceive the real impulses contained in it, just as one can perceive such changing impulses as they assert themselves in the human tooth change, in human sexual maturity.

For the truly impartial observer, it is evident from the course of human historical development that there are special times when the human soul undergoes a transformation and new impulses enter into the human soul.

One such age was the one that roughly coincides with the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In this respect, the history as it is presented in schools is in many ways a “convenient fable”. It does not point to the magnificent transformations that have taken place in the soul conditions of human beings in successive ages. Once we move from the blinkered history that prevails today to an unblinkered history, we will see how very different the inner soul state of a person in the eleventh or twelfth century AD was from that of a person in the sixteenth, seventeenth or eighteenth century! History cannot be viewed in such a way that one can simply trace cause and effect in a straight line; but such crises – crises that are fundamentally connected with the organization of the whole of humanity – such crises must be acknowledged, as one must acknowledge such crises, such fundamental upheavals, in the partial development of the human natural organism.

And that which lives there, I would say, as an elementary impulse in the modern development of humanity, has not been portrayed anywhere except in the field of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, which I represent. On the other hand, however, modern development has been repeatedly and justifiably presented in such a way that modern life as a whole, and economic life in particular, has undergone a transformation on the one hand through modern technology, and on the other hand through the advent of the capitalist economic order, as it emerged in the wake of modern technology.

I do not need to characterize these two impulses in the development of modern humanity in more detail here, because this has often been presented: modern technology and modern capitalism – many sides have aptly described what these two impulses of modern development mean with regard to the emergence of this modern proletarian consciousness. But this modern proletarian consciousness must not only be traced back to these two economic impulses: to modern technology, to modern machine production, to modern capitalism – but it must be seen as that which, as a kind of partial phenomenon, had to emerge in a very elementary way in the development of man. It is the result of those revolutions in the organism of human development, that inner revolutionary impulse of which I said that it manifested itself in the development of modern humanity around the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth centuries. The other classes have taken relatively little part in what broke into modern humanity. The modern proletarian has been pushed by his very necessities of life, especially in his state of mind, to take up this impulse, which arose from the forces of human development in the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth centuries, this impulse into his soul.

What was this impulse? Well, this impulse cannot be characterized in any other way than to say: Much of, indeed, all of what has been thought and felt and invented by people in earlier times more instinctively, more from the subconscious, intuitive powers of the human soul, is consciously being lived through by humanity from this crisis in the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth century. The conscious inner clarity of the human soul is developing more and more. This is what the human personality has been relying on since that time.

The transition from an instinctive life to a conscious life was particularly true of the modern proletariat. Just observe how this modern proletariat is separated from what is natural and what is humanly produced. Contrast this with the old crafts, with the old relationship of man to nature, with the direct, natural, original production, where man is connected with what he works, what he does, how a personal relationship develops between man and his labor.

It is an interesting study to see how the modern age has torn apart what used to be connected: man and his work. And most of all, the modern proletarian experiences this, who is placed in front of the machine, next to the machine! There is now an extremely impersonal relationship between man and the thing with which he works! And in the most impersonal way, he is placed in the whole social organism, in that he is a member of an economic order that does not arise from the impulses of personalities, that does not arise from the personal impulses of human individuals, but that arises, one might say, objectively, from the workings of capitalism itself. Man is torn away from what used to constitute his joy in his occupation, what used to constitute his zeal, his enthusiasm for his occupation, what constituted the honor that he associated with his occupation, and so on; and a completely abstract, sober relationship between man and his occupation has arisen. Because this is not the case for the other estates and classes, because this in particular comes out, comes into its own among the proletarians, that is why it is the proletarian above all who is pointed out, in his soul the actual impulse of modern times, consciousness, to develop.

Behind the saying “class-conscious proletariat” lies the other fact that the proletarian, above all, through his world position, through his being placed in human development, aspires particularly to modern human consciousness, to consciousness of human dignity. The old estates are not so detached from what used to be their joy, used to be their thoughts of human dignity and honor from their actions. The modern proletarian, because no interest can connect him with his means of labor, is thrown back on himself as a mere human being. It is in him that this impulse of the transition from unconsciousness, from the instinctive social life to the conscious social life, develops.

One could say, esteemed attendees, how Christianity broke out in an unknown province of the Roman Empire, how it spread first to the educated countries, Greece and Rome, but took much less root there than it did among the barbarian peoples with their simple – as one often says from a haughty point of view, childlike – state of mind, and how Christianity in the simple minds of the Germanic and other tribes descending from the north, the most significant impulse of human development, the transition from instinctive life to life in full human consciousness, cannot develop most intensely in the other classes, but most intensely – even if the other classes may otherwise have greater prerequisites for intellectuality and so on: What the new impulse actually is in the development of humanity can develop most intensely in the modern proletarian precisely because of the proletarian's unfavorable position in general human development. The modern proletariat is moving against the educated world of today, just as the Germanic Christians once moved against the Roman and Greek world. One can say that human consciousness, consciousness of human dignity, is actually hidden behind the words: “class-conscious proletariat”.

Thus, dear attendees, for those who can observe life, it is not just any economic demand, it is not just some abstract notion, it is not just some one-sided economic impulse, but the living human being is at the center of this modern social proletarian movement, the modern proletarian himself with a special way of consciously striving for the realization of true human dignity. And it is from this deeper class consciousness that the true form of social demands develops, which are often masked behind mere economic disputes and economic demands.

If you know this modern proletariat, dear attendees, one thing stands out above all. It is striking that this proletariat is the aspiring population, the more educated classes, which, as I mentioned at the beginning, can truly be said to It is founding a social movement that is based entirely on science and on thought. In his class consciousness, in his striving for conscious human dignity, the modern proletarian also strives for real knowledge, for real inner thought deepening.

But where does this deepening of thought lead him? Here, ladies and gentlemen, is a point that the modern proletarian himself, being more devoted to external work, does not really notice – but it is noticed by someone who may justifiably call himself a spiritual proletarian – and it is a point that provides a particularly deep insight into the state of mind of the modern proletariat , and actually into the whole structure of modern socialism: the fact is that everything spiritual, everything that man acquires in terms of concepts, artistic experiences and otherwise, is perceived by the modern proletarian, and also by the theoretical leaders of the modern proletariat, as - as they themselves always say - as “ideology”; ideology - a spiritual life that is not convinced that among the real forces and entities that pulsate and interweave the world, there is also objective, real spirit - no: a spiritual life that is nothing more than the subjective reflection of external material and economic reality. Not that an effective spirit penetrates into our humanity, which leads us not only to have a kind of brain digestion, but to have thoughts and feelings within this brain digestion, it is not a real spirit that leads us to develop a life of thought, a different inner spiritual life - no: this spiritual life is mere ideology. Nothing of spiritual reality corresponds to it. All that lives in ideas is only the mirror of material processes, economic processes.

One could even say that the modern proletarian is, in a sense, inwardly happy in theory that he can be such an enlightened person, no longer believing in old metaphysical entities, but knowing that everything that is spiritual life for people is ideology, bubbles that rise from the material and economic world of facts. And yet, what the modern proletariat brings into the whole social structure depends in many ways on its perception and recognition of intellectual life as ideology in the way I have described.

But why is that so? Of course, the proletarian himself thinks that in doing so he has made a special contribution of his own to human development. But that is not the case. The modern proletarian has inherited only what the other classes were able to hand over to him in this particular field. At the same point in time that I mentioned to you – the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth century – when humanity went through a significant crisis, moving from a mere instinctive life to an inwardly soulful conscious life. At the same time, a phenomenon can be observed in the leading classes and leading personalities: spirituality loses its driving force in relation to what the human being can think and research further.

In this way, we touch on a very significant secret of the whole of recent human development. We must look back, esteemed attendees, to those times when everything that man researched, everything that man thought about the individual facts of nature and human life, how all of this was incorporated into an overall world view, which was also permeated by religious impulses into the most minute branches of human knowledge and research, how a common impulse spreads through what was a central religious feeling and what wanted to know and research about individual parts of the world.

In the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth centuries, with the advent of modern times, the spirituality of man loses its momentum. Just imagine what it means, for example, for the Church, which, out of its own initiative and on the basis of its last old impulses, very commendably founded universities and all sorts of other institutions, that this Church, out of the old world view, has no momentum that could fruitfully spread beyond what the Brunos and the Galileis have produced. Outer knowledge, knowledge of the world and its facts, comes to the fore. And the old spirituality does not possess the impetus to place the center of the human being, the center of the human soul and spirit, in a truly appropriate, human relationship to this new spiritual life. And so it is not religious, not general human impetus, not real spirituality that lives in this science, in this wide universe, that lives. Under the influence of this loss of spirituality, the newer spiritual life becomes ideology.

And the modern proletarian has inherited the fate of those times when there was no proletariat in the modern sense, to inherit the spiritual world only in the form of ideology, to inherit the spiritual world in such a way that in the relationship of man to the spiritual world no longer lives the recognition of the real spiritual forces and entities that permeate and animate the world.

This is the great, perhaps tragic error of the modern proletariat: it believes that it has a special proletarian achievement in interpreting spiritual life as an ideology, but that it has precisely the peculiar inheritance of the old class in it. The modern proletariat has adopted the particular way in which people relate to science from the bourgeoisie and the other classes!

But it turns out that because the other classes have certain old traditions, the modern proletarian is at the top of his personality, it turns out that the modern proletarian must take the impulses more seriously, and to a quite different degree. Here again lives a significant social problem, which will not be exhaustively illuminated by popular science and popular observation of such things for a long time to come.

Of course, the other classes, too, if they are Christian, have only one ideology in their spiritual lives today. But they are not so honest; they still believe they have something of the old religious impulses, of the old driving force that emanates from the center of the soul and penetrates into that which man researches and recognizes beyond the individual facts. The modern proletarian has simply taken an extremely radical view of ideology. The consequence of this is that the appreciation of this spiritual life is, after all, a very superficial one. And this way of relating to the spiritual life is the reason for the feeling that this spiritual life is actually only something that seems to be an addition to the serious life of man, but that it consists only of materialistic and economic processes.

Must not a view that takes the spiritual life seriously as an ideology, must not this view think quite differently about everything spiritually achieved in the course of human development than the other classes, who, still arising from other impulses, have recognized this spiritual life?

There is a terribly revolutionary element in the view of spiritual life as an ideology, the consequences of which, one might say, people today still dare not dream of! There could be a very uncomfortable awakening from this oversleeping of what is revealed in this point in relation to the social question. The loss of a living, real spirituality, the descent of spiritual life to a mere ideology, that is the first thing I would like to mention among the true forms of social demands.

The second, however, dear attendees, lies in the realm of public political life. Again, one could say: In the consciousness of the proletarian lives a kind of mask; in the depths of the soul lives something completely, completely different.

What has struck people, and also the modern proletariat, most of all in the more recent development of humanity is the inundation of all conditions by modern machine technology and by modern capitalism. Certainly, it is these things that have struck the modern proletarian most of all at first. As if by historical suggestion, his attention was fixed on this. And he understood that Karl Marx, in a special study of economic processes, also wanted to explain to the modern proletarian how he actually comes to his social position.

And yet, the second essential form of social demands that now arises cannot be understood from economic life alone. It is not the economic structure, not the economic conditions that drive this second true form of social demand into the soul of the proletarian, but this second social demand lies in the direct further development of that which, some time ago, already led to the abolition of of the old slavery, which later led to the abolition of serfdom, and which must necessarily lead to the end of something that the modern proletarian, economically misinterpreting it, perceives as the most degrading in his position.

What was the essential thing about the slave? He was not recognized in his full human dignity; he was considered a commodity by his master. And in a certain way, serfdom in feudalism is also still a commodity. In the most insistent way, one could say that the last remnant of this unworthiness of the human being lives in the consciousness of the modern proletarian, in that it is clear to him what his labor power is. No longer is he as a human being in serfdom, as in slavery, but rather that which is his labor power is a commodity in the modern social process.

Just as one otherwise buys this or that commodity within the capitalist economic system, in that the commodities come onto the market, circulate through the market according to supply and demand, so too does one buy the commodity “labor power” on the labor market. Nothing has been more forcefully absorbed by the modern proletarian from the Marxist doctrine than this perception that his labor power is equal in relation to the economic process, equal to the commodity.

The same impulses that led to the abolition of slavery, the same impulses that led to the end of serfdom, live in a different form in the modern proletariat and actually strive towards a possibility of divesting human labor of the character of a commodity within the human social structure.

I know a great many people in the present day – when I explain to them what I have just said about human labor power and its relationship to the commodity, they say they cannot understand how it should be possible, through any measures, to divest the labor power of the craftsman of the character of the commodity, of the character of a commodity.

Plato and Aristotle, the most enlightened Greeks, the great philosophers, could not imagine a human society without slaves in it. In the Middle Ages, certain people could not imagine a human society without serfs in it. Today, many people still cannot imagine a humane social structure without labor power being included as a commodity. How this can be achieved will be discussed by me tomorrow, dear attendees, as part of the attempts at a solution that I will try to characterize. Today I just want to point out that the second demand in its true form within modern proletarian social life is that human existence requires that human labor no longer be a commodity, that it can no longer be bought by capitalists in such a way that they give money for a certain amount of labor, which the worker must then make available to him, just as the farmer makes available the goods that he, the farmer, obtains from his field, just as the merchant makes available as capital what he has in his shop. The modern proletarian feels – he may not express it clearly, he may present it in some national scientific guise, but that is how the modern proletarian feels – that it cannot continue to be the case that human labor power has its commodity price in the economic structure of human society. That is the second link.

The third link is that the modern course of human development has led to an overestimation of the external, economic life, just as it has led to an underestimation of the spiritual life by decreeing that spiritual reality is a mere ideology. Precisely because of this, I might say, because of a certain lack of balance, economic life has leaped upward on the other side. As if by a mighty suggestion of world history, people's attention was directed to economic life itself. And so it happened: people were drawn away from everything else and devoted their attention entirely to economic life.

From ancient times, a certain spiritual life has emerged. But this spiritual life, as I have shown, has lost its momentum and has degenerated into ideology. What else has emerged from ancient times? Certain state, as they are called, political connections of the public legal system; how man can find a relationship to man within a certain territory as a citizen or as something else within the social structure. Furthermore, a certain economic order has emerged. This economic order, however, has been given its special character by modern technology, by the modern circulation of commodities in the sense of the capitalist economic order.

This is what has broken into modern life in such an overwhelming way, overwhelming all else. That – as I said – the gaze of modern man was fixed only on this economic life, as if hypnotized, dulled the spiritual life in him, on the one hand, to ideology. On the other hand, state life, public legal life, loses all content for him if it is not filled with what is the only reality for him: material economic life.

Under the influence of this third real form of modern social demands, we see the call for nationalization, for socialization, first of all of the means of production, then of the enterprises and so on, and so on. Simply, the state has also more or less lost its content in the old sense in the eyes of modern man, who is hypnotized by economic life.

Thus we see that in recent times it has become desirable for certain classes to nationalize certain branches of public work, as they say. Then, in theory, the modern proletariat next proceeds radically to demand the socialization of the whole of economic life, and thus of life itself.

And so we see that these three figures emerge as the true ones within the social demands of modern times, out of the necessities of life. On the one hand, we see what the life of feeling goes through when the spiritual is reduced to mere ideology. We see how there is a tendency to hypnotically focus on mere economic life and to want to radically merge the state, the political realm and economic life because only then does the state have content for those who believe that all social reality is exhausted in economic reality when the state is a large economic system.

But we see, I want to say, how three sparks of light complement what we see as the proletarian movement: we see three real figures, three social demands: one that shines forth from the spiritual life; the second, it shines forth from the life of public law, from which only the real relationship of the equal human being to the equal human being can arise, from which the position that labor must have in the social structure must also follow. And thirdly, we see the economic body itself.

Thus, from the real three forms of social demands, we see the threefold form of the social question arise at the same time. This threefold nature of the social question can only be a spiritual, a political, and an economic one. And only by considering these three, which have acquired a very specific configuration within modern proletarian consciousness, can we arrive at possible solutions for what is going through the world today as a social impulse, so that for a long time to come people of all professions, people of all walks of life, people of all social classes will have to deal with it.

A consideration of the true nature of social demands, as we have practiced it today, can only lead us to seek solutions to the social question from the full, unbiased reality of intellectual, state, and economic life.

This more important part of the social question of the present day will now occupy us tomorrow, when I will try, just as I have tried today, to characterize the true form of the social demands, when I will try to present possible social solutions to you.

Dear attendees! From my remarks yesterday, you will have gathered that the basis of the observation of the social problem on which this is built is not based on the aspirations or demands of this or that social class, this or that party, or on what emerges from interests that stem from very specific areas of economic, legal or other areas of life; but here we must build on what arises from the life forms and life necessities of contemporary humanity itself, insofar as these life necessities and life forms can be observed through a truly spiritual scientific investigation of what humanity has worked through in the course of its development to the present.

What use is it, dear attendees, to point out the necessity of this or that social legislative measure out of one-sided interest, out of a one-sided party tendency? And even if you succeed in realizing something that corresponds to such a demand, what if what you bring into the world as a result is beneficial on the one hand, but on the other hand, of necessity, must bring about all kinds of harm? That which is truly beneficial can only follow from an all-round, unprejudiced observation of the necessities of human society itself.

This observation of the necessities of life, as they exist in particular in present-day humanity, have actually, I might say, been revealed and revealed in abundance by that which has emerged, as I already indicated yesterday, from modern technical operations on the one hand – precisely that was to be shown yesterday – and from the capitalist economic system on the other. It is precisely these special forces, which have arisen out of modern technology and out of modern capitalism, that have produced demands of life, including social demands, demands of life that cannot be satisfied by a particular further development of capitalist or technical scientific forces, but whose satisfaction must be sought from quite a different direction.

I said yesterday: People's gaze has been hypnotized and focused solely on what the modern economic order has produced. And today's socialist agitator also has the opinion that what is effective in technology, in the economic order that has become through technology in the capitalist economic form, one must simply transfer it into something that can develop out of itself. For those who look more deeply into the developmental forces of humanity, it is clear that in our modern life through capitalism and technology, which as such were absolutely necessary in the course of human development and will continue to be necessary, that through technology and capitalism, phenomena have arisen that can almost be called forms of illness. These forms of illness must be cured. But some of the ideas of the modern man, whether he is a socialist or anti-socialist partisan, do not lead to a cure of the forms of illness that technology and capitalism have brought about, but rather to a continuation of these forms of illness. What must be striven for is to seek the healthy social organism behind those phenomena that are described as social forms of illness.

The one-sided view of economic life of the human being, of the modern human being, has certain ideas, such as you can find in the things that are eaten, so to speak, the extraordinarily justified striving of the modern proletarian. This view has given rise to certain ideas and certain connections between ideas which, if they were to permeate the social organism, could almost be compared, with regard to this social organism, to the ideas that Wagner in Goethe's “Faust” leads to his “homunculus”, to the creation of this homunculus! A social order could arise, an apparent, inanimate social order could arise from the realization of what is today often called, whether by socialist or antisocialist parties, the social idea, the will to socialism. For it is thought that there must be certain measures, there must be certain institutions that need only be realized, and then one has the right social organism. The considerations on which my present exposition is based proceed from something quite different. They do not at all want to give birth to such ideas, such concepts, such social aspirations, which lead to a kind of social homunculus; but they want to indicate the conditions under which a living social organism can arise!

For the starting point here is the realistic view that it would be just as foolish to try to build a social organism out of human ideas, however clever they may be, without that social organism having its own life force within it. It would be just as foolish to try to build a natural human organism from all kinds of chemical ingredients in a retort according to preconceived ideas of the connection between static forces.

The only thing that can be desired in social life is to seek out the conditions that must be realized if a social organism is to truly grow out of its own living conditions, out of its own necessities of life. This corresponds to a realistic, this corresponds to a truly practical way of thinking.

Therefore, it is important to recognize what the conditions of the social organism are. No matter how much the approach taken here is still regarded by some as impractical idealism today, the longer this realistic view of life and social life is regarded as impractical idealism, , the longer it will be inconvenient to address the true living conditions of the living social organism, the longer the disaster that has befallen humanity in such a catastrophic way will last.

If you know a little, dear attendees, what is alive in the development of humanity, you are not a “practitioner” in the sense of all those who sniff at the very closest things in life a little with the tip of their nose and then consider themselves practitioners from their narrow point of view and brutality rejects everything that does not want to follow their conditions, but is one a practitioner according to the general conditions of humanity, and one looks a little into the developmental conditions of humanity, so one knows that much of what can prevent later social disaster in the social fabric of humanity, very, very far back in its essence must be recognized! It is not easy to recognize too late what is happening in the social life of a nation, but it is very easy to do so in other fields. Once instincts are unleashed, as they are already beginning to be in a large part of the civilized world, the possibility of understanding is no longer there. Therefore, the appeal that arises in the heart of the one who recognizes the necessity that the seeds be sunk in the course of time, so that not disaster but salvation can occur in later time, is serious.

If we consider the social organism that is to emerge, which of course is not yet there, we first come to the conclusion that the following observation, the following premise, is necessary as a feeling, I could say: social forces have always present in the development of humanity; wherever any kind of cohesive human society had developed, whether a people, a state, a tribe or something similar, social impulses were always at work between people and their associations and organizations.

But up to that point in time, which I indicated yesterday as the point in the cycle at which human development passes from instinctive life to fully conscious life, up to that point in time, the social impulses also functioned more instinctively. And just the one sphere, the one area of our social life: the economic sphere with its modern technology, which has to be driven so consciously as an economy, with its modern capitalism, which has to be driven so consciously – just that has conjured up one-sidedness in one area of consciousness.

The old instinctive social life must give way to a fully conscious conception of the social organism. Our humanity must develop a sense of how the individual fits into the overall social organism. And without this social feeling, this social sense, arising from a real insight into the social organism, no salvation can come from the further development of humanity.

That people learn their multiplication tables, that people learn other things in life, is taken for granted today. It must gradually be taken for granted that the growing human being, through education, through school, takes in that which makes him feel like a member of the living social organism. And this living social organism, if it is healthy, is not an abstract homunculus-like unit, as it is often presented today: it is a structured organism.

And to make myself clear, esteemed attendees, I would like to start with a comparison today, but I will immediately note that this comparison is intended to be nothing more than a basis for establishing understanding and for averting misunderstandings.

I would like to say: just as the natural human organism is structured in such a way that it is actually a tripartite in the most eminent sense, so too is the social organism, when it is healthy, a tripartite structure in itself, not an abstract unity. The social organism is not any of these things: it is a threefold unity.

Dearly beloved, for decades I have tried to gain a truly scientific basis for the true threefold nature of the natural human organism. I have given hints about this in my book Von Seelenrätseln (The Riddle of the Soul). I have shown that present-day natural science, biology, will recognize the true organism as threefold when it passes over from that hustle and bustle which is now criticized by such biologists as, for example, [gap in transcript] himself, when it passes over from there to real science. This biology, this true science, which must first develop out of today's, will recognize the real organism as a threefold one.

I have tried to describe this threefold nature of the organism, as it is meant here, in such a way that the human being in his or her entirety is, firstly, the system that I would like to call the nervous-sensory system, which is more or less centralized in the human head. The second is the system that I would like to call the rhythmic system, which is more or less centralized in the rhythmic activities of the respiratory organs and the heart. And then, the third human being, so to speak, the third link of the human natural organism, that is the entire metabolic system. And it can be shown that the human being, insofar as he is active, is composed of these three systems.

But these three systems have a certain autonomy within them. The metabolic system, which is built on the digestive organs in the most eminent sense, cannot help but function independently and must be centralized independently within itself. Next to it, in a certain autonomy, is the lung-heart system, the rhythmic system, and next to that, in turn, is the head system, the nerve-sense system. And it is precisely through this that the living activity in the organism exists, that there is not an abstract centralization, but that these three systems each work within themselves with a certain relative independence; each wants to send the results of its activity into the other systems. The fact that they work alongside each other, on each other, is what makes the organism what it is.

Now I am far, far from simply bringing the social organism into a playful way, by an analogy game, into a comparison with the natural human organism. And the one who, from a superficial understanding of what I am going to present here, will say: Oh, yet another analogy game, as unfortunately created by Schäffle and now again in the book “Weltmutation”, yet another such analogical game in which the processes of the organism are transferred to the social order of society, which is governed by completely different laws; anyone who says that will judge what I actually want to present from a completely misleading point of view. My concern is not to transfer something that happens in the natural human organism to the social organism, but rather that realistic thinking, which teaches us to understand the human natural organism in the right way, realistic thinking is also applied to the social organism, and that the social organism, which is also a threefold nature, is objectively recognized in its living conditions, precisely by recognizing this threefold nature of it.

Those who seek analogies in a playful way, as in “Weltmutation” or in the works of Schäffle and many others, would simply say: the human natural organism has a spiritual part in the nervous-sensory system spiritual part, a regulating part in the rhythmic life of the respiratory and cardiac systems; and thirdly, in the metabolic system, it has that which is based on the coarsest material processes of the human organism. And what would such a system say by analogy with the social organism? It would compare the spiritual impulses that develop in the social organism with those that arise in the human head system, the nerve-sense system. It would thus compare the outer material economic life with that which is bound up in the human being with the coarsest material processes.

But anyone who simply observes the social organism in the same realistic way as one can observe the human being's natural organism, will, strangely enough, come to exactly the opposite conclusion! They will in fact come to observe all of it – whether one can describe it as the lowest or the highest, that is not the point here – but the first link of the social organism, the economic system. But this economic system cannot be analogously compared with the metabolic system of the natural human organism. Indeed, if one wants to use a comparison for the laws of economic life as they express themselves in the social organism, then these laws can only be compared with those laws that prevail in the so-called noblest system of the human organism, in the head system, in the nerve-sense system, the system from which human gifts arise, the system on which all human giftedness and also all human education must be based. In that which is connected with the natural gifts of the nerve-sense system, something enters into the natural, individual natural human organism that cannot be conjured up by mere learning, which brings the outside into the human being, but which must be brought out, depending on how it is predisposed in the human being, which must be demystified from a certain basis. Just as in the individual human development for education and shaping of life there is simply the intellectual gift, the physical and emotional disposition of the human being, so in the social organism there are natural foundations for all human living and working together, in addition to what can be achieved in this social organism through social thinking, that is, through the actions of people! By belonging to a social organism, man is related to certain natural foundations of all human existence through this social organism. The social organism is related to these natural foundations as the individual human organism is related to its innate talents, and no social thinking may deny these natural foundations in their influence on the shaping of all social life. No matter how beautiful the observations on the interaction of land, rent, capital, wages, entrepreneurial profit, and so on, and so on, if one does not understand how to correctly evaluate that which stands as a natural foundation, through which the social organism opens up to an element outside itself, then one does not arrive at a realistic observation if one cannot see this.

Just consider the following, esteemed attendees. Of course, it is of infinite, great importance what part human labor, as human labor, plays in the shaping of any social context of people. But this human labor is, after all, tremendously dependent on the natural foundation. Just as the developing human being is dependent on his or her predispositions, so the social organism is dependent on the natural foundation. Take the following example: Let us hypothetically assume a social organism whose main nutrient is bananas. The means necessary to transport the bananas from their place of origin to where they can be profitably consumed by humans, [to do so] a labor is necessary that is related to the labor necessary to bring the wheat from its point of origin to human consumption, a labor necessary from the material banana culture to the material wheat culture, a necessary labor in the social organism, which is approximately 1:100; that is to say: A hundred times more labor is required to develop labor power in the social organism where wheat production is concerned than where banana production is concerned.

Or assume something else: human labor must be employed to transform the natural product so that it can enter into the social process of circulation, to the point where it finds its end in consumption. You only need to consider the following: in Germany, in areas with medium yield, wheat yields seven to eight times the amount sown; in Chile, wheat yields twelve times the amount sown In northern Mexico, wheat yields seventeen times the amount sown, and in Peru seventeen times. In southern Mexico, it yields twenty-five to thirty-five times the amount sown! There you can see the influence that nature has. And this can also be applied to the yield of this or that raw material for any processing. There you see the relation, the ratio of the fertility of nature to human labor. What a different measure of labor is needed to produce the same yield, where wheat yields twenty-seven times its seed as a result, than where it yields only seven to eight times!

Now, these are radical examples. But the ratio of what nature, what ordinary production in general gives man to his labor, to the labor that is necessary, is just as different within each social context. There we have, I would say, the starting point of one link of the human social organism. Everything that flows out of the natural foundation into the process that takes place between the production, circulation, and consumption of commodities is just as much a closed system in the healthy social organism as the nervous-sensory system is a closed whole with relatively independent laws in the natural human organism.

And to allow something else to play a role in the economic organism, whose essential nature is in the circulation of goods, is just as unhelpful as it would be beneficial if the pulmonary-cardiac system were to play a role in the nervous-sensory system of the head. However strange it may still seem to people today when one speaks in this way, it is something that must underlie as a fundamental truth all, not only social thinking, but all social measures that can somehow be taken for the benefit of humanity in the healthy social organism in the present and future. That which takes place in the cycle of the commodity system must not flood and overwhelm the entire social organism, but must be a relatively independent system in its own right, with its own life. For anyone who then gets to the bottom of things in practice, this system of pure economic mechanism is already automatically distinguished from the other two systems.

The second system of the social organism is the one that encompasses everything that could be called public legal life and everything that regulates the other systems, in other words, that establishes the dignified relationship between people.

The establishment of a dignified relationship between people has nothing to do with the laws that govern pure economic life, with what leads to the circulation of goods within an economic body. The system of public law, the system of regulating life, the system that establishes the right relationship between people, will, just as the pulmonary and cardiac system, in the results of its activity, plays into the head system, so this system of public law, of public regulation of legislation, into what may be called political life in the broadest sense of the word; it will, especially if it develops relatively independently, also play a proper, vital role in economic life in the right, living way. Only the two systems must develop quite independently alongside one another, each according to its own laws, according to its own inner, essential impulses!

One could say that the great misfortune in recent times is that people have chaotically mixed up what can only flourish when it develops separately, in relative independence.

In older times, in keeping with human ideas and human needs in these older times, the three systems I have spoken of today were also in a corresponding relationship in the social organism.

The relationship that present and future humanity needs has yet to be found. However, we have started from many erroneous assumptions, out of a certain conservative attachment to what has been handed down from older times. Something has developed from older times, which was well founded in the old Roman conceptions of the state, developed through monarchies and other forms of state, that which one could call the constitutional state, the political state. Connected with this constitutional state, this political state, here and there was something of economic life, agriculture and forestry here and there. Other branches had claimed what was run as a state for themselves; so that, to a certain extent, the state, which was mainly a constitutional state, a political state, a political community, stood as a protective community with its armed forces against external influences, that this state also became an economist in a certain respect.

And when the modern era approached with its complicated economic systems of technology and capitalism, at first people found salvation in them, not separating the old economic areas that the constitutional state, the political state, had already incorporated, and establishing the two spheres neatly side by side: the rule of law, which aims to organize the relationship between people, and, on the other hand, the economic body. Instead, the two were conflated.

And more and more, the state, which actually has the task of regulating the relationship between people, was saddled with the postal system, telegraphy, railways, in short, the things that serve modern technology and modern economic life. What can be called the flooding of the purely political state system with the economic system developed. Under the influence of precisely those things that technology and capitalism have brought about for the detriment of modern humanity, modern socialist views have developed, so to speak, which, out of thoroughly good intentions and justified demands, want to take what can be called the “flooding of the constitutional state with economic life” to the extreme, but only out of a lack of understanding of old conditions that arise from a realistic observation of the social organism.

The salutary development does not lie in merging the economic social sphere with the political sphere, with the public legal sphere, with the sphere that has to regulate the relationship between people, but in separating each of these spheres to achieve relative independence.

We have seen, esteemed attendees, how damagingly the economic interest groups can operate when they do not organize according to economic impulses in their particular economic areas, but instead enter the representations of the political and legal state and want to push through what are purely economic interests, for which they want to establish rights and special privileges, where completely different foundations of political life should prevail. But what pulsates in economic life must be based solely and exclusively on the healthy conditions of economic life itself.

From what has arisen partly in external reality, partly in human perception, in human sentiment and in the elaboration of human demands from the confusion of economic life with pure politics, with pure state life, that is precisely what has been formed, disguised, and shaped into one of the most essential demands of the modern proletariat. The fact that economic life has flooded everything, that economic life has gradually, one might say, crept into political state life, has meant that an impulse in human activity has not been placed in its proper place – alongside other things, admittedly; but one of the most important, one of those that most deeply intervenes in the social problems of the present.

It will never be possible to separate the mere economic sphere from human labor, from character, from the character that everything in the economic sphere has, from the character of a commodity!

But, as I explained yesterday, the modern proletarian perceives this as the real inhumanity, that there is a labor market, a labor market in which the economic value of the commodity that is his labor power is simply determined according to the law of supply and demand. However the modern proletarian may express his demands, this demand, as something that is unconsciously at the center of all the other demands, even if one is unconscious of it: this demand, as something that is unconsciously at the center of all the other demands, even if one is unconscious of it, is the main thing: the removal of the commodity character from human labor. Human labor should no longer be a commodity!

If you were to socialize in the way that a large proportion of people, those people who want to socialize, intend to carry it out today, then you will not detach the labor force from the commodity, but on the contrary you will make this human labor force more and more into a commodity!

No abstract remedy can be given as to how the human labor force can be stripped of the commodity character – a commodity that can be bought and sold; rather, as stated at the beginning of today's lecture, it can only be said: Do not look for magic remedies, for remedies that are superstitious in the modern sense of the word, to cure socially, but look for the living conditions of the social organism. Then this social organism will develop with its own vitality. And as economic life, according to its own impulses, and the political body of the state, which has to establish the relationship between people, will simply develop side by side, again according to its own laws and impulses. This will happen in such a way that - not in such a way that one can say theoretically: This is how human labor will detach itself from the economic process, and human activity will develop. And it will fall naturally into that link of the social organism that can be described as the political link, as the link that regulates the relationship between people.

There is – and I already pointed this out at the beginning of the century in an article I wrote on the social question for my magazine Lucifer-Gnosis, which was published at the time – there is a certain law for human labor in the totality of a social organism. This law is evident to the true observer of the social organism as something fundamental in social life. So one could then, and still can today, speak of this law, which can be proven in all its details and is important for real knowledge of social life. One preaches to deaf ears with such a fundamental law among those who are there or there to teach people “correct concepts” about economics and the like.

This law, dear attendees, is the following: When someone works, be it manual labor or intellectual work within a larger social community, not within a small one, since the law is not expressed in the same way, but in a larger social community, as it alone comes into consideration in today's consideration of the social question, when a person works in a larger social community, it is impossible for him to benefit personally from what he has worked for as an individual within the social process, within what goes on in the body of society! He can never, so to speak, have the fruits, the results of his own labor. Today, of course, there would not be enough time for this, because it would require hours of individual observations to substantiate this in detail. I can only say that the law I have stated is a law that can be fully substantiated scientifically. What the individual works through his activity can only seemingly serve him in his result. In reality, what the individual works is distributed among the social organism to which he belongs. All people benefit from his work; and he, what he has within a social organism, cannot come from his own pocket if the social organism is healthy; but it comes from the work of other people.

This is simply due to the objective circumstances that take place. If I may use a rough comparison: you can no more live [in an economic sense] on what you work [...] than you can live in a physical sense by eating yourself!

It is a basic law of economic life that one cannot live on one's labor. If one lives on it, it works to the detriment of the social organism. The social organism is only healthy when each individual works for the others, and all others work for the individual.

This is not just a matter of ethical altruism, it is a law of a healthy, organic structure. Therefore, esteemed attendees, it falsifies the basic laws of the social organism if you simply pay for labor like a commodity - for the reason that you are starting from something that is not real. You want to give the worker his earnings; you want to let the person live off his life force. You do not integrate him into the social organism by doing this, but exclude him.

And because the modern economic order has led to the outward, masked, and seemingly settlement of the proletarian with what is supposed to be the product of his labor, it has, precisely through the counter-effect of resistance, produced in him that which he himself, with all his other astute knowledge, cannot develop, that which arises from the killing of social connections, that which is produced in him and he wants to be part of the social connection. He is exposed by that which commodifies his labor power; he wants to be reintroduced; he wants the deadly element to be set aside. This is contained in the one form of social demands that I already mentioned yesterday and to which I must return in this form today.

But if what is introduced into the social organism by labor, by human labor, what, under socialist ideas, wants to introduce more and more of this labor into the purely economic organism, were to take hold, then the proletariat would be increasingly pushed out of the social body.

The fundamental issue depends on the fact that alongside the mere economic body there is another, political body, with relative independence, which does not have to deal with what the circulation of goods is, but has to deal with what establishes the relationship between people. And in the most eminent sense, you can see it as soon as you can gain a relationship to the law that you do not work for yourself but for other people.

In the truest sense, human labor, the regulation of human labor, belongs in this second link of the social organism, in the political organism. It is the duty of the state to see that human labor is not abused. But human labor can never be accorded its rights among other human beings if these rights are to come from the mere economic body - the mere economic body, which is supposed to exist according to its own laws, independently, separate from the political, the purely political body, from the pure state body!

What has come about today, because people are so often accustomed to regarding it as right, what is often regarded as right today, yes, that does indeed speak against what is stated here. However, esteemed attendees, either we will make an effort to live according to the laws of a healthy social organism, or we will be driven into even more terrible catastrophes than we have already been driven into, simply because we have not striven for such a clean-cut distinction between the individual members of the social organism.

We can trace the causes of the war back to the confusion of economic and state affairs.

We will study, because we will be forced to study more and more closely the factors that led to the catastrophe in which we are now mired up to the point of crisis. We will find that among the many causes – I cannot, of course, discuss them exhaustively in this context – is the fact that states could be driven against each other by economic circles that had simply taken control of the political bodies for their own interests! If the political bodies had not allowed themselves to be led by the confounding of certain purely economic interest groups, dear attendees, then the catastrophe could not have taken on this character! The international politics of people, the international will of people, also depends on recognizing the laws of the social organism.

A third link of the social organism is then the spiritual life, dearest ones, this spiritual life, as it has gradually formed into a kind of ideology in the present stage of human development, into which old forms only protrude like remnants - I described it yesterday. But this spiritual life, which arose from certain social instincts and existed in a certain independence until the middle, until the end of the Middle Ages, has also been absorbed. Just as economic life is to be absorbed influence of certain modern aspirations, economic life has been absorbed by state life or vice versa, one could also say: this spiritual life has been absorbed by that life which should only regulate the relationship between people. How people should relate to each other, purely by the fact that they are legal subjects, must be the subject of a special social link in the social organism.

Spiritual life must be a special link in the social organism with relative independence. For the entire social organism, what comes from the spiritual life in its true form is just as important as the absorption of food and metabolism is for the individual human organism. This spiritual life in the social organism must be compared with the most primitive system - the so-called most primitive system - in the natural human organism.

Everything that can only arise from the physical and mental abilities of the human being belongs in this system; everything that can only be placed on the basis of the individual freedom of the human being. Everything that plays a role in the religious life of human beings belongs in this system. This includes everything that belongs in the school and education system, in the broadest sense, from the lowest to the highest level. In addition to much else, in addition to the cultivation of all the arts, in addition to all other cultivation of free spirituality, this also includes - and it would lead too far to give the details here, because it would take hours again - private and criminal law. Public law belongs to the second link of the social organism, public law that establishes the relationship between people in healthy human coexistence.

If, with regard to violated private interests, if, with regard to criminal offenses, a person is to judge another person, then such an individual relationship between the judge and the judged person is necessary before a true observation of reality, that the whole process can only be placed in the realm of individual freedom. One must, as a real judge, submerge oneself in the subjectivity of the person one has to judge, whether in a civil or criminal matter, to such an extent that it is not possible otherwise than for the impulse of individual human freedom to prevail.

I could cite many examples; I will mention just one: anyone who, like me, has observed for decades, through direct experience, the conditions that prevailed where, [officially] and [inofficially], many more individual nationalities lived alongside and mixed with each other than in Austria. Anyone who has observed this, anyone who has observed how much the court relationships contributed to the chaos into which the tremendous Austrian catastrophe has now led, knows the importance that must be attached to the incorrect regulation of the court relationships!

However, within such circumstances, it only manifests itself in a radical way. Consider this: we have an area where Germans and Czechs live together. If a Czech has committed some crime, he is tried by a judge who speaks German, because that is simply the way it is under the current political conditions. The Czech does not understand a word of what is being said about him. He knows he cannot trust his judge, who, according to national characteristics, is different from him.

All this – I can only touch on it briefly – should have led to the conclusion decades ago, in order to avoid this terrible present catastrophe, that it would have been necessary, however the other territorial borders were drawn, with regard to the legal relationships of private and criminal law, to proceed in such a way that for five or ten years everyone freely elects their judges, just as, incidentally, in the field of intellectual life, everyone is free to choose the school for their descendants and so on. This liberation of the school system, of the education system, of the whole of intellectual affairs, includes infinitely much more of the rest of the economic and purely state-run affairs of the social organism.

Naturally, people will be least willing to accept this necessary idea, because many see the nationalization of the school system, the extension of the state's tentacles over free spirituality, as the most sacred of all. Nevertheless, this is the opposite of what is salutary. That which should or can develop as spirituality with a real character can only develop if this spirituality is based purely on itself in the social organism, if the state organism has only to ensure that this spiritual life can develop freely.

The socialist agitators and their supporters have so far discovered only one area, and that out of a misunderstanding, which they treat in this way: the religious area. They hear within the socialist agitation areas: religion is a private matter - but not really because one wants to protect religion in its freedom from state and economic intervention, but because one has no real interest. They want to isolate it; they want it to live for itself, and perhaps die for itself.

The right thing would be to have the greatest respect for the spiritual life in all its individual aspects; then one would know that this spiritual life can only flourish if it has its own administration, its own organization, its adequate, relative independence. This spiritual life must be conceived in the broadest sense, not only in the sense of the actual spiritual ideas, not only in the sense of the actual spiritual achievements that emanate from these spiritual realms, but also in the sense of everything that extends as spiritual impulses to the other two realms. It must emanate from these realms; the technical ideas, that which actually sets the economic life in motion, will emanate from the spiritual-soul work.

But this spiritual and mental work must not be maintained, administered or legislated by the other two spheres; it must govern itself with relative independence so that it can act in the appropriate way, just like the [digestive] system on the two remaining systems of the natural organism, that it can act in the right way through its freedom, through its independence, on the two other social systems.

Thus, it is to be thought that the economic link of the social organism, the area that regulates the relationship of man to man, and the area that, as the actual spiritual area, is based on the individual freedom of all that arising from the spiritual, mental and physical faculties of man, that these areas live side by side in such a way that each has its own administrative and legislative body, as befits its own nature. Not the one parliament that confuses everything together is the salutary thing for the social development of the future, but the three representative bodies, of which one concerns all people: that of the political organism, which will probably be purely democratic in most of the territories of the earth, the civilized world; while the other two will be appropriate in their representation.

The economic body will be built on an associative basis. We can already see the beginnings of this today, in that man must grow together with what is available to him as a natural basis for his economic life, how he must join forces with other people; this union, as it is attempted today in cooperatives and union, and so on, must be built on purely economic foundations: the economic foundations of production, the economic foundations of consumption, the economic foundations of trade, which will regulate each other according to purely economic principles.

The political body, which is based on the legal relationship between people, will become more and more democratic in essence, because it deals with each person's relationship to the circulation of goods. That which is the spiritual realm will be built on what follows from the spiritual life of the individual's advancement in the spiritual life.

These three areas, in a healthy social organism, are effectively sovereignly juxtaposed, and thus responsible to each other like sovereign states. It is precisely because the individual members of the social organism are relatively independent that the delegations can work together in the right community!

One can admit that these ideas may seem too radical for many people today. However, they are not intended, esteemed attendees, to transform any social community overnight in the way that might seem natural when such things are expressed. No, the thinker of reality — and that is always the spiritual scientist, the true spiritual scientist — thinks extremely little of the formation of such theories as theories. He thinks much more of people permeating themselves in their whole will and in their immediate life with what follows as impulses from such a view of life, so that they give the corresponding direction to all the details of their actions, their measures.

It would certainly be a mistake to try to remodel the social organism overnight, as is being attempted in many fields today; but people have always been confronted with the necessity of organizing this or that. You can organize it in such a way that you are obsessed with the idea that everything, in a state of confusion, must be a state entity; or you can take what is most common to everyone and shape it in such a way that it is integrated into the gradual realization of these three coexisting links in the social organism. even more than many socialist thinkers of the present day, who do not dream of bringing about a different organization of the social organism overnight, but think of a slow development, the one who, because his observation is based entirely on these explanations, thinks that a direction is given to social development that is slowly being realized.

This realistic thinking does not speak of any kind of confused social revolutions, for example, that take place quickly. But what is discussed, dear attendees, is that one should be comfortable directing one's thoughts towards what follows from the realistic observation of the social organism itself.

What I have presented to you here, esteemed attendees, appears to me, from what I believe is an objective consideration of present-day events, to be particularly important for this present time, and particularly necessary for this present time to heal many things that need healing. And I may say: it is not merely on theoretical considerations that the ideas which I have presented to you today have been given their final form.

What I have explained to you – I could only give you an outline due to the short time – can be justified in all its details

can be expanded in all its details. This can already be done today in a completely scientific way! Anyone who wants to take this direction can already do so today by working together with those who are willing to devote their energy to giving the social organism a form that makes it truly healthy in the face of a realistic view of life. This can be done; it can be carried out in detail today – in detail, that which I could only present to you today in a comprehensive sketch.

These ideas did not arise out of mere theoretical consideration; they arose out of the observation of the conditions under which these conditions have developed, so that in the end nothing else could result from them but this European catastrophe.

Those who have immersed themselves in the inner workings of these conditions in the contemporary civilized world may have experienced something like, for example, - I could also cite others - me with regard to a certain point. I truly do not want to boast about these things in any way. But, dear ladies and gentlemen, these things are serious; and even if something that one uses for understanding looks like something personal, then perhaps it may be said today in the face of the terrible seriousness of the times.

It was still the time that preceded this [war] catastrophe, when [diplomats], politicians and statesmen and other clever people in Europe had a sunny smile when it was mentioned how peace, or something similar, was established and firmly established in the world. At the time, I had to give a lecture in Vienna, as part of a series of lectures, about what the deeper foundations of our social conditions are heading towards. I spoke at a time when the approaching catastrophe was not yet being noticed from the outside, when diplomats still had a sunny smile on their faces about the good deeds they had done. I spoke of the fact that something like a social carcinoma, like a cancer, was creeping through our social order long before the amateurish book “Weltmutation” (World Mutation) had appeared, with all sorts of socialism gimmicks! And I said at the time: The times are so serious that one feels something like an obligation to cry out to humanity, so that souls may be shaken, so that they may know: The right thing must be done at the right time, so that disaster later, unspeakable disaster would be averted.

That was said before the war.

During the war, however, urged on by the seriousness of the burning social issues, which were brought to the surface in their true form and manner during the catastrophe of war, I had presented to many an influential person within the social organism what was necessary for recovery. Outwardly, in theory, some people understood this; but they could not bridge the gap between theoretical understanding and will, because their understanding was not thorough enough.

Now one would like to believe that what influential people refused to understand during the war catastrophe, now, one would like to believe, now some of those who were brought to misfortune by this war catastrophe in Central and Eastern Europe and some others who have been given a reprieve, now they should understand, at the right time, show understanding for things! For two or three years ago, when things could still have taken a different course from that which they took in the autumn of 1918, I said to many people in Central Europe: What is expressed in these ideas of the threefold social organism must become foreign policy; then the whole course of events will be given a different direction, a more salutary direction. And I then said: You have the choice of either accepting these things at the right time through reason, because these things are not made up, these things are not programs, these things are not an abstract ideal, as abstract ideals have certain societies or parties, but these things are observed from the developmental forces of humanity; they simply want to and must be realized in the next ten, twenty, thirty years. Whether I or you or anyone else wants something in this direction is not what it depends on. What it depends on is whether the developmental forces that humanity must go through themselves want this, whether it is their will that this must happen. You have the choice of either using reason to help shape such a social organization, or revolutionary catastrophes and cataclysms will take place in the field, for which you are now also responsible. The choice between reason and the unleashing of the most terrible instincts, which can then no longer be overcome by mere understanding, this choice is set before people.

It is essential that people move away from the mere search for comfortable thinking, that people come to the point where those who are the real practitioners of life, because they see the formative forces of humanity development, that these people are no longer portrayed as “impractical idealists” and are thus rendered harmless or avoided, but that precisely what they have to say be made fruitful - that is what matters! In many areas, real life practice is quite different from the narrow-mindedness of those who often consider themselves the ultimate practitioners. What these “practitioners” have done over decades has led directly to the misfortunes of the present.

These ideas were also misunderstood in the opposite direction, in that it was believed that they were merely internal ideas, for shaping some kind of closed social organism within.

Now, it is understandable that people who have not learned anything, could not have learned anything, nor through the military catastrophes of recent years, could not understand the intervention and incisiveness of such social ideas coming from reality. Of course, such ideas could not find their way into a state-run country, for example, into a state-run country and life whose leader was able to write such a book over a long period of time, as Bülow did under Wilhelm II; that this book could still be taken seriously, that this book was not taken as an historical document of how Germany's misfortune was brought about by a lack of understanding of modern human development, is one of the special characteristics of our time, which will often give cause to be judged according to a special scientific field - I already mentioned it yesterday: “social pathology” or “social psychiatry”. I don't use that just as a “witticism”, I mean it very seriously.

But what would be necessary to realize, which has not been understood by those to whom I have presented these ideas so far, is that these ideas do not just apply to the inner shaping of some social territory, but that they must gradually become the basis of a true international foreign policy for every state, although each state can start them individually, on its own.

The issue at hand is that, furthermore, states do not negotiate with each other as if they were closed territories, but that each social entity negotiates with every other social entity – it can also be done unilaterally, so each state can start with it – or that each state negotiates with each other state, or one state negotiates with another state that still adheres to the old confounding, and gives its trust to the fact that on the one hand, the representatives of the purely economic body come into consideration, who in turn deal with the economic life of the outside world for themselves, from the foundations of the economic body, in political thought, political relationships, those factors that deal with the relationship between people in general, with the corresponding factors of the other social territory. Likewise, the spiritual representatives of the other territory with the spiritual representatives.

Thus, the so-called “national borders” take on a completely different meaning; what leads to conflicts through national borders is no longer, as it happens now, that everything is thrown together and welded together, but a conflict in one area is balanced by the other areas that work alongside it.

We need only look at the way in which this threefold structure will function across the whole earth in the international relations of nations [and establish something different] that is deeply organic compared to what is attempted out of good will but only out of abstract thinking: a league of nations, intergovernmentalism and the like. All this will not be built up like a human organism, but, brought about according to its conditions, it will become like a living social organism when the threefold nature outlined today is brought into the current that is expressed in the flowing social will and thinking and feeling of humanity.

The contradiction between these three ideas seems just as clear as the great, obvious power of these ideas.

Only when one advances from a mere abstract, from a merely theoretical thinking, which would have to lead to a social homunculus, to a realistic feeling, can one understand how these three ideas must relate to human social reality:

Freedom leads to the area in which spiritual life must unfold.

Equality leads to the place where the relationship between people develops in the political arena, which is what it should properly be called.

Brotherhood leads into the realm of economic life, where everyone should give and receive according to their economic means.

If one knows that the social organism is structured according to three relatively independent links, then one knows that these ideas must contradict each other, just as the laws of development contradict the threefold structure of a natural human organism. If one knows that the great, decisive ideas and impulses; then one is not surprised at the contradictions that arise when one wants to believe that these three ideas must be applied to a social organism in which everything is supposed to be jumbled up and welded together.

Thus, what humanity felt was necessary for social life at the dawn of modern times will only be able to become established in the true social reality of humanity if the three elements of this social reality of humanity are incorporated into the social organism through a realistic [observing, acting and willing] in the social organism.

I know how much prejudice and preconception still speak against these things today. However, without in any way lapsing into vanity or pride, I would like to express what it is all about in conclusion by means of a comparison. Many a person will say: Well, someone with a background in the humanities wants to solve a social problem in such a simple way. Yes, esteemed attendees, I may perhaps compare, for the sake of someone to whom this attempt at a solution seems so simple, so primitive, and does not seem appropriate in comparison to the great erudition economics teachers and other people, I may perhaps venture the comparison for such a person: Once upon a time there was a poor boy who worked as a servant on a Newcomen steam engine. He had to manually operate the two cocks that had to be pushed and pushed all the time, one of which was to let the condensation water into the engine and the other to let the steam into the engine. Then the little boy noticed that this opening and closing of the two cocks, which he had to push back and forth with his hands at the appropriate time, with regard to their swinging up and down, he came up with the idea of tying the cocks together with strings, to control the cocks with strings. And it turned out that the cocks opened and closed by themselves in his up and down, so the cocks that let the condensation water flow in on one side and the steam flow back out on the other. And from this observation of the little boy, one of the most important inventions of modern times emerged: the self-regulating steam engine.

It could also have happened that a “very clever person” would have come and said to the boy: You good-for-nothing, what are you doing there? Get rid of the strings! Take care of your cocks as before by hand, do what you are told! And don't think you can do anything special there!

As I said, you can compare things, but a comparison always has something of a limp. You can use the comparison for something else, that is, for something you look down on with a certain arrogance: for this humanities that now also wants to extend its experience to the social problem! But perhaps I may venture the comparison with the little boy after all. If the “very clever people” today find it extraordinarily foolish for someone from the humanities to dare to tackle the social problem, I would like to say to them: Such people just want to be nothing more than the little boy who just notices what the others have not noticed in all their cleverness and erudition, perhaps also wrong erudition.

For I believe I can be convinced of this, precisely from an insight into the social workings and rule of today's humanity and its demands. I believe I can be convinced of this: What matters is that if one observes in the right way how the three areas of the social organism can develop in their independence, one has discovered the life of this social organism. And just as life itself is control and regulation, so the social organism will regulate itself if only the laws of its individual areas are found in the right way.

That, dear ladies and gentlemen, is what inspires anyone who is serious, especially in today's serious times, with what is necessary for humanity in terms of social demands.

Let me conclude by saying that I actually compress everything that needs to be said in this regard into one sentiment: May there at least be enough people in the present who are moved by what must happen in the next 20 to 30 years because it lies within the developmental forces of humanity, may there be enough people today who open their hearts and minds to what humanity must do to lead the future, so that even greater disaster does not occur! Because if that which is believed by most of those who consider themselves practical – in their own sense, in the right sense – disappears, then there will not be a healing of the misfortune, but rather an immeasurable increase of this misfortune!

Therefore, may as many people as possible be found who open their hearts and minds to what must be done to make possible an understanding, an understanding between heart and heart, an understanding between soul and soul within the social coexistence of humanity, before the instincts are unleashed to such an extent that such an understanding between people, given the terribly animalistic instincts, will no longer be possible.

Dear attendees! Those who do not sleep through the present conditions of life, in which they are enmeshed, but who live through them with an awakened consciousness, will be able to feel that what has been looming in the life development of modern man for decades has only now, in the present, basically achieved its true historical form and its elementary historical power. That is what is making itself so powerfully felt in our lives today: the social question. In particular, one should feel how something that may have been taking place for decades, perhaps more below the surface of life in its actual form, has now come to the surface with ever greater and more far-reaching significance. The starting point of the last few years, the war catastrophe that engulfed the world, showed how the social impulses of modern humanity played a role in general life. Many a personality who shares the responsibility for the disaster that has entered our lives in this way would have behaved differently if they had not been under the influence, whether of fear or something similar, of the so-called social movement for a long time and out of a certain fear or anxiety or other mental states, behaved in a completely different way than she would have behaved if she had been able to gain clear insight into what was in the air in the ill-fated year 1914 in complete composure.

And again, during this terrible catastrophe, how did people on the one hand nurture hopes that the destroyed harmonies could somehow be reconciled from the social movement of humanity? On the other hand, how did those personalities who were somehow in a leading position during this time of horror stand under the influence of the social demands of humanity, so that they were essentially influenced by this side in their actions? Many things would have taken a different course if that had not been the case.

And now, esteemed attendees, now that the catastrophe has entered into a crisis, we can see that all the more what can be called a social movement is entering into the life of present humanity in a decisive way, so that the attitude of most people can be seen to be permeated with something of deep tragedy. Can we not say that the fact in which our lives are embedded, over a large part of the civilized world – and this will spread further and further, as anyone with insight can see – can we not say that the fact in which our life is geared to, to the judgment of people, to the judgment of people that is supposed to prove itself in the right way through action, through intervention in life, that this fact shows in the face of this judgment how little the judgment of most people can actually cope with these facts.

Yes, esteemed attendees, it is really as if certain currents, certain forces in the life of newer humanity wanted to show themselves in their impossibility, in their absurdity through this catastrophe, and as if that which which has been played out in an absurd way, to the detriment of humanity, has left something behind that undermines many of the things that we might have believed could not fail before this catastrophe occurred.

On the one hand, we see the drastic facts that are unfolding in such a way that they must deeply affect every individual life. We see how, from the innermost impulses of humanity, a re-shaping of life is demanded. We see the old party ideas and party programs asserting themselves within what is emerging, asserting themselves in such a way that they want to take hold of what is there. But how do these party ideas, these party programs, this thinking, which is also sometimes formed in a scholastic way in social events, appear to us today? One would like to say: like mummies of judgment that suddenly want to come to life, but which only walk around as mummies in the face of living events.

The way people think today about what is happening is like something dead in the face of the living demands of existence. The seriousness of the situation, which is characterized by this, makes it clear to every thinking person that it is necessary to form an opinion about the current situation, to the extent that their actions allow.

The lectures I intend to give here will proceed from this point of view, dear attendees. Today I would like to show more what the true form of the so-called social demand actually is, how this true form has arisen from the life of newer humanity, and tomorrow I would like to go into the important matter of possible attempts at solutions that do not arise from this or that fantastic fantasy, this or that one-sided impulse of the will, this or that party coloring, but which arise when one takes into account the true reality of life, the true reality in all its depth and in all its breadth.

It is not only in the life of the individual human being, but also in the social and state coexistence of people, that many things are at work that do not play out in consciousness, but rather, so to speak, prevail in the unconscious; indeed, it can be said that even in the social, state and societal life of the human being, many more unconscious factors play a role than in the life of the individual human being. And anyone who has no idea about these unconscious factors, or who has no sense of how to engage with them, will hardly be able to get behind the true nature of what is asserting itself today as a social movement.

One can certainly look with a certain respect at everything that has been thought, written and spoken for decades, and also done within certain limits, to deal with the so-called social questions and the social movement. However, as much respect as the effort and thought that has gone into it reveals, one will only be able to truly understand the social question, which is so essential for everyone today, if one looks at this question not from the perspective of how it has been shaped by the consciousness of people, but if one looks at it from the perspective of full life, including from those depths of life where the unknown factors play a role.

And if I may begin, dear attendees, with a personal remark, let it be this: I came into close contact with the social movement early on, but particularly in its full vibrancy when I was a teacher at a workers' education school for years, from where I gave lectures and had to organize discussions in trade unions and cooperatives. It was precisely through these life circumstances that I was able to experience what was going on in the minds of the proletarians and to see from direct experience what impulses are actually at play in the modern proletarian movement. I would like to say that anyone who is inclined to look at the modern proletarian movement with such a realistic view of life is, above all, confronted with what could be called a contradiction in the feelings, the will, and the thinking of the modern proletarian , but one that is as full of contradictions as all life that does not unfold in logical sequences but rather proceeds from one contradiction to the next.

And so, when we look at the modern proletarian movement in particular, we see that, on the one hand, it is not at all inclined to attach great value to human thinking and feeling, to social coexistence , for the social impulses, that it is actually inclined to consider everything that man thinks and feels more as an emanation of what goes on in economic life and in pure material, economic life. We will come back to this.

I would like to say that the sustainability, the impulsiveness of thought itself, is denied to a certain extent in the mental life of the modern proletarian. And yet – that is the strange thing – never before, one might say, was a world-historical movement built to such a high degree on thought, indeed on the scientific pursuit of knowledge, as this modern proletarian movement. Anyone who has ever really seen – which, unfortunately, the bourgeois circles have neglected to do for decades due to certain circumstances – anyone who has seen how certain difficult-to-grasp ideas, let us say ideas that arise from scientific Marxism, live themselves into, fully into the modern proletarian soul, only he gets an idea of what lives unconsciously in millions and millions of people today. For, as we shall recognize from these lectures, the fact that a deep gulf has opened up between classes of people, on the one hand the previously leading circles with their ideas, with their habits of thinking, as it has become fashionable today, with their sentimentality; on the other hand the proletariat with its habits of thinking, with its particular way of feeling - there is little possibility of mutual understanding! This is something that has a profound impact on all of modern life. Because, when you get right down to it, how superficial it seems that much of what the leading circles have done to gain understanding with regard to the social life of broad sections of humanity! They went to the theater and watched Hauptmann's “Weavers” in order to gain some insight into the lives of a large part of modern humanity. In this behavior lies – as you will recognize more and more, dear ladies and gentlemen – a profound misunderstanding.

If one tries to penetrate into the depths from what is happening on the surface of life, then one will want to pay less attention to everything that so-called intellectualist leading circles think about the social movement today. One might even want to show less consideration for what the modern proletarian himself thinks about what he wants and what he strives for; but one will feel all the more compelled to bring one's own living understanding more precisely into line: not so much the objective course of events of the social movement as the modern proletarian himself, the inner life of this modern proletarian.

I believe that countless observations of an intensive kind, intensive experiences of the life of the proletariat, have opened up the right thing to me in a certain sense, in that I thought I noticed that an essential thing in this social question is what is hidden in the word that one can hear again and again within the modern proletariat: the modern proletarian feels class-conscious. He has awakened from what used to be an instinctively dull life to class consciousness, to an awareness of his situation within his human class.

But just when one considers this as a characteristic of the modern proletarian soul, then one comes to realize that this feeling of being imbued with class consciousness points to something much, much deeper, to something that only opens up the way to the actual, true form of the social question of the present.

What can be recognized as the true form of the social question of the present has been tried to be recognized by many, by repeatedly pointing out how the modern proletariat was actually created under the influence of modern technology, which is revolutionizing people's living conditions, and the related capitalism in the economic order, to what took place in these matters in world history.

Now, esteemed attendees, I do not need to point this out in particular, it has been presented over and over again. It has been shown how the old crafts, how the old economic conditions have been absorbed by everything that depends on technology and capitalism, how the proletarian class within the newer life of humanity has actually only been created as a result. But to the student of human evolution something quite different is revealed in addition to these things. And here I come to the point where it might be apparent to the man of today that it is precisely in regard to the incisive social questions that the spiritual-scientific method can truly penetrate to reality.

The modern technology and capitalism looming before us are, after all, only a later manifestation of something quite different. In lectures that I have been privileged to give here in Basel over the years, I have already hinted at what is at issue here. The life of humanity as a whole, although fundamentally different in many respects, is similar to the life of the individual cell in one respect. Anyone who properly considers the individual life of a human being will be repeatedly forced to combat the preconceived notion that nature never makes leaps. In fact, in crucial points, all natural development makes leaps. In the individual life of man, dear honored attendees, we find that development does not proceed in a straight line, so that we can always link the effect directly to the cause. For example, we face a decisive crisis in the life of an individual human being around the seventh year when the teeth change. We find another decisive crisis when sexual maturity sets in. We find such crises even later on, when we observe life more closely. However, the later ones elude superficial external knowledge.

What takes place in the life of the individual human being does not follow on directly from a previous cause in a linear way, but it is as if forces with elemental power came up from the depths of the organism.

The life of the individual human being is no different in this respect than historical life as a whole. Within this historical life, not everything simply progresses in a successive manner. Rather, the historical development of humanity also includes critical upheavals in which elemental forces work their way from the depths to the surface. Such a crisis occurred for modern humanity at the turn of the fifteenth to the sixteenth century.

Only by treating the historical life of humanity in a scholastic way today, by looking at it rather superficially, do most people fail to see the fundamental difference in the spiritual life - and in everything connected with it - of man after the turning point in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and what took place in man in the Middle Ages or in even older times.

Once a true historical perspective replaces what, especially with regard to this point, is often convention in today's world, it will be recognized how radically life has changed at this turning point. And if one is to describe what has emerged from the depths of the subconscious, one can say: things that previously worked like instinctive impulses in the social coexistence of people, unconscious impulses, are coming to the surface more and more, so that people want to understand them consciously.

And this self-confrontation of the human personality through a deepening and illumination of consciousness coincides with what otherwise takes place superficially in modern technical life and modern capitalist economic life. And the essential thing is that, as a result of living conditions that used to be different, man is placed at the machine, to which he can only have an impersonal relationship, that man is woven into the fabric of capitalist economic life, within which he can also only have an impersonal relationship.

Look at how the old craftsman in the thirteenth century still stood by what he had produced, how he loved it, how it gave him joy, how his honor was involved in the context of his profession. Consider all the personal connections of the human being with what he has made in the economic life in earlier times before this turn of an era, see how this changes in modern life, how the human being can no longer develop a personal relationship, neither to the machine at which he works, nor to the economic conditions of circulation in which he lives. And he is called upon to submit to these impersonal conditions – at least a large proportion of people are called upon to do so – at a time when personal consciousness is awakening in particular, when the human personality is being confronted with itself.

That is the significant thing. While economic conditions arise that drive people into the impersonal, on the other hand, historical events push them to face the pinnacle of their own personality. Outwardly, they are made impersonal, but inwardly, all the more personal. Outwardly, he cannot develop any interest in what he is dealing with. This forces up the innermost strength of his soul. He comes to self-reflection. He comes to the question: What am I actually as a human being? What do I mean as a human being in the world?

Simply and fundamentally put, one could say: the one who was led as a laborer to the machine, since the machine could not interest him, truly had the opportunity and time and reason to reflect on what he actually is in the context of the world as a human being.

And so we are confronted with something peculiar. The modern proletarian calls it class consciousness. But behind this class consciousness stands the emerging consciousness of human dignity in general, the question: What am I as a human being in the context of the whole of humanity?

Not the machine, not capitalism has brought this about; they were only the cause of this most modern impulse of human life coming to light precisely in those who have been driven by the necessities of life into modern technology and modern materialistic economic life.

We must not overlook the fact that the class-conscious proletariat is actually the truly human-conscious part of the modern world. Something peculiar is taking place there, which can be easily recognized. Perhaps it can be understood by comparing it to another historical fact.

Let us consider: at a certain time, in a province of the Roman Empire that was of little consequence at the time, the impulse of Christianity arose. That impulse, which was then to take hold of the world in such an intense way. The Christian impulse spreads. But how strangely it spreads within the Greek and Roman worlds. It comes, as it were, despite the fact that in the Greek and Roman worlds there is a mature education, a culmination of ancient education. It comes only into its own when the barbarians, as they were called, came from the north and adopted Christianity. Christianity was only able to develop its true strength in the simple, elementary minds, not in the mature education of the Greek and Roman world.

You can only recognize such things if you know how, on the one hand, the mature or overripe education of some part of humanity stands in relation to the unspent, virgin powers of another part of humanity. The very personalities who count themselves among the leading circles of humanity have a very warped judgment on this point. Oh, this or that, what is emerging, it is too high for the people, they say. These judgments have been heard ad nauseam in a decadent time at the end of the nineteenth century. What had been imagined, how something should be, childishly, simply, so that the people would understand it, because the people's intelligence was not very high. Usually, such judgments prove little more than that it was uncomfortable for the person making the judgment to accept such a thing for himself.

Those who truly know life know that what the bourgeois intellectual sometimes finds extremely difficult to grasp is actually easy for the fresh intellect and the unspent power of the soul of the so-called subordinate part of the population.

And so the ancient Greeks and Romans could have said: That which did not want to enter him properly, Christianity, precisely because it penetrated the unspent soul power of the barbarian tribes coming down from the north. And that was new, original, elementary soul power. It understood much more than the highly educated Greeks and Romans in terms of what the time demanded.

We see something very similar today, only most people have not yet recognized it. Fresh intellectual and spiritual power is rising up from the depths of humanity and taking with it what can be offered from the entire historical power of modern human life.

In a sense, we are living in a new migration of peoples. Only this migration of peoples does not take place in such a way that masses of people move from some region of the world, but instead of the horizontal direction, this migration of peoples takes on a vertical direction: something rises from the depths of the people, with tremendous power of understanding, with tremendous power of longing, to receive something of the goods, of the best soul goods of people as well.

In view of this, it is very natural to raise the question: What did the leading circles do for this modern proletariat, which represents this mass migration, since the indicated turning point in history? What did the leading part of humanity bring to the proletariat in modern times in the way of human goods, what was it called by this leading part of humanity, what was it woven into the capitalist economic order? This proletariat, which was pointed to by life at the machine, was pointed to its own personality, was pointed to the longing to enrich the soul, this modern, emerging proletariat longed for something that could meet it halfway. But what came to meet it?

What met them was historically unlike Christianity, which met the northern barbarian voices on the soil of Roman-Greek culture. And here something very peculiar presents itself. The soul and spiritual life of humanity had taken on a special form of development towards the fifteenth or sixteenth century, and in general towards the modern times, in which the old driving force of the human spirit no longer lay. Whoever takes a deeper look at the historical life of humanity, oh, he finds, however he may feel about the content of this or that older religious or other spiritual impulse, that these impulses can strike deep, deep into human hearts and souls, that they can sustain human life from this side, that they have a certain momentum to lead man to happiness, to a certain appreciation of his life on earth. For the spiritual impulses open up for him the prospect of a connection between what he experiences here on earth and the supersensible, which shows his human dignity in a higher light than everyday life can.

In more recent times, since the turning point described, what is modern science has taken the place of the earlier spiritual impulses. This modern science has bound its ever-increasing, its immense significance for the whole development of humanity to the names Giordano Bruno, Galileo, Kepler. But one thing is curiously missing in this newer development of humanity: the older spiritual impulses cannot extend beyond what is emerging. And so we experience that a science, a knowledge takes hold of people in which nothing is alive that tells people what they are and how they are placed in the world.

And so the modern proletariat craves more and more for enlightenment through science. But it does not get, at the same time, an impulse that tells it what it is in the overall context of humanity, what constitutes its human dignity, while it seeks a task.

This is a point where, to a certain extent, modern life becomes tragic. We see how religions, at the turn of this period, have arrived at a point where they reject what is emerging as science, reject what is emerging as human knowledge, declare it heretical, prove themselves incapable of sending their impulses into what is emerging as something new.

And so we must regard the following as one of the most essential factors in the development of the life of the modern proletariat: for the reason given, this modern proletariat craves knowledge, craves insight, wants to experience through insight what is worthy of man, what a human existence is.

In this sense, only that which is imbued with the momentum that simultaneously makes knowledge and insight a powerful life content can live as insight, in addition to what bourgeois circles or the other estates bring him.

And so we see something emerging in the newer development of humanity that reveals to us the true form of the modern social question in one point, in one area. We see the proletariat's yearning for an understanding of its own nature, the search for this own nature through modern science. But we also see the impossibility of receiving an actual spiritual impulse in this modern science. And so what this modern proletariat seeks as its knowledge, as its spiritual life, becomes what is now called in the leading circles of this modern proletariat: ideology.

And in this view that the spiritual life is an ideology, we have the true formulation of the social question in one area. Much else is only a consequence of this. Even what often appears in the purely economic sphere (we shall see this in the course of these lectures) is only a consequence of the fact that in the decisive period, when the proletariat longed to receive a spiritual life, the other classes gave it something in which there was no spirituality left. The modern spiritual life had become ideology, ideology. The religious momentum, the religious impact, the spiritual impact in general had disappeared from this intellectual life. This is how the modern proletarian received this intellectual life. He, who was placed at the machine, he, who was ensnared in the capitalist economic order, asked: What is a dignified human existence? How can I learn something about a dignified human existence from science?

The intellectual life alone had become mere thoughts, mere concepts, mere laws of nature. He saw as reality that which his hand had to grasp. The proletarian saw that which entered into modern economic life as an impersonal element. Nowhere did he see anything but its reality; and that which the leading bourgeois circles told him about the spiritual was reduced to mere thoughts, to mere ideas, it was not permeated by living spiritual power.

And so the opinion emerged in the minds of the proletarians that the only real thing is the external economic life, that from this economic life in its circulation, in the external scientific existence of man, arises like a smoke, like a social superstructure, only that which takes place as spiritual life - takes place in science, takes place in art - that this spiritual life is only ideology.

It would not be true if this spiritual life were something that was imbued with the spirit itself, something that, through its own content, would lead people to tie their existence to a higher world, not just a mirror of external material reality, for the proletarians of the external economic reality, the spiritual life was so. But to see the spiritual life in this way means that the soul becomes desolate, that the souls remain empty with regard to their innermost impulses, that the soul asks, asks into the empty space, receives no answer, stands before the riddle of existence emotionally, intuitively, receives no answer!

This is the state of mind of the modern proletariat more and more become: that it had to take over as an inheritance from the other classes not a living spiritual life, but an ideology, that was its fate.

What was caused by this in the souls of the modern proletarians has ultimately led to everything that is emerging today as a social movement. This is how we must understand the true nature of the social question in the one area. It is the actual intellectual area. The modern proletarian was condemned to lead a spiritual life that had to become a mere ideology for him.

The second area, dear attendees, comes to the fore when one actually considers the legal and the political. Political and legal social coexistence was presented to the older estates with their traditions by the fact that their interests, their entire happiness in life, was connected with what emerged as the state, as external political life, as external legal life. What the individual had, what the individual did in the so-called ruling classes, that had its basis in the structure that was the state, that was the political structure.

Of the life of the proletarian, which was emerging, only one thing flowed into this structure, into this political, into this legal structure: that which is closely connected with his existence, and in relation to which he could not come into a similar relationship with the state and politics as the leading circles: it flowed into the social structure of the proletarian as labor power.

And by considering this, we come to a true picture of the modern social demand in a second area. If the worker, who has nothing but his physical strength, gives it to the machine or to something else, he is part of the social organism quite differently than someone who is interested in political or state life through property or other legal relationships. Now, however, the proletarian became more and more aware that he was part of modern technical, modern capitalist life, that his labor had taken on a very specific character through modern conditions and that this character had pushed itself into human consciousness in a particularly clear form. The modern proletarian became aware of the fact that his labor power had taken on the character of a commodity, because in modern times that which was previously instinctive has pushed its way into human consciousness.

Otherwise, economic life is characterized by what may be called the circulation of commodities, which consists of the production of commodities, the circulation of commodities in the narrower sense, and the consumption of commodities. All other classes, so to speak, brought their wares to market, bought and sold. The proletarian had nothing to sell but his own labor power. And life turned out so that this labor power of the modern proletarian more and more took on the same form as the commodity has on the economic market. Just as one buys goods according to the principle of supply and demand, so the modern proletarian has to bring his labor power to market, which the owner of the means of production buys from him – buys at the cheapest possible price, if no legal countermeasures prevent him from doing so.

This is the second area where we encounter the true forms of modern social demands. This is, so to speak, one of the fundamental points of the modern proletarian movement. One must only know, one must only understand, what impression - even if it is outdated today in certain circles, even among workers - it has made on the modern proletarian soul over decades, that Karl Marx - as I said, even if Marxism is often outdated - that Karl Marx showed in a penetrating way, as scientifically as can be justified, how modern economic development has brought it to the point where the modern proletarian has to take his labor to the economic market, just as the other takes his goods, that the proletarian must, so to speak, trade in something that is as intimately connected with his humanity as his labor, that was the inspiring thing, that was what dug itself deep, deep into the soul. That is what they carried within them, instinctively, the people, the proletarians, what they could hear in scientific form from those who wanted to lead the modern proletariat scientifically.

This is the point that must be placed in the right perspective in the historical development of humanity in order to recognize its full significance. This is not something that has only come into humanity through modern technology. This is something that the modern proletarian experiences, albeit not in full consciousness, but sometimes, in that it remains in the subconscious, in such a way that he knows, knows in a certain way: once upon a time there were slaves, the whole person was sold on the labor market, on the goods market. The whole person was a commodity. Serfdom was the next step; the human being was already less of a commodity. Now, in more recent times, labor has taken its place: with it, a part of the human being is still brought to the slave market. Such is the feeling of the modern proletarian.

And just as humanity once overcame slavery – as it was done relatively recently – and serfdom, so must the modern life overcome the fact that labor power is treated as a commodity in modern economic life.

This is what the proletarian has increasingly come to feel is in his interest in relation to the political and legal state. This is one of the fundamental issues of the modern proletarian movement: to wrest human labor from the market, to strip this labor of the character of a commodity.

Of course, dear attendees, there are still many people today who cannot see how one should separate from the goods, from the product into which this labor flows, this labor itself. One need only consider the following. We will overcome this prejudice. The great Greek sages Plato and Aristotle considered slavery to be a necessary institution; nevertheless, it has been overcome in the course of human events. Today there are many people who still cannot imagine that what has just been mentioned in relation to human labor must also be overcome in the same way.

And so, in this second area, attention must be paid to the true nature of the social demands, which consists in giving human labor a position in the social organism such that people no longer have to sell this labor like a commodity, and that only objective material goods remain as commodities in economic life, no longer human activity.

This is something that seems to many to be an almost insoluble problem. We will see tomorrow where we want to proceed to attempts at a solution that it is precisely in the attempt to solve this question that something tremendously far-reaching for the whole of contemporary social life lies. The modern proletariat craves a political and legal organization in the modern state, through which its labor power loses its commodity character, and this labor power - institution in the social organism changes accordingly in relation to the commodity.

And a third area comes to us. This is the area that represents economic life in the narrower sense, the purely economic life, which proceeds in the production, circulation, and consumption of commodities. That which is thus integrated into the human social organism has certainly taken on a very special form after the aforementioned point in time in the fifteenth or sixteenth century and during the emergence of modern technology and modern capitalism. This economic life gradually emerged, one might say, flooding out everything else with its complexity, in that the economy expanded in modern times to encompass the whole world, extending to the circumstances of the whole world; whereas in the past the economic spheres were relatively were relatively narrow; but also because economic life itself became impersonal, separated from human honor, from human joy, from human devotion, and thus this economic life became the one that presented a particular, forced difficulty in the overall life of man.

And so it came about that, as a result of the former connection between man and what he worked, what he produced, developed into the incalculable relationship to the technical, to the capitalist world, that, I would say, economic life was pushed away from man. But precisely because it was pushed away from people, because they were no longer personally connected to it and their gaze was hypnotically absorbed by this economic life, it gained more and more power over people themselves.

And so it turned out that in the materialism of modern times, people's attention, their view, their living conditions were increasingly directed towards this economic situation.

This resulted in a very special imbalance for the proletarian, compared to those who live in the other areas of the social organism. He received the spiritual life as an ideology through the course of history. He could not affirm the legal life because, through this legal life, which gave property and rights to others, his labor power was basically stamped as a commodity. Thus, the spiritual life was, in a sense, a vain ideology; something with which his interests and human dignity could not be connected: political and state life. Thus the modern proletarian was completely pushed into economic life, and so it came about that he expected everything from this economic life, until the spiritual life was paralyzed into a shadowy existence, increasingly flooded on the other side by its crude reality, overwhelming all thought, feeling and will.

And so the belief arose that in the modern proletariat there is now a third area in which a true social demand is emerging: the belief that the rest is worthless to me; that I can rely only on what takes place in economic life itself. What redeems me, what gives me human dignity, must arise from economic life and its own laws. And a strange faith, one might say, a strange economic religion, has emerged. No religious impulses could come from the spiritual life that has become ideology. No religious impulse that could somehow fill man with his own dignity could come to the proletarian from state or political life. He hoped for it from the one to whom he remained connected, to whom he became more and more connected through technology and capitalism. He hoped for it with religious confidence from economic life.

From this feeling it is understandable that, in turn, the Marxist doctrine, or what later developed from it in one form or another, entered with such power into the modern proletarian soul that economic life, that the struggle of the individual economic classes, is the only real, the only thing of real importance; and that everything else, the spiritual, the political, everything that has to do with morals and customs, even art and religion, is a kind of superstructure, an ideological superstructure of the only true thing, economic life. But the economic process is an objective process. The economic process is one that takes place outside of the human personality.

And so one could say: From these foundations, the modern proletarian soul lost all trust in the personal powers of man, retaining only trust in that which, without man, one might say, with natural historical necessity, permeates the world: economic life.

They tried to recognize the course of this economic life, how it developed from earlier economic forms into modern capitalism, how this modern capitalism culminated, culminating in capital multiplying itself through itself, so to speak. They observed all this. They observed the accumulation of capital in a few hands. This finally became particularly transparent to the modern proletarian's eye, which had become clairvoyant in this purely material, economic field: the economic process, which takes place without people, has brought about modern misery, it has brought about what the modern proletarian perceives as his life situation. It must continue. But Karl Marx tried to show how it must continue by turning into its opposite, by what the newer economic order of capitalism has taken from the proletariat must be taken back from capitalism by turning into its opposite through the proletariat.

From this reversal within the economic process, that is, from a purely economic process of development, the modern proletarian expected what was to become of him. Just as he has debased intellectual life to ideology and fails to recognize it through the inheritance he has received from the other classes, so on the other hand he fails to recognize economic life, which can certainly never develop anything spiritual out of itself, but in which he believes that it must develop something spiritual, in which he alone has confidence. Underestimation of the spiritual, debasement of the spiritual to the point of ideology; lack of faith in the legal power of the political state that has taken away the dignity of its humanity by turning its labor power into a commodity; overestimation of the viability of economic life by believing that everything a person experiences can only economic life, and giving the development of economic life a quasi-religious consecration. These three things in three different areas, in the spiritual, in the state-legal, and in the economic, are the threefold true formulation of the social question, and are what lives in the modern proletarian. If we recognize this, then we know how the modern proletarian movement came into being. But then we also know what power it has. And we see that it has emerged with a certain inevitability in the development of the present and that it must continue to exist in the development of the future. That is why all modern life springs from two roots, and that there is so little possibility of mutual understanding between the classes.

On the other hand, the formerly leading classes have brought up intellectual, state, and economic life. They have toned it down to what was then passed on to the proletariat as inheritance.

The proletariat, driven by the impulses of modern humanity, craved intellectual life. It was given ideology. It craved a dignified existence. This dignified existence was extinguished by the imposition of the commodity character of its labor power. Economic life had finally emerged as the all-encompassing factor for the other classes as well. But these other classes brought into the modern organization of economic life what they had in their traditions. The modern proletarian was placed alone in this economic life. Therefore he expected everything from the development of this economic life.

The reasons for the attempts to solve the social problem in the present must also be sought here; how this social problem, whether it be temporary or whether it be solved in some definitive way, can be solved, can only be fathomed if one first attempts to fully recognize how the true form of the proletarian social movement has emerged in these three different areas: the spiritual, the state, and the economic.

We must seek the threefold solution of this modern proletarian movement in what can arise as such attempts at solutions precisely from the three currents that have led to the modern proletarian current. From this basis, we will now try to approach tomorrow, esteemed attendees, that which is so urgent and necessary for humanity today: to form an opinion on certain attempts at solutions, realistic attempts at solutions to the modern social question.

Dear attendees! Yesterday I tried to present the real nature of the social question as it arises from the consideration of what has gradually developed over the last few centuries, especially in the last century, in the minds of people, especially in the souls of the proletariat.

Today I would like to attempt to speak of possible solutions to this social question, of such possible solutions, dear attendees, that do not arise from some program, from some party demand, from human emotions; rather, I would like to speak of such possible solutions that arise from the developmental conditions and developmental forces of contemporary humanity.

However, if one wants to speak from such a point of view, then completely different things come into consideration than are considered by those who today are often preparing to comment on what has emerged as a proletarian social movement in the life of humanity.

If one has an eye for the developmental forces of humanity in the present, just as the natural scientist is supposed to have an eye for the developmental forces that a single person has at a certain age, say at the age of sexual maturity, then one must finally, I believe, come to realize that much of what that is currently emerging in an understandable way, in a completely understandable way, here or there, as a theoretical or practical or somehow-conceived attempt to solve social issues, that we are dealing with the revival of what is rightly regarded by many in another field as medieval superstition. It is as if certain superstitious ideas have already been exhausted in the more rapidly developing field of natural science, and as if, unnoticed by human thought because they only masquerade there, because they have taken on a different disguised form, they have been preserved to this day in the field of social life and its problems and its riddles.

To make it easier to understand what I actually mean, I recall the passage in the second part of Goethe's “Faust” where Wagner creates the homunculus, an artificial human being, in a retort. Goethe points to the medieval superstitious alchemy, which believed that a human being could be created in a chemical laboratory by artificially processing certain substances and forces in a thinking way, as an indication of what he wants to represent at this point in his “Faust”. The broadest circles consider such alchemical endeavors to artificially create an organism, a human body, to be a superstition based on the principles of current scientific thought. In the field of social thinking, as I said, this alchemical superstition continues to prevail to this day, without people noticing it because the matter is veiled. For much of what is thought and done to bring about the social structure, the social organization of human society today, resembles the efforts of that Goethean Wagner who wants to artificially create the homunculus in the laboratory. Today, people think they can concoct the social organism from some social materials and forces in an artificial way.

And if we examine more closely, esteemed attendees, what is emerging here and there as a so-called solution to the social question, we find that no attention is paid to the conditions for the solution of the social organism. Even in the experiments that are already being carried out on a large scale, no attention is paid to this. Instead, it is assumed that something artificial can be created in some way.

The spiritual scientific thinking, from which this consideration started and which also takes the method for the social question, this spiritual scientific thinking is based on reality and must therefore proceed in a completely different way than many socialist experiments of today. The question for the method represented here is not: How do you shape the social organism? but rather, how can we create the conditions of life through which the social organism can shape itself as a living being, through which it can come into existence? Just as in nature one does not artificially create an organism by some kind of thinking, but one has to create the conditions under which the natural organism has to form itself, and through which it can then develop out of its own life impulse, so it must also be done for a realistic view of life with regard to the social organism.

However, this, esteemed attendees, requires a radical change in the way many people think today, and that is a very uncomfortable thing for the widest circles today. People may still be willing to accept a change in some institutions, a change in some circumstances, if they are not too sleepy. But people are less willing to accept a different way of thinking, a transformation of their whole view of reality. However, such a reorientation, such a change of thinking, is necessary for the deep social problem that not only cuts into individual areas of life, but into the whole of contemporary life. What is at stake here is that one must, as it were, change one's path from social superstitious alchemy to real social insight, to real insight into the social organism.

Just as one can study and get to know the individual human natural organism by applying the scientific method impartially enough, so too can one, with vigorous thinking and research, see through the social organism in its living conditions. That is what it is about.

I have already taken the liberty of speaking about the individual human organism, the natural organism, here in Basel in previous lectures. Today I would just like to point out that it seems to me that no one will be able to understand the natural organism of the human being, the natural life body of the human being, despite all the progress in physiology and biology in the present day, without studying the three interacting but relatively independent parts of this organism. When I spoke from the same place here in Basel about these three links of the natural human organism, I took the liberty of pointing out that I was giving something - I have outlined it in my book 'Von Soul Mysteries», - something on which I have actually been working for thirty years, trying to justify what has emerged from spiritual scientific documents by all the means that modern natural science can provide in this regard today. So that I can say: anyone who wants to, anyone who does not want to dabble but will approach the subject scientifically, need not shy away from what I will only briefly mention here and what may still surprise some people who believe they have a deep insight into scientific matters.

This single human organism is not centralized in a simple way, but is actually decentralized into three relatively independent parts: one can say, into the nervous sensory system, which is centralized towards the head; one could also say, the head system. Then into the rhythmic system, which encompasses the lungs and the heart life, which has a certain inner independence from the head life. And then again the system of metabolism.

However strange it may seem, these three systems comprise everything that takes place in the human organism. But this is not a centralized administration, so to speak, that takes place in the human body, but rather there are three independent members, each with its own center, so to speak. They work independently. And precisely because they work independently alongside each other, they build on the overall process in this individual natural human organism. Each of these links, these three links of the natural human organism, in turn relates to the outside world: the head system through the senses, the heart-lung system through the lungs, through the respiratory organs, and the metabolic system through the digestive organs, which open to the outside.

And it is precisely on this independence that the harmonious interaction, the possible and purposeful interaction of the individual human organism is based. Anyone who thinks that they can present the human organism as a sum of processes regulated from a single center completely misunderstands the essence of the human organism. The essence of the individual human organism lies in this interaction, not in subordination.

What now comes to light in a healthy observation of this human life body must be transferred to the observation, indeed not just to the observation, but to the living in it, in relation to the social organism, the social life body. And there the matter becomes far more serious.

What is a mere theoretical, scientific matter of knowledge in relation to the human organism becomes a practical matter in relation to the social organism. In relation to the social organism, it becomes a practical matter that concerns every single person. This is not a matter of scientific knowledge, but of certain intuitions, a certain feeling for how to place oneself in human life in this threefold social organism. Just as one learns the multiplication table from childhood on, how to add, subtract and so on, in order to be able to calculate, so one will have to acquire from childhood on a feeling for being part of a human , which, if it is to be healthy, if it is not to resemble a homunculus, an artificially created human being, but rather a homo, a real human being who shapes himself out of his life impulses.

But lest I be misunderstood – nowadays one is almost always misunderstood when one expresses things that are, after all, quite obvious – lest I be misunderstood, I want to point out right away that what I am expounding here has nothing, not the slightest, with any kind of, as one can call it, playing with similes or analogies, which aims to study the human organism and then transfers what it believes it has found in the human organism to the social organism, to the social life body. Such things, as the economist happened to try in his social organism, the economist Schäffle, or as [Meray] has now tried in the so-called, in the so-titled “Weltmutation”, these things are mere playing around before a serious conception of reality. The point is not to carry on such gimmicks, to somehow transfer something from one to the other, but rather that just as healthy as the consideration of which I have spoken here must be for the natural human organism, just as healthy must be - and now not a scientific consideration, but a social feeling, a social understanding of all people for the three-part social organism. If one were to play a mere game of analogy, one might do the following: One would say: Well, the human being has a head; that is the organ for his spiritual. In the outer social organism, there is also something like a spiritual culture. So one compares the opposites that relate to the organ of the part, to the head, with what is found in the social organism as spiritual culture. Because political life, law, and public life have a regulating effect on human activities, one might compare the regulating pulmonary respiratory system with the police system, the political system, and the state system. And because, as people have always imagined, the metabolic system is the coarsest, the most material, it is compared to the materialistic culture of man, to the external economic life.

This would be obvious if one wanted to play a mere game of analogy. If one goes into reality, then one is dealing with the opposite. An analogy places the social organism alongside the individual natural human organism in such a way that both are standing on their own two feet. As paradoxical as it may sound, reality presents itself to us in such a way that, in relation to the individual natural human organism, the social organism is indeed standing on its head, according to human prejudice.

For the lawfulness that must be sought precisely for the so-called noblest system of the human natural organism, for the head system, this lawfulness corresponds to economic life in the social organism. This is found in economic life. The lung-respiratory system as a regulating system is found, however, as we shall see shortly, in the legal sphere, in the political state in the narrower sense. But what spiritual culture is in the social organism is subject, strangely enough, to the same laws or to laws that can only be compared to the laws of human metabolism in the natural organism. So, as you can see, dear attendees, a realistic observation turns everything upside down. This is to be understood in the following way.

In fact, for anyone who wants to examine the living conditions under which the social life body can develop, the healthy social life body is actually divided into three parts, and without life trying to work out these three parts in relative independence, so that they do not live centralized in some centralized state or the like, but each lives independently for itself, so that they have precisely this harmonizing effect on the whole, just as the three members of the human organism, as I have described, without this a healthy solution to the social problem, to the social puzzle, will never be found.

A structure must be created, and not by some abstract theory, even if this abstract theory were a party program, but by life itself, by the real factors of life in the social organism, the social body, in three independent structures: the economic structure, which has its own laws and can only live truly healthy through its own laws alone; a second structure, alongside this, or but developing in relative independence, a link that could be described as the actual political state link, as everything that a system of rights, a system of connections between human and human, has to establish; and a third relatively independent link, which needs its independence, its being based on its very own laws, that is everything that belongs to spiritual life.

Let us consider the economic sphere as the first limb of the healthy social organism. I said that if one wants to compare – but such a comparison must serve the purpose of understanding, not be some kind of arbitrary analogy – if one wants to compare, one can say that in economic life there is something for every limited social organism that develops in any territory, in any country, in any geographic area, there is something for such a social organism that could be compared to the original gifts, talents of the individual human organism.

Just as education – which is not life through mere learning, through mere imparting or any other artificial method – must neither ignore what is inherent in the nervous-sensory organism as an original gift, nor can it, so the economic life, which is the basis of the healthy social organism, is based on everything that constitutes the natural conditions of this economic life: the fertility of the soil, the raw materials available, everything that has to do with how these things can be processed, everything that connects man with the source from which he produces everything that is produced in trade and industry. This is the basis of economic life as a limited area, just as the gifts and talents of the individual human life are the basis of the talents of the social organism.

And indeed, this is where the great differentiations occur. This is where the social organism, as it were, receives something as a dowry. Just as a person receives his or her individual talents as a dowry, let us say a few examples, which I would say have a somewhat radical effect, to show what is actually meant.

Yesterday I spoke of the integration of human labor into the social organism. We will come back to this shortly. It is essential for the social problem of the present that human labor be stripped of the character of a commodity. But just as the rhythms of breathing and blood circulation are stripped bare of the mere metabolic life, so everything that relates to human labor power must be stripped bare in a healthy social organism, of all that springs from the laws that are peculiar to economic life.

But nevertheless, the life of breathing and the life of the heart are related to the life of metabolism. Human labor power is related to economic life in such a way that one can say: Depending on the preconditions of this economic life, human labor power is utilized in very different ways by it. Let us now look at the matter radically; but if it is not too strongly differentiated, the things are there after all; they are then only there to a lesser extent, but they still have an effect in the economic process. But let us look at something radical in order to visualize it. Let us say, for example, that we want to point to a country in which bananas could be a staple food, and want to compare such a territory of the earth, in which people can mainly feed themselves with bananas, with a country in which wheat yields an average harvest, such as in Germany. One can calculate the ratio of human labor required in one territory to that required in the other. The banana is so easy to transport from its point of origin to the point of consumption, and so easy to convert into what is then consumed. So little labor is required to make the banana into a consumer product in the economic process, compared to the labor required to make wheat into a consumer product in a country with an average wheat yield that the labor required for banana cultivation is 1:100 of the labor required for wheat cultivation, that is, one hundred times more human labor is required to make wheat consumable as a raw product for humans than for bananas.

But that also varies from territory to territory within the same article. If we look at the matter from a global perspective, there are major differences. But even on a more limited territory, such differences then arise. In Germany, if you look at the matter with a healthy average yield, wheat yields seven to eight times the yield compared to sowing, in Chile twelve times, in northern Mexico seventeen times, in Peru twenty times. There are regions where it yields twenty-five to thirty-five times as much. This requires a great difference in the human labor expended to bring a product, such as the conditions of the gifts and talents of human beings, that is given to the economic process to the point where it can be consumed, compared to the point of origin for such a product. Production of goods, circulation of goods, consumption of goods: these are the things that live in economic life, but which only economic life can embrace. Man has the need, precisely for such reasons – many similar ones could be added, such as the necessity in the multitude of human labor – man has the need to be connected, to be united with that which concerns the natural foundation, which concerns the other starting points of economic life.

This interconnectedness of human beings in the social organism with the economic conditions is what gives rise to the shaping of the laws that are peculiar to economic life. This economic life can only be based on the interpretation of those laws that arise from what has just been said. What is the basic aim of this economic life? Well, it can be said, esteemed attendees: that which must be active, must absolutely be active in this economic life, without which economic life cannot flourish, that is the human need, that is the need in general. There are also intermediate needs of these human needs: that is what can be called human interest. And certain thinkers in the field of social organization have rightly pointed out that only in the free activity of human interest, of direct human desire and of the interplay of desires and satisfactions in economic life, can the proper development of that economic life lie.

What is the aim of everything that now takes place in the interplay between need and the satisfaction of need in the production, circulation and consumption of goods? It is necessarily all aimed at the purpose of the commodity, at the consumption of the commodity, one could also say, at the most appropriate consumption of the commodity. Look around you wherever you want – if time allowed, I would expand on the concept of the commodity, but everyone feels that – if you want to look around you wherever you can in economic life, you will see that ultimately what matters in economic life is to consume what is produced in the most expedient way – in the most expedient way, I say, to consume.

What does that mean for the human labor force, esteemed attendees? If it has become clear in modern human life, precisely because of the flooding of this modern life with economic life in technology and capitalism, if it has become clear that the proletarian without property, whose own labor is brought to the labor market and is treated, precisely because it is on the labor market, as if it were a commodity, in terms of supply and demand, this is contrary to human dignity. For, in contrast to anything that may be a commodity, a person does not bring their own essence to market. But in the case of his labor power, he markets himself.

It is the abolition of this that the modern proletariat, out of a sense of human dignity, absolutely seeks. Perhaps here and there one will be found who, in full consciousness, can give the correct reasons for this demand; but in the subconscious, in the depths of human souls, in the depths of the proletarian souls, there lives what it is about. There lives a feeling in it: everything that comes onto the market of commodities is ultimately consumed in the most expedient way. But man must resist, absolutely resist, the mere consumption of his labor-power in the most expedient way in the labor-market of commodities. He feels that he has a value in himself, that he has something to preserve in himself, that he carries something in himself, which also lies in his labor-power, which must not be brought to the market of commodities, which must not be treated in the social organism as a commodity. Because in the tripartite social organism everything ultimately boils down to being consumed in the most expedient way, the modern proletariat cries out to the world: I do not want my labor power to become mere consumption for others.

This unconsciously underlies what I tried to work out yesterday as the one main aspect of the social question. And if you look at how it actually came about that, in the course of the development of modern technology and modern capitalism, labor was driven into the economic process, then, to understand this, you have to ask yourself: How did the economic conditions, the satisfaction of economic interests, the whirling up of the economy for the previously leading circles, for the previously leading classes, develop?

This is an essential and important question. They have not developed out of economic life, but precisely because in modern times there has been a fusion of state life with economic life that is no longer appropriate for these modern times; what has developed alongside the economy of humanity as the modern constitutional state, as the modern authoritarian state, is not what the proletariat was initially interested in, but what the so-called leading circles and leading classes were interested in. Within the development of modern technology and modern capitalism, these had an interest in regulating the economic underpinnings from the rights, as they were conceived, within the state adapted to the bourgeois and other ruling classes.

The oppressive aspect of economic life, the aspect that has created an unbearable situation for the proletariat in economic life, my dear attendees, does not come from economic life itself. It is a complete fallacy to believe that. And just as no defect in the metabolism or in the lungs can arise directly from a self-regulating metabolism, but only indirectly, so whatever in economic life has become oppressive for the proletarian world comes from – one need only study history, and one sees this if one is not blinded by prejudice, it stems from the history of conquests, from the history of the power relations and the legal relations that establish the power relations and the laws that oppress the proletariat. As I already mentioned yesterday, property relations are also based on laws. The oppressive nature of the proletariat's situation and the real pulse of the proletarian movement arise from such legal relationships.

Just as legal issues of the old state have worked their way down into economic life, the proletarian labor force, which has been pushed down into economic life by modern technical and capitalist development, must be taken up into legal life, which must now develop as an independent member in the healthy social organism alongside the economic member.

In this context, it really does not matter what they are called. If people prefer, they can call the economic organism the state and the other thing something else – the names are not important; what is important is that these two systems, these two links in the social organism, do not have a single centralization, but that each is centralized within itself, so that they can work side by side and harmonize precisely through their coexistence. That is what matters!

What can be state in the narrower sense can only encompass the regulatory system, that which takes place in the relationship between people. Just as the economic organism has interest in consumption, need and the satisfaction of needs, so the legal organism, the actual state organism, which must not be an economist, which must not engage in any economic activity at all, has the will to right at its core, in the healthy human [social] organism, which has the will to right at its core.

Rights can only exist in a state context. Economic interests can only exist in the economic body. And they must go side by side and together independently. That is it, if you look more closely, however little most people still believe it today, that is it, which has brought about such misfortune in modern life, which encompasses a representative body, an administration, economic life, and the state-regulating legal life. An independent system of representation is necessary for the purely political state. For the legal life, an independent representation, independent administration, for example in the Reichstag or in any ministry, is necessary. An independent administration, an independent ministry, but, to put it bluntly, for economic life, which is inherent in itself in terms of its administration and its perpetual further development, this will arise by itself. While the legal life of the state is concerned with the relationship between people, in that we must all be equal before the law, and while the legal life, if it is properly understood, can only result in a complete democracy, the economic life must be based on independent associations, on such associations that arise from the way people grow together, like the natural conditions previously characterized, in their economic life. Entire systems of associations will develop that, in a corresponding way, interpret the economic organism from the self-regulation of forces in such a way that it must and can be viable for everyone. These things are basically beginnings, yes; but beginnings in which many misunderstandings prevail. We have cooperatives – fine; we have trade unions, we have various other associations; certainly, such things have arisen out of the urge to serve the developmental forces of modern times. But partly from the form that such things have taken, partly from the fact that it is thought that economic life can be handed over to the state, to the community – in all these things it can be seen that in these new structures one does not want to include only what arises from the laws proper to economic life, but what must develop alongside economic life as an independent link in the social organism, namely, the political and legal life of the state, as described in the narrower sense. In contrast to all the concepts of labor and the position of labor in the social organism, as they haunt today, there will be, when these two elements of the healthy organism are juxtaposed, there will be, above all, as there is ownership in the old social organism, such a very different labor law in the new, healthy social organism, which will correspond to the present and the future.

As a result, dear attendees, one thing will happen: the fact that natural conditions are decisive to a certain extent for the formation of economic value in the circulation of goods is already ensured by these natural conditions themselves. But something else must become equally decisive. When what I have described occurs, when the relative independence of the legal sphere occurs, which in itself will comprehend the law of labor, then the value of the goods circulating in the economy will be limited in the same way as the natural conditions. Likewise, this value will be limited and determined by the labor that can be contributed to the economic process according to general human values and humane labor law. No true labor law can ever arise from the mere economic process itself, but only from the separate, relatively independent legal link of the healthy social organism.

This has been abandoned even in the heyday of capitalism, when the state, which is supposed to be merely a constitutional state, stretched its claws over the larger transport companies, especially railways and so on. And while what emerged as a social disease from the delusion of nationalization should be cured, a certain form of modern socialism seeks to continue the disease. That is what matters. For people do not see the following. They do not see what results in this area from a real understanding of the social organism.

Among the various schools that have emerged in modern times, one was already in the eighteenth century for economics. It is called the physiocratic school. This physiocratic school had, but in a terribly one-sided way, we would say today, according to the bourgeois method - it had the principle of the free circulation of economic forces and economic essence. The followers of this physiocratic system, who did not want the constitutional state to interfere in economic life, said the following. They said: Either the constitutional state issues laws that coincide with the laws that economic life already has of its own accord, in which case these laws are superfluous, or it issues laws that contradict the inherent laws of economic life – in which case these laws destroy the rightful existence of economic life; in that case they certainly should not be issued. – So said the physiocrats.

This seems extremely plausible – for what seems more plausible to the superficial person than such an either-or! But when it comes to the reality of life, such an either-or is nonsense, a folly. How so? In the following way: Economic life also develops when man does not want it to, when he interferes with it through all kinds of state laws; it develops independently through its own power, and it always has a certain tendency, always a certain directional force. After all, it tends to bring human coexistence into such a balance that it in turn has to be straightened out.

That is the great error of a certain radical socialism, that one believes that economic life could make people contented and happy if it followed its own laws. No, if it follows its own laws, then it will always end up in crisis-like conditions, which must be helped, and another system must intervene, just as the respiratory-pulmonary system must always intervene in the metabolic or head system to regulate it. Therefore, it is necessary to face reality: the laws of the constitutional state cannot run in the direction of economic laws. But because economic life requires constant correction, because otherwise it would consume people, it is precisely necessary that the laws of the constitutional state constantly limit, regulate, and correct mere economic life, just as metabolism is corrected by breathing. That is what matters.

Today, when we believe we are so practical, we have more and more abstract theories in our heads, not reality. We believe that something makes itself, and laws are there when we just think about what makes itself. Laws, institutions, and forces must often be applied in precisely the opposite sense of what is given from one side, so that a prosperous, healthy development can take place. That is what matters.

Therefore, the healthy spiritual-scientific method, which is based on reality, must not establish any abstract principles - and these are also party programs today - but must point to life. It must point out not how to think up that the labor power of the commodity character is stripped, but it must show what is to be created so that in the emerging social organism human labor power is really perpetually withdrawn from the commodity character. That is what is at stake here: the living shaping of reality. This is what is striven for by the much-maligned spiritual science, and what is most important in the present, what is truly urgently needed in the present: what is important is the living interaction. One cannot push the life of the social organism either economically or in mere rigid conservative legal codes.

Gladstone, one of the most superstitious bourgeois of modern liberalism, once said: “The Americans have such a perfect constitution that it could hardly be more perfect, that it has truly proven itself in all the individual circumstances of the American people.

Another Englishman, who, it seems to me, was cleverer, if perhaps not as great a statesman as Gladstone, said: it is no proof at all that the American administration is a perfect one, that it proves itself, Because if it were less than perfect, it would also prove itself, because the Americans are still such a healthy people – in the opinion of the person concerned – that they would do all this even with a less healthy constitution. And the latter is certainly more right than what Gladstone said, because it points to the living reality, because it really does not matter which laws prevail in a living context, but that people work together in such a way that the necessary damage that arises on one side is constantly corrected by the living forces on the other.

Imagine a homunculus in which the waste products of digestion are not produced inside, which in turn have to be removed by other forces – then you have thought up something that has no breath of life. Spintize, and even if it is in the sense of the most radical people of modern times, about a social organism that does not cause harm to people, that does not consume people, that does not need to have another link of the social organism besides itself other than the constitutional state, as the actual state, then you have thought up an unhealthy social organism. That is it, that one is always pushed again, by the practically minded, but in the most eminent sense impractical way of thinking of modern times, that one again penetrates to a conception of reality, to such thoughts that can submerge into true reality, that can speak of what conditions itself, not what wants to have conditionality out of human prejudices.

And as a third link, alongside the two links that I have mentioned – alongside the economic link and the strictly political or legal link – there must be development of that which encompasses spiritual life in the broadest sense, the spiritual life that exists in education, in all schooling, from the most elementary school up to the university; that which exists in the artistic life, and finally in the religious life, which must also include - this will again seem paradoxical to some today, although it arises from real factual considerations - that must also include [not] public law, the law that is conditioned by the relationship between human beings; it belongs to the second link.

But this third part must include everything that aims at private law and criminal law. There the individual human being is confronted with the individual human being in such an abnormal relationship that the public life of the constitutional state, although it is up to the one who - if I may express myself trivially - has to carry something out; but to pass judgment is the responsibility of a relationship between individual human beings. The execution of the judgment may in turn belong to the constitutional state.

Everything, dear attendees, belongs in this area, in this spiritual area, everything that must be based on the ground of the individual human soul and body, which can only arise from the individual, from the freedom of the human being, how it must be placed on the economic interest of the economic body, the independent one, and how it must be placed on the legal life of the political body, so must it be placed on freedom the body that encompasses the actual spiritual life. Modern social democracy has included a single area in an impulse that goes in the direction described here, but not out of an appreciation of this area, but precisely out of an underestimation of it: religion should be a private matter.

Of course it should be. And anyone who does not underestimate religion, but understands its full value, will demand this all the more! But in the face of the legal and economic state, all of intellectual life must be a private matter. And now that the social question of the present day is coming to a conclusion – for that is what it consists of, the merging of economic life with legal life, of the state with the economic organism – it is precisely through the emergence of the capitalist and technical world order in modern times that the merging has also occurred, which was not there at all before the point in time marked yesterday, before the fifteenth century. The amalgamation of intellectual life with state life. The interests of the emerging bourgeoisie, which were connected with the development of the modern state, also tended to have intellectual life absorbed into the organism of the state. Judges were needed, doctors were needed, theologians were also needed, teachers were needed, and so on and so forth. The state extended its omnipotence over the spiritual life as a result of this impulse.

This spiritual life must be redeemed again, and placed on its own ground, on the free individuality of the human being. Then, and only then, will it develop in a healthy relationship to the other two limbs of the social organism.

Sometimes things are very hidden and masked there. Perhaps only someone who, like the one speaking to you, has spent his whole life has avoided in any way bringing what he has striven for spiritually into any relationship with any state; who can therefore know how this spiritual life must develop when it is freely left to its own devices. And it must be left to its own devices if it is to develop.

The dependence of the spiritual life on the life of the state has not contributed in the slightest to the weakening of the impact of the spiritual life to the point of the dead ideology that the modern social question creates. For it is not only that the personalities who drive intellectual life come to depend on state life and have to serve the institutions of state life. Anyone who can look at these things in depth knows something else entirely: , he knows that the inner form, the content of spiritual life itself becomes dependent on its relationship to the other organisms, which can only be a healthy one if the spiritual life develops in complete independence. Otherwise, dependencies also conceal and mask themselves. If it occurs independently, if it occurs in complete freedom, if it is completely left to its own devices, then a healthy relationship with the legal and economic body will arise naturally in life. How we adjust our own impulses; otherwise, due to certain prejudices, we do not notice things. Let us take a case that could seem radical, but which is quite characteristic. Let us assume that some young student wants to take his doctorate in the field of philology. He is advised to write, say, about feeling words in some old Roman writer or about the [parenthesis] in Homer. Such a task even had to be done by a young friend of mine. For such a work, a young person needs a year of extensive work.

Those who are so asleep in today's scientific life will say: Well, scientific interests. Science demands such an investigation into the feeling words of an ancient Roman writer, or into the [parenthesis] in Homer. In this way, science is served. But there is something else to consider. The healthy relationship of such a work to the whole of human life must be considered. This must become transparent in the entire human [social] organism. The student who works for a year to determine the hidden [parenthesis] in Homer eats, drinks and dresses for a year. That is to say, a number of people have to work for this work, to work for a year to feed him, to clothe him, so that he can do in time that which certainly does not fit into the healthy human [social] organism in a proper interest! Because a spiritual achievement only fits into the healthy human organism with a proper interest if it is desired, if there is a need for it. That is what matters.

And something else is important. It depends on the healthy development of the spiritual part of the social organism that the spiritual part of human culture also has the corresponding momentum, that it really produces what is relevant to reality. From this spiritual life, for example, technical ideas also arise, that which, as a spiritual idea, constantly intervenes in economic life in a productive and creative way. This can only be born in a healthy way in a real spiritual life, not in a spiritual life that has been deadened to the point of abstraction, which can be described by the term ideology.

The important thing is not to fight against the leaders of the modern proletariat labeling spiritual life as ideology, but to recognize that spiritual life, which has emerged from the unfortunate amalgamation of spiritual culture with the other two links of the social organism, has reduced spiritual life to ideology. It is easy to describe modern intellectual life as ideology; but a productive, self-effective intellectual life must in turn occur in a healthy social organism. This will also have a healthy effect on economic and legal life. This in turn must be relatively independent.

That this life in spiritual culture, in the third link of the healthy social organism, must be built on itself, I believe I showed as early as the beginning of the nineties of the last century in my “Philosophy of Freedom” , which, I believe, is now being republished at the right time, and which shows that real freedom can only exist and is only justified where a true spiritual life can flourish.

Now there is far too little time to elaborate here on what I would like to say about the free spiritual life. But I would at least like to hint at it. I will hint at it by saying that a healthy consideration of the threefold human organism shows that what is produced out of the spiritual sphere will then intervene healthily in the other two organisms when the spiritual life is completely self-contained. For then, he who can have a leading position in economic life according to his own conditions will not only need the proletarian who toils and labors, and who will then no longer be there as such at all, but he will need the one who, as a spiritual worker, can be the consumer. But through labor legislation, he can preserve that part of his labor power, that is, of his life force, which must not be consumed in the labor market, but must be regulated by the second link of the healthy social organism. Today, at least within the capitalist economic system, the one who is in a leading - that is, today essentially capitalist - position has only an interest in the consumption of human labor in the proletarian. The healthy three-part social organism will not only have an interest in the working laborer, but also in the resting laborer, in the laborer who can consume what will strive for consumption. This will certainly not be what the young badger will do, spending a year writing about the sensory words of some old writer and doing a doctoral thesis, but it will be what is demanded, what is needed by spiritual life. A full unison, a living unison will arise between spiritual production and general human, spiritual consumption. No one will be excluded from what the spiritual life offers. And precisely because of the interconnection of the three parts of the social organism, which should be independent, so many people are actually excluded from what other people do.

Everything that is produced as the lifeblood of society in a healthy human organism must also flow in a healthy way into the other parts of the social organism. It will not be possible to say, esteemed attendees, that in the future, for example, in a constitutional state that will have a democratically oriented representation, the individual circles will also sit, that they can also form a party, an agricultural party and so on. This will not be the case for the reason that the interests that today develop in opposite directions will then develop in the same direction. Even the antagonism between the Conservative and Liberal parties will not exist in the future if the social organism is allowed to develop healthily, because in a constitutional state, the conditions that always arise concretely will not be oriented objectively towards conservatives, liberals and so on, according to the slogan, I say slogans.

So today I could only sketch for you, dear attendees, what is at stake, in that not only a transformation of circumstances, but a transformation of the whole life for the social organism must occur.

On February 28, I will give another lecture here. There I will give individual evidence and details, and also show that for everything I have hinted at today, only a sketch could be given, that for all this there is a proving, a reasoning science. So that is to take place here in this hall on February 28.

Today, I would just like to point out that this terrible catastrophe that has befallen humanity for four and a half years, as I already mentioned yesterday, has highlighted the social question as a major question of world history, on which every person must take a practical stand based on life.

It is necessary for each individual to take a position on what has happened. One will soon be convinced how the life of each individual depends on the position he will take on the social problem, on the social riddle in the future. That is why it happened that way, because I always these things - allow me here, a personal but in reality not personal, but quite objective remark - because I did not invent these things to make something up, but because I won them from the observation of the present human that I wanted to put them into practice more and more when this terrible catastrophe of war reached a certain point, where one could see that it would develop out of the absurdity of previous forces, that it would develop into the essential social problem of humanity. During that war catastrophe, I tried, for example, to present to individuals, sensed and adapted to the circumstances, that the time demands something like the social impulse, which I have also explained here in yesterday's and today's lecture.

In a sense, I wanted to show personalities who were still active at the time, but have now been swept away, what they need if they are to contribute to changing that which proves to be diseased in the social organism. And so I had to speak to many people, to those who still mattered at the time, about what I am saying here. It is not a program that has been thought out, not something that has been thought out, but reality, in that the forces that are at work within the development of humanity will bring about what will happen in ten or twenty years over a large part of Europe. And to many I said, I believed that their hearts and souls could be stirred by it, to many I said: You now have the choice, if you still want to join in, either to follow that which will happen because it must happen, out of reason, or you wait until social cataclysms and social revolutions come.

People were drawn into what they were drawn into more quickly than could be hinted at in those days. In those days, the word “could” meant “was allowed to”. That was the way one had to speak in those days. But people did not want to listen. We have also experienced similar things in other areas! We have experienced that statesmen, leading statesmen, as late as May 1914, announced to parliaments in the most prominent positions: We are in such a European context that peace is secured for a long time. — This can be proved to them. People are that far-sighted!

However, anyone who is serious about what is really going on would have had to speak differently to people at the time. Before this military disaster, I repeatedly had to hint at what I, in turn before this military disaster, said like the others, like the statesmen: Peace is assured, we now live in one of the best of worlds. I was told in Vienna: This tendency - namely the tendency that lies in the present social life - will become ever greater and greater until it destroys itself. He who has a spiritual grasp of social life sees everywhere the terrible growth of social ulcers. That is the great cultural question that arises for him who sees through existence; that is the terrible thing that has such a depressing effect and that, even if one could suppress all enthusiasm for spiritual science, if one could suppress what would otherwise open one's mouth for spiritual science, which could then lead one to cry out to the world, as it were, for the remedy for what is already so strongly on the rise and will become stronger and stronger if the social organism continues to develop as it has done so far. This is how cultural damage occurs, which can be seen for this, for the social organism, just as cancerous growths can be seen for the natural human organism.

Faced with the social question, we are faced with the possibility that people will continue to sleep through events, that they will not listen to what must necessarily be said to the social organism, just as it can be said to the natural organism when someone has a cancerous ulcer inside.

Not only did people refuse to see the full implications of what I mean in the course of the war catastrophe so far – they took what they understood of it, usually in such a way that it can only be seen as an expression of the internal politics of this or that state. I did not then and do not now mean it only as the domestic policy of this or that state territory, but I do mean it in such a way that I find it rooted in the developmental forces towards which humanity is heading. And I mean it first and foremost as the foreign policy of the various states.

That is what I have emphasized above all: that certain states, to whom it concerns, have to hold these things up to the world as their foreign policy. If we consider that one state is not so closely connected with another as they would have been, for example, these European states in 1914, that the unnatural mixing of the political and state problem to the southeast of Austria, the Austro-Serbian problem, of ill-starred memory, - the states would not have linked their economic and political interests in such a way, the social organisms would not have linked their interests in such a way as they were linked in Europe, and therefore alliances arose that necessarily developed to such an extent after a certain point that ultimately decisions were made from the most one-sided strategic-military points of view.

Let us assume that the states are in a relationship in which the threads are drawn, the legal ones, which will essentially be the same for all states - the actual political relationships will be the same for all states, especially in the case of a healthy organism - then the economic and intellectual threads will intertwine. More and more, the one will be corrected by the other. And precisely where today, at the borders, the contradictions have arisen as a result of the interconnection of the three areas, these contradictions will be corrected when, regardless of the political relationship, the system of economic efficiency extends across the borders.

I can only hint at this here. But it should mean, it should point out, that the various territories of the world, through what is characterized here as a healthy social organism, come into such a system that, in contrast, the League of Nations, as it is conceived today, will be an abstraction, into such a system that is based on reality, so that one reality increasingly excludes the damage of the others. That is what matters today.

Now, esteemed attendees, what I have presented is perhaps more uncomfortable for many than what these same many imagine as the solution to the social question today. Because you can very easily see from what I have presented – as I said, more on February 28 – but you can already see from what I have presented today that one cannot imagine: The social question has arisen, clever people will solve it, and then socialism will be here. But it is not like that. It is contrary to all development.

Of course, the social question is here because human development has entered a new stage of existence, because new forces have emerged. But since it has been here, this social question will not disappear for all time in the future development of humanity. Economic life will continue to be more and more a social question. It will not be possible to invent a socialism that will solve the social question at a stroke. But it will be possible to create a healthy social organism in which the social question will be solved in a living context through the active engagement of people, day by day, year by year, epoch by epoch, in an ongoing process. No solution of the social question that can be thought of today must be allowed to take place. I am not pointing out institutions to you that will eliminate the social question. It is there, it is there as a life force of future humanity. The life of this future humanity will consist in the fact that this future humanity will have to create something through which the solution of the social question will be experienced perpetually. The existence of the social question, the existence of social development, will be enriched, not impoverished; a new element of life will enter into the social organism. That is what matters: the self-regulation of social life through the three relatively independent social links, that is what matters.

When I consider this, and when I consider that the general prejudice that once prevailed against spiritual science is also applied when this spiritual science speaks about the social question, on the one hand it strikes me that a very well-known gentleman had it said to him when a certain goal was explained to him, which I am practically striving for in terms of rebuilding the ailing conditions of the civilized world – in a brief appeal, the person in question was able to read, in a few sentences, what I have explained to you yesterday and today – he replied: he would have thought that I would not point to such economic things for the recovery of the current human situation, but to the spirit.

Now, dear ones, this shows how the minds, how those who have worked with us for a long time, brought about the disaster, and even today do not want to see what is important. It is not enough to just preach: spirit, spirit and spirit. It is not enough to call out to people today: but rather that we use this spirit to immerse ourselves in the actual conditions and to control the actual conditions as they must develop in accordance with reality. It depends on how the spirit is applied in life. It does not depend on repeatedly pointing out in the abstract: Spirit, spirit, spirit must be placed back into humanity, then all will be well.

That is one thing that occurs to me. The other thing that occurs to me in response to what the clever people are saying: what does the spiritual scientist want in the social question? I would like to reply: he wants to adjust human thinking and feeling and willing to true reality, just as he does in everything else. This reminds me of the poor boy who once sat as a servant at a Newcomen steam engine. He had to take out and push in the two cocks alternately, which let in the condensate on one side and the steam on the other. And then this boy noticed that the balancer was jumping up and down. It occurred to him, because he was not forming theories, but was standing at the machine itself, it occurred to him: What would happen if I took two cords, pulled one at a time, and the other at the other? And behold, the balancer went up and down, and all by itself, one tap opened at the right time and came down again, and the other from the other side. And the boy could watch! You see, someone of the ilk of those people who observe everything that is observed from reality poorly and say, “You good-for-nothing boy, what are you doing! Get rid of the cords. – World history has done it differently. World history has allowed the self-control of the steam engine, one of the most important modern inventions, one of the inventions that has most comprehensively intervened in modern technical life, to emerge from this initially poor boy who tied the cockerel to the balance arm.

Not out of immodesty, and not to characterize something for the one who is already established in the teaching represented here, but to characterize those who would like to come, to speak in relation to the social aperçu that I have presented, to speak, so to speak, from the standpoint of their cleverness, as one would have said: “Stupid boy, quickly get rid of what you are doing, what nonsense are you up to?” Leave it alone! I would only like to say to them what occurs to me with regard to the little working boy, as I have told you. For people will soon have to realize, those who cannot do it with their minds will have to realize it with their lives and with their feelings - they will have to realize that they have to approach the reality of the social question in a realistic way. It is there; it has been knocking at the door of human life for long decades and has come in through the door. It will not allow itself to be thrown out again by anyone. The desire to throw it out will be the worst policy. But it will also be bad if people do not listen at the right time to what needs to be said about the social question. Because then it could be that communication from person to person, across class lines, is no longer possible because the instincts have been unleashed too strongly. We need only look at the fire signs that are rising on the world horizon today to realize that we have to deal with the issues at hand, otherwise it could well be too late due to the unleashing of human instincts that can no longer be calmed – perhaps not for decades!

Dear attendees! The issue that is currently being called the social question has been on the horizon of modern historical development for more than half a century, and humanity has had the opportunity to reflect on what is expressed in the social demands of the movement associated with this question. During this time, people have also taken measures, small, medium and large, conceived in terms of state, through which they have tried to satisfy these demands in the way they have best understood. But now, when this social question, which in comparison to what is now, was more present in the undercurrents of human life, has emerged in a completely new form as a result of the terrible war catastrophe of recent years, and now that this question has been brought up by many quite horrifying , one cannot, if one really wants to learn from them, raise the question of why everything that people have tried to do to understand this social question is inadequate. Does it not prove that in many respects people today have not only been taken by surprise by the shape of the facts, which most of them truly did not dream would come about one day, that they did not dream that these facts would have to bring everything that can be executed in the human soul to this social question, that they have to relearn and rethink in a certain sense?

One could already see, dearest ones present, during the war catastrophe, how the suppressed forces of this movement pushed their way to the surface of life. Many a person who, through their words or advice, could have contributed to the inhibition or promotion of what was pushing towards the terrible war catastrophe of 1914, felt moved to push towards this war because they believed that a military victory would save their country from the forces against which the social movement was directed. But such personalities have had to realize over the past few years that they have made their decisions under serious illusions, because they have not been able to somehow push back the social forces moving to the surface through what they have achieved. On the contrary, they have - one can say so, the facts teach it - fuelled the fire all the more. And again, during the catastrophe of the war – the other world-shaking powers have driven humanity into chaos, into a terrible misfortune; then, during the catastrophe, hope emerged here and there in wide circles that precisely from the ranks of the international proletariat and its leaders those people will arise who will bring order back into the chaos that had emerged.

From all this, it can be seen that it was precisely in the face of these war catastrophes that this social movement first took on its critical form. And now, after the catastrophe itself has entered into a crisis, what is now apparent? Dear attendees, facts do not show whether everything in the face of all this history, in the face of these facts, is gripped by a deep tragedy. People, both those who profess the modern socialist worldviews and those who oppose them, show everywhere that the thoughts they have formed, the conclusions they have reached, and the preparations they have made are nowhere equal to these facts. The facts are overwhelming people, so it can be said in view of the current world situation.

It is therefore justified to reflect on whether the ideas that have been cultivated over the course of many decades really did capture the true nature of the social question. Did they take the true character into account? Is it possible that something quite different from what was sought to be grasped in the ideas is present and at work in the depths of the soul of the proletariat? Whether perhaps in the depths of these proletarian souls there is something quite different from what the proletarian himself believes is at work and calling to him?

Now, it is precisely in the circles of today's socialist thinkers that one finds a true disdain for intellectual life. But anyone who has been able to follow the proletarian movement of the last decades with a certain insight into life must say to himself that this rejection of intellectual life, of intellectual culture, this contempt for intellectual culture on the part of the proletariat actually expresses something extraordinarily significant that points the way to at least one in the true form of the modern social movement. If one has understood in the course of the last time, not only from some theoretical or quite scholarly point of view to reflect on the proletariat, but if one has been able to live with the proletariat, then one could see that in this rejection of the intellectual life there is something much, much deeper than one usually believes. And one is pointed to what is actually contained in it when one examines a certain word, which one could hear over and over again from the mouths of proletarian people, for its true content. It is a word that stands out significantly from the modern proletarian movement: the word is class consciousness of the proletariat. The modern worker says that he has become class-conscious. And by this he means that his consciousness is no longer as it was in the old days, when, based on certain instincts, a person placed himself in a relationship of dependence on this or that other person in order to work for him, and also established his relationship with these employers more instinctively, more unconsciously. The modern worker knows himself to be class-conscious. This means that he acts in accordance with certain ideas that he has about his dignity as a human being, about his value as a human being, about his position as a human being in society. He uses these ideas to determine the relationship he wants to enter into with those from whom he takes his work. What he represents in the world, he expresses with these words “class-conscious”. And this class consciousness is then accompanied by a certain feeling, a certain sentiment. It is this that only when the worker draws the full consequences of this class consciousness, when he behaves in his social position as this class consciousness makes him behave in relation to his human duty, then he will first achieve that goal, that goal that must be in his mind in the true sense of the word: to become the person he can desire to be according to a just world order.

Now, esteemed attendees, we can examine how, in the course of more recent times, what is hidden in the words “class-conscious proletariat” has emerged. To do so, we must go further back in contemporary history. And indeed, it has often been pointed out that we must go back to a certain turning point in time to gain insight into this question. Again and again it has been emphasized that, if one wanted to reflect on the origin of the modern proletarian movement, one had to look at how modern technology has emerged on the horizon of humanity, how this modern technology has given rise to modern capitalism, and how technology and capitalism have destroyed the old crafts, how they have led the worker away from what were his own means of production to the extensive means of production of modern factories and modern technology. And from all that could be seen from the historical development, the idea was formed that modern technology and the modern capitalism associated with it actually produced the proletariat.

However, dear attendees, it is not important that one realizes: modern technology and modern capitalism have created the proletariat, so to speak; rather, what matters is what the proletarian himself has become at the machine, in technology, through his integration into the modern capitalist economic process. And when one poses a question to that effect, then something extraordinarily significant becomes apparent to those who understand the issues, to be considered in historical parallels. Then one involuntarily recalls another great movement in world history. One recalls the spread of Christianity from Asia, through Greece and Rome to the north – to that north where, at the time, while Christianity was spreading, barbarian hordes were moving against the south, with more elementary sentiments than the inhabitants of the south had. And a remarkable historical phenomenon occurred at that time: Christianity, which then proved to be a world movement, also took hold, in a certain way, among the people, among the highly educated people of Greece, among the people of the Roman Empire. The way in which it took hold in these areas of civilization at that time shows at the same time that it would not have become what it has become in world history if it had only been able to come to the Greeks and Romans. The Greeks and Romans had a highly developed intelligence, they had a highly developed wisdom; but at the same time, this intelligence, this wisdom, was, I would say, like a fruit that had overripened, in a certain process of decline. And precisely this highly developed intelligence, this highly developed spiritual life of the European south was less able to absorb the impulses of Christianity than the elementary minds of the barbarians advancing from the north; and in the unconsumed intelligence, in the unconsumed mental powers of these advancing peoples of the north, Christianity created the impulses by which it has become what its actual impact in world history shows.

At the same time, the first [history] of Christianity must be studied in the migration of peoples from north to south.

But it is also a mistake, dear attendees, to assume that the modern proletarian movement began with what it is actually still experiencing and will continue to experience for a long time. Only here we have to do with a migration of peoples that does not run in a horizontal line, so to speak, but consists of masses of people who previously merely allowed themselves to be led, striving upwards, striving towards the form of consciousness, the intelligence, the ability to make decisions that the leading classes have: one might say a migration of peoples running in a vertical line!

But this vertical migration was met with something quite different from what happened with Christianity. The highly developed Greeks and Romans could give the Christian religion that which struck home in the elemental, primitive hearts, in the northern barbarian hearts of the attacking population. And these latter needed that, longed for it in a certain respect, which the more highly developed Greeks and Romans brought them.

Christianity brought a special spiritual gift with a strong impact on the souls - that was what it brought to the primitive minds of the north. But what could the ruling classes do in the new mass migration, what could they offer the proletarian masses storming from below?

I am not saying, esteemed attendees – I ask that you take this explicitly into account – I am not saying: they could offer them modern science; but rather, I say: they could offer them the human orientation, the human way of thinking that is connected with this modern science. And the surging masses of proletarians were hungry for this mode of thinking, for this acceptance of the modern scientific way of thinking. Why were they hungry for it? They were hungry for it because they were people who had been torn out of their old life contexts.

Let us consider the crafts as they developed up to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, well into the late Middle Ages. We will see that the human being is close to what spurs him on to produce. He is close to what makes economic production possible for him. And from his occupation, not only does an external professional honor arise for him, but something arises that gives him the feeling: he is of value in human society, he stands in a certain way. Human dignity is inherent in this human society. The craft was worthy of the person who practiced it. The craft instilled something in the soul that carried that soul. Not so with those who were torn out of their life contexts and led into the desolate factory, placed at the machine and harnessed to capitalism, which is alien to the human being. These people received nothing from their surroundings. Everything flowing towards them from their work tools and their work environment was alien. What did they have to fall back on when they asked themselves: What am I as a human being in the world? What do I mean in human society? They were dependent on their inner being, on that which can arise loudly from the soul, which can say about the human being from the inner being: I mean in the world as a human being. — But it is quite natural that no answer could come from an inner intuition, from an inner enlightenment, to these people's questions about their human dignity, about their human worth. They looked around for what the ruling class could offer them. Just as the barbarian masses storming in from the north had earlier accepted Christianity, so the modern proletarian masses wanted to accept what spiritual life could be brought to them, what a certain world view could be brought to them by those leading classes who had such spiritual life, such a certain world view.

One must not mistake this, esteemed attendees. It has often been completely misunderstood that the modern working masses approached the leading classes with a certain, I would say unconscious, trust and demanded of them: Give us information from your knowledge, from the science to which you have brought it, about what man actually means in the world!

But what was this scientific way of thinking like? What was it like, this scientifically oriented way of thinking that educated the bourgeoisie at roughly the same time as modern technology and capitalism emerged? It was like this: of course everything that has happened is also, in a sense, an historical necessity. One can hypothetically say that what the bourgeoisie had to offer the proletariat in the way of intellectual life was scientifically oriented, and was precisely the achievement of the newly emerging science. But the leading classes had not understood how to incorporate into this scientific attitude the momentum of spiritual life that was inherent in the old worldviews.

One need only recall the momentum that lived in the old religious and artistic conceptions, in general worldviews. These conceptions were able to give man something that carried his soul, filled his soul completely, and was meant to show his soul how this soul was connected to a spiritual world that stood above mere nature.

The modern scientific way of thinking could not do that. That was precisely what people were — certainly it was necessary, but one can still characterize it like this: It was the case that the old worldviews, and their representatives in particular, even opposed what was being developed as a modern scientific attitude. They did not understand how to give this science something that would have been a soul-bearing element. And so this science became well suited to give man enlightenment about nature and about the way he himself stands in nature; but it was impossible for this science to tell man anything serious about the questions that arose in his deepest inner being: What am I as a human being?

So, one might say, the proletariat did indeed place its trust in the leading classes; but this trust, and this, even today, is not fully understood by the proletariat, one must say: this trust was betrayed. The proletariat believed it could find something in modern science that could become its creed, its religion, so to speak, and what did it find? There is another word that shines brightly on what lives and happens in the modern proletarian soul. There is the word that can be heard again and again in proletarian writings, in proletarian assemblies, the word that proletarian leaders always have on their tongues - there is the word “ideology”.

What does the proletariat mean when it speaks of ideology? It means that the entire intellectual life: science, art, religion, law, custom, morality, that all this is not something that contains an inner, spiritual reality above nature, but that all this is based only on ideas that are mere reflections, mere reflections of what is going on outside in material life. The intellectual life that the bourgeois class handed over to the proletariat was so paralyzed, so paralyzed that the proletarian class could only perceive it as an ideology, that it no longer sensed in it anything that bore the soul as reality, but only sensed in it only insubstantial, unreal mirror images of external material reality.

And what was this external material reality for the proletarian? Only the economic life in which he was involved, only the machine, the factory. Only this gave him the bleak capitalism in which he was socially placed. And so it showed itself that now, in this new mass migration from bottom to top, people also longed for spiritual nourishment, but that they were only offered a spiritual nourishment that gradually hollowed out their souls, that gradually made their souls desolate.

And what was the result of this? The result was that demands arose in the modern proletariat that could not be illuminated by the impulse of any spiritual life, and that had to assert themselves as mere instincts, so to speak. By perceiving the spiritual life, which it has inherited from the leading classes, as ideology, the proletariat must, on the one hand, reject this spiritual life, but on the other hand, it must also allow this spiritual life to work in such a way that it is deprived of the possibility it sought in this spiritual life of feeling through this life what it is as a human being, whereby it places itself in the whole scientific order.

With these suggestions, dear attendees, I believe I have touched on the one link in the modern proletarian, in the modern social movement. In any case, more than one would believe, this movement is a spiritual movement, but not one in which the spiritual has had a beneficial effect. The trust in the intellectual life of the leading classes has become mistrust. And in the facts, which today stand so horribly for many, one experiences the consequences of this mistrust. Yes, the way things play out on the surface, how they live out in the human imagination, that is sometimes not the essential, not the decisive thing; in this respect, man often misunderstands himself. What stirs below [in the true depths] of the soul is what matters. And however little the modern proletarian admits it, in the depths of his soul he yearns for something that can carry this soul. And if he believes he finds it in the current scientific attitude, with his ideas and his thoughts, then his unconscious feeling tells him that he must be dissatisfied with his whole situation, because this modern scientific attitude only shows him, so to speak, the vanity of man.

In this respect, there is a huge difference, an enormous difference between what still permeates the consciousness of the leading classes and what permeates the consciousness of the proletarian.

Dear attendees, you have to experience these things as they happen in the striving proletariat itself. If I may interject something personal here: I remember very clearly a scene with all its details, which I experienced in this area, among others, when I stood at the lectern at the same time as Rosa Luxemburg, who recently died so tragically. It was precisely in this scene that the deep gulf became apparent to me, which exists and must widen more and more between the leading classes and the storming proletariat. As a member of the ruling class, you could be well convinced of what modern science teaches about man, you could theoretically be a free thinker, you could even theoretically be an atheist, but in terms of what lived in the feelings, you were part of a life context and wanted to remain in it , even if one was a natural scientist like Vogt or a scientific-psychological researcher like Büchner, for example, wanted to remain in it, despite all theoretical-scientific conviction, in what was a life context that was truly not determined by modern science, but by old world view impulses. In this respect, science seemed theoretically convincing, but there was no sense of entitlement in the soul to be completely hollowed out by this science. The modern proletarian is different. I remember exactly the words that Rosa Luxemburg spoke about science and the workers at the time, how she made it clear to the workers that the newer scientific way of thinking had finally enlightened man in a true way, how man now knows that he does not have his origin close to angels or any spiritual beings, but that he has his origin in the fact that he once moved indecently while climbing trees, and other such things. “Of such origin,” she said, ”to such origin man goes back, and whoever considers this must admit to himself what an enormous prejudice there is in all the differences in rank, in all the differences in class, within human society. From such an explanation of man as man, from such a placing of man in the natural order, not in a spiritual world order, something quite different followed for the proletarian than for the member of the bourgeois class. That gave the modern proletarian his soul's imprint. That made him what he actually is.

Do not tell us, esteemed attendees, how many proletarians there are who occupy themselves with such things. How far removed from the proletarian question of bread and that of status is what touches on such questions of world view! If you say this, then you only testify to how little you know about the reality of the proletarian movement. No matter how uneducated the individual proletarian may be in the eyes of the ruling class, no matter how little he may have heard of the things I have just mentioned – within the proletarian class he is so organized that a thousand threads lead from the perhaps few people who know, a thousand threads lead from such things to him. And the most radical actions and measures that today frighten the leading circles, which come from the proletariat, are really connected with the intellectual direction and intellectual character that the proletariat has acquired.

Thus the proletarian question is, in one of its aspects, more than one might think, a spiritual question. But it is not only a spiritual question. It is, in the second place, what one might call a legal question. For something else happened at the same time that modern technology and modern capitalism were developing. There was a certain orientation of human interests towards state life.

What happened there is also often misunderstood today. History, as it is taught, is actually just a kind of fable convenue. People today imagine that the state was more or less as it is today throughout the whole of history. But that is not the case. What is important in state life today has actually only emerged in the last four centuries. It has emerged because the ruling class in the state was able to see something that served their interests. The state has emerged as an instrument for the ruling classes to realize what they call their rights. And the consequence of this was that the ruling, the leading classes in the state sought to realize what they called their rights. One can trace it historically, how property rights, how other rights have gradually emerged through the fact that more and more the leading classes of humanity linked their interests with state life.

But the worker was called to the machine, was put into the factory, was harnessed into soulless capitalism. For him, one right remained unrealized in the realization of rights in modern state life. And this unrealized right was one of the strongest impulses of the modern social movement. This unrealized right arose from the fact that the corresponding right did not arise because the worker was completely placed in mere economic life, in mere external economic existence, in that which only expresses itself in the production, circulation and consumption of goods. And within this economic existence, it turned out that an important factor in the production of goods, even in the modern technical sense, was human labor! What has become of this human labor? This human labor itself became a commodity. Others, who had objective commodities, offered them on the commodities market; the commodities were bought, are bought. The worker has nothing to sell but his labor. And this labor power took on the character of a commodity. Just like other commodities, it was subject to the law of supply and demand. The modern proletarian learned this, and it penetrated deep into his soul: the awareness that it is indeed degrading to know that a part of yourself is a commodity within the human social order.

What this impulse means can be understood, honored attendees, when you have seen time and again how it struck the hearts of the proletarians. For example, what flowed into their souls from Marxism and similar socialist beliefs, where it was made clear to them that their labor power had become an ordinary commodity through the modern capitalist mode of production. The proletarian understood this from his own life. But in him the social question is expressed in its true form in a second point, in a second link. Admittedly, the modern proletarian believes that it is quite understandable that modern economic life has turned his labor power into a commodity, and he even believes that the further development of this economic life will in turn take away the character of the commodity from his labor power. But this belief is vain. This belief is only on the surface of consciousness. In the depths of his soul, the proletarian feels something else. In the depths of his soul, he feels that this labor question is nothing more than a continuation of what is expressed within humanity on the way from slavery through serfdom to the modern proletariat, which has to market its labor power.

In other times, you could buy the whole person as a slave. Then the time when you could buy less of the person, but still a good deal of him within economic life, is during serfdom. In more recent times, within the capitalist economic system, you can only buy the labor force, but the whole person has to go along when you buy his labor. The whole person thereby comes into a dependency on the one who gives him the work that he perceives as degrading. And one can only show understanding for this matter if one realizes that in this question about human labor, we are now dealing with a legal issue.

I said earlier that the worker has been neglected. His labor law has not been realized in modern state life. He was thrown into economic life, and it was out of economic life that the relationship between his labor and the other factors of human society was shaped.

More and more, the urge took hold in the unconscious to break out of this economic life, to break out and carry oneself into another realm where the question of labor is not a mere economic question, where it becomes a legal question. This is actually inherent in the question of labor: the transformation of labor from an economic factor into a legal factor. This is the true form of the second classification of the social question.

The third area can be seen in its true form by looking at economic life itself. This economic life is humanly marred by the fact that not only do goods separate from people circulate in it, but also human labor power is remunerated in it like a commodity. As a result, in modern economic life there is not only objective commodity that is subject to exchange, there are people who are separated from the rest of humanity because they have to be determined in their entire will, in all their soul impulses, by this economic life. To tear it away from the human being, to place it on its foundation, to place it on the foundation on which it then has a mere commodity-circulation character: that is the third area of the social question in its true form.

And so you see that the social question actually has three core issues, and can be broken down into three parts: the first part is a spiritual question, the second part is a legal question, and the third part is an economic question. These three parts of social life, these three core issues must be taken into account if one is to gain any kind of insight into the modern social movement.

This attitude can only arise if we consider the following. Our time is already in a serious crisis of human development. And something of this crisis is evident in the following: social life - of course there was social life in the past as well. But people placed themselves in this social life in such a way that they took certain thoughts for granted, which brought them into a relationship from person to person. This is now beginning to change. It actually began to change a long time ago. The necessity arises that a feeling arises in each individual human being of how he or she stands within the entire social organism. And it will become necessary for something of this feeling to be incorporated into our education, into our school system.

People find it very difficult to adapt their way of thinking to such things. Nevertheless, people will have to learn to feel more and more drawn to these things. Today, of course, you are only considered an educated person if you know the four types of arithmetic, at least to a certain extent, and if you are not illiterate. You have to have a certain amount of education if you want to be considered a real person in the right sense; but you can be seized very little by the feeling of being inside a social organism, like a single human limb is inside a natural human organism. Feelings will have to be developed like rules, like the truths of the multiplication table, in the future human being – feelings of how the spiritual life, the legal life, and the economic life express themselves in the social organism. There is more to this than is usually thought. Therein lies the actual, purely human side of the social question.

When the social organism is discussed today, one often gets the impression that there is something like a last remnant of medieval superstition in all this talk about the social organism. This medieval superstition comes to the fore in a certain scene in the second part of Goethe's Faust, where Wagner is preparing the homunculus in the laboratory, wants to prepare the homunculus from mere abstract human ideas, from natural ingredients.

Goethe deals with medieval alchemical superstition in his own way. Of course, modern enlightened humanity does not believe in medieval alchemy; but it does not know that it has often transferred such superstition to a different area. What is being attempted today with regard to the social organism, the social being, with all kinds of socialist theories, and what is sought in what the medieval alchemist does in “Faust” by artificially to create a living being, a human being, artificially, that which is striven for as a social organism, out of all kinds of principles, out of all kinds of impulses, one would also have to say of that: it is artificially conceived. The principle of allowing something to become self-sustaining and natural, of merely giving it the opportunity to become viable, must underlie it – this feeling must become part of humanity with regard to the social organism. People must learn to recognize that one does not have to think theoretically: How should one go about creating a social order? – but that one has to promote reality, through which this social order can continuously be realized.

Those of you who are present today and who approach the study of the social organism from this point of view will find that, as a result of the developments that have taken place over the last few centuries, and particularly during the 19th century, the three limbs of this social organism, each of which requires a certain degree of independence in order to function, have been welded together, so to speak. The best way to understand this is to draw a comparison. But it should not be a scientific gimmick, just a comparison, between the social organism and the natural human organism. I pointed out the truth on which this is based in my last book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Mysteries of the Soul). Today, we have already progressed so far scientifically that what I am about to say can be fully asserted, even if the scientific scholars themselves do not yet recognize it, but they will come to recognize it. The system of the natural human organism actually consists of three parts. One of these is what we can call the nerve-sense system, which encompasses the processes that take place in the nerves and senses. The second link in the natural human organism is what I would call the rhythmic system, which encompasses the activity of the lungs and heart and everything connected with them. And the third system is the metabolic system, which is often perceived as the coarsest, most materialistic system in the human organism.

These three systems of the human organism are not fully centralized; each has a certain independence and each also stands independently in a certain relationship to the outside world. The nervous-sensory system through the senses; the rhythmic system through the respiratory organs; the metabolic system through the nutritional organs. These three organ systems open independently to the outside world.

As I said, not to play a scientific game of analogy, but only to make myself understood, I point out these three independent links of the human organism. The nervous-sensory system has a certain independence, and it is precisely because of this that it can be properly presented and supported by the respiratory and rhythmic systems, which in turn function independently and are connected to the outside world independently. If everything in the human organism were centralized in a single point, the human organism could not exist in the perfect harmony in which it exists. What nature has made of the human organism, a three-part system with three relatively independent individual areas, must become, out of the impulses of modern times, the healthy social organism. Until now it has been so instinctively. Man must work towards it consciously, and every single person must build this healthy social organism. But this requires that we recognize that the welding together of three links in the one state life must cease. And here we touch on one of those attempts at a solution that bears the sole character of a reality thinking, one of those attempts at a solution that present-day humanity in particular thinks least of all. What matters is that one can first bring about in the social organism, by making it viable – but one can only do that by letting certain things drift apart again, which have drifted together over the last four centuries as a result of historical impulses.

The situation is as follows. Initially, the leading classes, through the interests that pushed them towards the state, also drew the spiritual life into this state. The state has increasingly extended its power over the spiritual life. The social entity and many other branches of the spiritual life have been included in the sphere of the state. But anyone who is familiar with the spiritual life, esteemed attendees, its inner structure, anyone who knows what should be at work in this spiritual life if it is to sustain the soul, knows that this soul-sustaining, true reality impulse of the spiritual life must dwindle more and more as the external power of the state makes use of it. Spiritual life can only fully fulfill man if it is based on the direct individual freedom of man, on the free initiative of each individual, on the talents and abilities of each individual. One should not recoil from the thought that spiritual life must be drawn out of the sphere of the state so that it can develop through its own forces.

The modern proletariat is not aware of this – but the very longing that drove it is in fact there in the depths of its soul, in the unconscious depths of its soul: for a liberated spiritual life! Only when this spiritual life is released from the state organism, when it is left to its own devices, will it again have the power to push forward, to push forward through the free initiative of the human being, through the connection of the deepest, innermost interests with the spiritual life, which is necessary to answer the question inwardly to the human being: What do I know as a human being? A spiritual life that is detached from the external state, which in turn is intertwined with the economic and legal life, such a spiritual life will not be materialistic. The state has materialized science. The state has externalized spiritual life. An internalized spiritual life is capable of making a completely different personality out of the proletarian.

This is the first key point in the attempts to solve the social question, even if today the proletarian does not yet know it, he longs for the development that he needs and that he has not been able to receive, even though he has longed for it in this time when he was first put into the factory, in a comprehensive way.

Dear attendees, but then, when intellectual life has been removed from the actual political state, the state will be left with the actual legal life. And it will then be pushed to prove its competence, so to speak. It will then realize that it must be the stronghold of justice. Then the tendency will also arise, just as on the one hand spiritual life has been pushed out of the sphere of the state, economic life has been pushed out, which has also been pushed into the state by the ruling class, they started with the larger transport institutions: post, telegraph, railways and so on, which have become nationalized, socialized. They went further and further. And the modern proletariat wants to draw the final consequences, wants to nationalize everything, and is only imitating what it has received as an inheritance from the bourgeoisie. At the moment when, so to speak, intellectual life has been freed from the sphere of the state, the state itself will realize that it must also push economic life out of itself in the other direction. Then the State will have its own sphere and there will be three constituent parts of a healthy social organism. The first of these, considered relatively, is the life of the State, the public life of the State, and the second is the rounded-off, self-contained economic life, endowed with real substance and having its own laws, just as the life of the law and the life of the spirit have their own laws. Completely independent impulses rest in these three areas. Economic life is completely dominated by what man needs in his everyday and other higher life. Economic life must be built on the satisfaction of needs. And a peculiarity of economic life, ladies and gentlemen – it is a pity that I cannot expand on these things, but time is pressing – a special character of economic life is expressed in that what circulates in economic life must be suited to the most appropriate consumption. Everything that is produced in economic life wants to be consumed in the appropriate way. And if it is not consumed, then it has missed its goal. But if that is the case, then human labor must not be harnessed in this economic life; for it must not be completely consumed, it must be preserved for that which man wants to be as a being that enters the whole world situation in a lawful way. This human being must be able to draw something from mere economic life, must not be completely consumed in economic life. What each person must draw from this economic life is the relationship itself from person to person, and the working relationship is no different than that from person to person in the realm of the political state, which, alongside economic life, is the second link in the healthy social organism. Here it is not interest that is at work, as in economic life, but right. What makes man equal to man. The law before which all men must be equal in a certain respect is at work. But this right can only take effect on human labor power if the consequence, if the destiny of human labor is not regulated by economic processes, but when it is regulated by law; just as other rights must be the subject of the political state, which is separate from economic and intellectual life, so must labor law be decided within this separate political state, not within economic life. And so it will have to be that in a healthy organism the independent economic life will develop, a life that is built on the interests and needs of man, and that will live itself out primarily in associations that are built for the present regulation of consumption and production and other things that are present in economic life. The state, public law, which no longer wants to be an economist, will develop with real matter-of-factness in a healthy social organism. The development dreamt of by the proletariat must take precisely the opposite course and institutions; the state must be separated and excluded from economic life. The state must develop a single public law.

And the third area must be the free spiritual life, which can be built only on human freedom and human talent. Just as the state can only be built on the law, and the economy can only be built on the interest, just as no human organism can survive healthily if the head wants to take over the functions of the lung and heart system or the metabolic system, so no healthy social organism can survive in the future if these three elements are mixed up. They will only support and sustain each other in the right way if each stands independently. Therefore, a relative independence of the three characterized parts must be demanded. If I may express myself this way: the spiritual life must form its administrative body, its law-giving body, out of its own laws. In the state area of law, a democratic order will have to prevail. There the relationship between people will be regulated. But this state system must in turn have its own legislative and administrative body. And the entire social structure of this economic life will arise out of the associations of economic life.

But these three members will, so to speak, each be sovereign in their own right, just as sovereign states stand side by side and are accountable to each other, in order to enter into a relationship with each other similar to that between the three characterized member systems of the human natural organism.

Perhaps today one is somewhat astonished when looking at such a solution to the social question. But, dear ladies and gentlemen, the way of thinking that is presented here is not based on theory but on reality. It does not ask: How should we think in order to solve this or that social problem? Instead, it asks: How should human coexistence be shaped so that people can solve the social question from within, through their own feelings, thoughts and will?

No human being can solve the social question from a one-sided economic life, nor from a one-sided state life, nor from a one-sided spiritual life. Because this social question is not something that has arisen in the world today and will be solved tomorrow - the social question has come to stay. The social question has entered the life of the human soul and will now always be there. Therefore, it will have to be solved again and again. The situation will arise more and more that economic life consumes the human being, that the human being must save himself again, must make himself independent of economic life in order to restore in the state legal life that which is consumed by him in economic life. Just as something is consumed in the human nervous system, which is always restored by the lung-heart system. What is important is not to penetrate one area with the other, but to ensure that these areas stand side by side and thus have the right effect on each other. We must strive for a certain state of the social organism, through which this social organism will become viable.

I have only been able to sketch out what actually follows from the world view represented here; but everything I have said can be scientifically substantiated in full detail today, and it is to be carried out in all its details for the entire life of the social organism. It must be clearly understood that the questions to be considered are not to be solved by one or other side gaining a view on this or that from its deliberations, but that the questions are to be solved by the fact that, on the one hand, economic life is there and produces something that, on the other hand, needs a counteraction through spiritual and legal channels. This does not offer a way out of the social confusions of the present that can bring a solution tomorrow; but it does offer a way out that can make the social organism viable in the future.

One would like to say: what has been discussed here was already instinctive in the souls of modern people when, in the eighteenth, at the end of the eighteenth century, the great, powerful impulses of the French Revolution were heard, clothed in the words: liberty, equality, fraternity. On the one hand, there was already an awareness of what needed to be done to heal the social organism; on the other hand, there was still confusion and the chaotic idea of realizing all of this in a centralized state. Then, clever people of the nineteenth century often wondered how these three impulses, which expressed themselves as freedom, equality and fraternity, could be reconciled with each other in real life. And some extraordinarily astute ideas emerged in the course of the nineteenth century with regard to this. For example, people of great acumen have said: freedom entails that man creates out of his individuality, out of his personality, letting everything that is peculiar to him come to light; he cannot be completely equal to another. Equality contradicts freedom. And on the other hand, fraternity cannot easily be reconciled with mere equality, and so on.

What is the basis for this? The basis is that the true meaning of these three impulses of freedom, equality and fraternity can only come to light not in a one-sided centralized social organism, but only in a healthy threefold social organism. This healthy threefold social organism will have its three relatively independent limbs. That which lives itself out in the realm of spiritual life will be built on freedom, on the individual freedom initiative of human talent and ability. There freedom will be able to be realized, as in the natural organism, in the head, thus in the nervous-sense system, one thing is realized, in another system another. In the actual political state member of the healthy social organism, the equality of all people as human beings will be realized. And in the third link, in the economic link of the healthy social organism, fraternity will be realized. Even if this social organism is constantly being recreated from day to day as a threefold entity, it will be able to live because this threefoldness will then live as a further unity in freedom, equality and fraternity.

All that I have said shows perhaps one thing, dear attendees; it shows that many people today have ideas about the social problem that differ greatly from a real understanding of the social problem through the modern necessity of life. I believe there is still little understanding of this social question, as I have characterized it to you today, which is taken from life itself. For this requires not only that one admits that this or that aspect of the situation must be changed, but that many things in human thinking itself must be changed. If the social movement is to be healthy, one must be willing not only to change things, but also to rethink and relearn. And the facts of the present speak loudly, and for some people they are so shocking that one must indeed relearn. How could we not have to relearn, after it has been shown that what we thought we had learned over decades, over more than half a century, proves to be so unfruitful when we consider history with regard to the social movement, when we consider the facts themselves! Do not the facts show that they demand something completely different from what we have prepared for? Do not these facts demand that we change?

Now, dear ones, anyone who points to this fact will say that it would be necessary for the gap that has opened up between the classes, and about which there is hardly any understanding today, to close; but one thing is necessary: that souls open up, that hearts open and seek such understanding.

But this understanding must go so far as to want to penetrate into the essence of a healthy social organism, to want to penetrate into the essence of such a feeling that tells the human being: I do not place myself worthily in the social organism if I do not empathize with what happens in the threefold social organism.

If we then look at how very different what arises from the observation of real life as an attempt to solve the social question is from what many people imagine such attempts to be, if we look at this correctly, we will, when we realize on the other hand what the loud-speaking facts are like, that is, if he turns his attention to the loud-speaking facts, he will say to himself: Indeed, effort is necessary today, indeed, overcoming the mental discomfort of some feelings and inability to will is necessary today if one wants to gain a position corresponding to a fact in the social life of this present. But perhaps such a person will also be able to think something else: the solution, the real solution to the social question, cannot be found by excluding the human spirit, by excluding the human soul. It must be found not only in the economic life that takes place from person to person, but also in the harmony of souls. If it is not understood in time that such harmony of souls, such socialization of souls, must be striven for through a greater deepening than that sought so far, then it could be, dearest present, that through the misjudgment of the most important facts, it will happen that not social understanding, not social feeling, but the wildest instincts of humanity will assert themselves. And we see a current of development in the present already on this path. This current of development could stand admonishingly before man in spirit and say to him: Today, everyone is basically obliged to take a look at the key points of the social question, because it depends on each individual whether the social organism will become viable as soon as possible or not. And in this field one can only do right if one loses no time in seeking understanding of that which alone can bring healing, that alone can bring a way out of and into chaos. One must feel this: Today, in relation to the social question, different things are necessary for each individual than humanity imagined was necessary just a short time ago. From this insight into the necessity that exists, may everyone sufficiently deepen their thinking and feeling with regard to social life, otherwise wild instincts could take the place of possibilities for understanding, and then, dear attendees, it would be too late.

Dear attendees! The events unfolding today in the field of the social movement, which are alarming for some, seem to truly lead people who observe them to a new language, a language that is unfamiliar compared to everything that has been experienced in the course of human history. In view of what is coming to the surface today from the depths of social life, must we not conclude that, despite the fact that what is called the social question has been in the making in humanity for more than half a century, the thoughts and will impulses of people are actually quite poorly prepared for what is being expressed in facts today? For decades, anyone who has had the opportunity to gain access to the real social movement has very often had the opportunity to notice how socialist thinkers, those thinkers who, with all their hearts, believe they are in line with the proletarian will , how such thinkers repeatedly pointed out that the economic facts themselves, which have emerged in the development of people through modern technology and capitalism, that these economic facts themselves, through their own progression, will, as it were, bring about something like a solution to the social question. If I am to briefly indicate what was thought there, it is something like the following:

The spread of economic life, with the division of labor and everything else that goes with it, has all led to the fact that the private capitalist economy has gradually been concentrated in the hands of a few, and that ever larger and larger masses of the proletariat have been harnessed to this will of a few. It was hoped that that which had so to speak extended an economic power over the proletariat would be driven to the point where it would destroy itself, as it would to a certain extent no will be able to advance on its own path, and where the proletariat, as I said, will be in a position, through the development of economic facts, to take power into its own hands, which it was previously dominated by. From radical revolutionary views, which played a role in this direction in earlier times, one has moved on to more reformist ones, through which it was expected that the gradual transition of economic power from the capitalist enterprise to the proletarian enterprise itself would take place through the measures that could be brought about by the proletariat within the regulated life of the state. So, to a certain extent, it was thought that objective facts independent of people would bring about a certain crisis, and with this crisis a certain solution to the social question.

Do we not already see clearly today that it has become different, that all thoughts that have moved in this direction actually miss the point? Do we not see that it is now the proletarian as such, with his will, with his demands, who is bringing about the facts that are now, as I said, appearing on the horizon of historical life in such a frightening way for many people? Does this not force us to look at proletarian life and to demand that we should no longer allow ourselves to be beguiled by what has been regarded as the right thing for decades by the doctrine?

In the lectures that I have recently been allowed to give on this question, I have already pointed out that these present facts, above all, force us to direct our consideration of the social question to the realm of the proletarian himself. And I have already stated why the proletarian has become what he actually appears today. What is the position of the proletariat, with its desires, its impulses, its demands, in the light of the present situation? Is it not that of a powerful criticism of world history, of that which the leading circles of humanity have hitherto regarded as correct and have made the basis and guiding principle of their actions? A criticism that could not be expressed in words is expressed by this criticism, which simply lives in the characteristics and actions of the present proletariat.

This present proletariat sees itself harnessed into pure economic life by the economic process that has been looming for a long time. And again I must emphasize, for the sake of the context, what I have already discussed in the earlier lectures, that in that this modern proletariat finds itself harnessed into bare economic life with its entire destiny, it above all, in the deepest sense, as unworthy of it that the proletarian's labor power for this present economic life means the same as the commodity that is brought to market, the circulation of which is regulated according to supply and demand, and which can be bought. However things may be expressed, even by socialist thinkers in this field, the feelings that prevail among the proletariat, that which lives in the unconscious depths of the proletarian soul, is much more important than that which is consciously thought and expressed. And these feelings are as follows: How is it possible, within the capitalist economic order, to divest the human labor power that the proletarian has to offer on the market and that can be bought, of the character of a commodity?

By stating this, attention is drawn to the first link in today's social question, to the extent to which this social question is an economic question, to what extent it is a wage question. Now, anyone who has learned over the decades not just to think about the proletariat, but to think with the proletariat, knows how the Marxist doctrine, which pointed out to the proletarians with particular intensity how their labor power as a commodity is integrated into the economic process, has taken hold. One must refer again and again to the illumination that Karl Marx has given to this matter, since this illumination lives on intensely in the faith and perception of the proletariat. The capitalist, within today's economic system, is the one from whom the proletarian worker sees how he is called to the factory, how he is called to the machine, how he is paid for his labor.

Marx then tried to make the following clear to the proletarians. He tried to show them that the proletarian's labor is actually essentially underpaid. This labor power must be continually produced by the food and other means of subsistence that the proletarian needs. If the proletarian is able to obtain food and other means of subsistence, then he can restore his labor power that has been expended in the economic process, and then he can perform his work. This leads to the situation – or so the view goes – that the employer pays the worker what is necessary to produce this labor, but that he lets him work far beyond the time that would be necessary to earn what is necessary to produce this labor. This is how the added value arises, which, as I said, had such a profound effect on the proletarians' perceptions. The worker produces for the entrepreneur. He produces more than the entrepreneur compensates him for. And what he produces more is the entrepreneur's profit. Achieving this added value by changing the economic process has become the ideal of proletarian endeavor.

Now, esteemed attendees, the opinions that have been formed about these matters, in both bourgeois and non-bourgeois circles, basically all point in the same direction. These opinions all suggest that proletarian labor for the production of goods must itself necessarily be treated as a commodity. In the face of this, one is indeed compelled to look deeper into economic life and to ask oneself the question: Is there perhaps something quite different at the bottom of it all than what proletarians and non-proletarians believe? Has this part of the social question been grasped correctly at all? The development of the facts, which the present shows, proves that this cannot be the case, that the matter has been grasped correctly. If we examine the matter more closely, we see that the economic process must necessarily be exhausted by the production, circulation, and consumption of commodities.

We may ask: What is it that actually gives this economic process its laws? What does what happens in the economic process depend on? Nevertheless, everything that happens in the economic process comes down to human needs and interests, however it is disguised. Everything that happens in the economic process boils down to the production of what is demanded by human needs and, as a result, consumed by people. And every view of what a commodity is, my dearest present, proves to be false in the face of a real economic study; every other view, except the one that regards the commodity as that which acquires its value by being consumed in the most expedient way [by] human society, by man in general. It is through the most expedient use that the commodity acquires its value. And everything that is the exchange of the commodity in the economic process is determined precisely by this. The mutual values of the commodities can only depend on the extent to which these commodities are consumed.

Anyone who now delves into this fundamental character of the commodity within the economic process will realize something that unfortunately many people have not realized: that human labor power is something that cannot be compared at all with what a commodity is, and that therefore, because it cannot be compared in real terms, because there is no relationship between labor power and a commodity, it cannot be a commodity. A strange contradiction, isn't it? On the one hand, one must actually recognize that human labor power is quite incomparable to a commodity and therefore cannot be exchanged for one; on the other hand, one sees that within today's economic order, proletarian labor power has truly become a commodity. What is the basis for this contradiction of life? This contradiction of life is based on the fact that the employee cannot actually buy the labor power from the worker. And by believing that he can buy it, one is labouring under a great fallacy. It is a fundamental economic fallacy that expresses itself in the belief that one can buy human labour at all. In reality, one does not buy it. What does the employer buy from the employee? In truth, the employer buys the services from the employee. The goods produced by the employee and the value of these goods are determined by their relation to other goods on the labor market. And the real fact of the matter is that the employer does not pay at all for the goods produced by the employee, that he, as a result of today's economic process, so to speak, evades payment – one can put it so radically – and that he pays for something else that, in principle, should never be paid for within the human social order because it can never be a commodity: he pays for labor. And he pays for this labor to the extent that he is able to do so, in that he holds the economic power, that he can, so to speak, exert a compulsion on the employee, that this employee, in order to live, goes to the machine, goes to the factory.

Thus we have the fact, the serious and significant fact, that something in our economic life has shifted, that something is being hidden, concealed. The fact is hidden that in reality one buys goods from the employee or purchases services, but evades the payment for this purchase, that is, one does not actually buy them, but forces the worker to give them up voluntarily in return for something else. By feeling like today's proletarian, he feels that his existence is degrading. And we will never be able to properly penetrate the souls of the modern proletariat if we are unable to see the matter in this way, if we are unable to rise to the view that a commodity must be consumed in the most expedient way if it is to serve the economic process in the right way. When proletarian labor power is commodified, it must take on the character of the commodity, that is, it must be consumed in the economic process. In this way, the human being is consumed, and it is in this mere consumption that proletarian man perceives what is degrading about it.

But how is it possible that such a concealment, that such a masking of the facts has actually occurred? Here again, proletarians and non-proletarians in the present day are not at all in agreement. What must be seen in this area is that the integration of human labor into the social process, into the coexistence of human beings, cannot be a question of economic life at all, that what regulates this labor must be taken out of the economic process.

This brings us to what is so necessary for the recovery of the social organism, and to being able to shed light on the damage caused by the fact that the social organism, in its own structure, is not understood in the right way. This social organism is viewed as if it were a unified, centralized structure. This view is just as wrong as it would be wrong to believe – as I have already pointed out in earlier lectures – that the human natural organism is a single centralized system. This centralized natural organism has, for example, the processes of rhythmic life, of breathing and of the heart, and the processes of the sensory-nervous system, in addition to the processes of metabolism. All of this is merely centralized in one place – and it works, each with a certain independence and serves the other precisely through its independence. The lungs take in air from the outside, quite independently of what is going on in the processes of the sensory nervous system and in the processes of metabolism. But it is precisely because these organs are independent that they harmonize best with each other. With regard to the social organism, such a consideration has not yet been reached. The necessary relationship between all economic aspects of social organization and all legal aspects has not yet been recognized.

In more recent times, it has become apparent that, to begin with, the leading classes have, as they say, nationalized certain branches of economic life. It has been deemed right and in the interest of human progress to nationalize, or one might say socialize, such branches of economic life as the postal service, the telegraph, the railways and the like. In doing so, they added further branches of this economic life to those already previously administered by the state. The leading and governing circles were the first to take this step of socializing economic life. But they were followed along this path by the views of the proletarian circles and their leaders. And today, what is being thought in this [area] comes to a head in the demand for the total socialization of the entire economic life. Thus, the proletariat is only drawing the final conclusion of what the leading circles have begun and which they have indeed limited according to their advantage. But if it were to be realized, the entire social organism would become a unified, centralized system. This is detrimental to its health. If it is to be healthy, it must be just as internally structured as the natural human organism. For just as air enters the natural human organism to be further processed in that natural human organism in a completely different way, in a completely different way than the food that enters the metabolism, so too must that which lies in the legal life, what is effective in the legal life, in the system of public rights, must enter the social organism in a completely different way than that which is in the economic life and leads to the production of goods, to the circulation of goods and to the consumption of goods.

What is the basis of economic life? As I have already pointed out, it is human interest. The laws that serve human interest must be realized in economic life. In this process, one person is always confronted with another person, depending on their interests: the consumer with the producer, one professional group with another, and so on. In a healthy social organism, alongside what takes place purely as a result of the effect of human interests, another element of this social organism must exist: the element in which the life of public law unfolds. This life of public law is based on human impulses that develop in a completely different, radically different way than impulses that lie in human needs and lead to the economic process. That which expresses itself as a need in human life and leads to the economic process arises from the elementary nature of human nature and the human soul. This is something that does not directly depend on man as such.

The situation is different with law, with everything that can be established as public law through the coexistence of people. This law is formed in a similar way to human language itself. Human needs are there by nature, insofar as they intervene in economic life. Human law, which has to do with the relationship from person to person, must, insofar as you are human, must ignite in the direct intercourse from person to person, as language is formed, or at least formed, in the intercourse from person to person. While political economy is concerned with the relationship between circles of interests, what is the life of public law is concerned with relationships that may take place only between human and human, independently of everything else. Relationships must be justified by the law, by which man feels himself within human society, worthy only as a human being. Such legal impulses cannot arise out of economic life itself. If such legal impulses were to be formed out of economic life itself, then they would always be only a transformation of economic interests. However you imagine the state or human society, or however you want to call it, to be formed, if rights are established in it according to economic interest, then these rights will only be the expression of revelation, only the transformation of economic interests. Just as little can arise from the economic organism that is present in the legal system as can arise from the metabolism that is present in the respiratory process.

What is important, dear attendees, is not that it goes without saying that people who are involved in economic life know what rights between people are, but rather that, in addition to the independent economic life in a healthy social organism, an equally independent legal life must arise, which, precisely because of its relative independence, can in turn intervene in the economic life in just the right way.

Nothing has shown more forcefully that this is a necessity than the relationship in which human labor power has been incorporated into the modern economic process. To understand this, one need only realize what is meant here by public law. In the economic process, one is concerned only with goods, the exchange of goods, and so on. The economic process does not include, for example, the ownership relationship; the ownership relationship belongs in the legal sphere. Why? What does it actually mean if I am the owner, say, of a piece of land? It means that the human institutions within which I live have been established in such a way that I alone have the right to use that land in the economic process. This is a right to this land; this is a right that is quite different from what can take place according to the laws of the economic process. And so one could cite many things that would define the opinion one must have about the difference between the actual economic life and the legal life.

Human labor power, by its very nature, because it is incomparable to the commodity, as I have discussed, does not belong in economic life, but in legal life. Today, there is a lot of talk about the socialization of economic life. The only question, dear attendees, is whether this socialization can really be achieved with the means and ways in which we are trying to achieve it today. What matters is not that we have this or that view based on certain human demands, but that we can also realize them, that they make the life of the social organism possible.

It is not considered that everything that can develop in an independent life of public law must have a social character from the outset, that it works from the outset towards socialization, towards the socialization of human society. And only when this public law is not brought about by the pure relationship between human beings, not brought about from the elementary sense of right itself, but from political or economic power, then it bears not a social character, but an anti-social character. The rights that we have in today's social body largely bear this anti-social character, because they do not serve to establish a relationship between people that arises from the elementary sense of right and wrong, but rather they serve to offer advantages to one class or another, to one profession or another, and so on.

In a healthy social organism, the relationship between employer and employee must not be based on an economic relationship, but must be based on a legal relationship. The relationship between employer and employee with regard to the labor force must be established not within the economic process, not within the institutions that are established within the economic process, but in a separate legal organism. This has certainly already been attempted in the course of modern life with the establishment of trade unions and the like and employment certificates and the like. However, anyone who understands this modern life will know that all these are only surrogates for what the proletarian actually feels as his natural demand from the foundations of human nature. But, dear ladies and gentlemen, if you say that the relationship between employer and employee is a legal one, and in truly civilized countries it is based on a contract between employer and employee, then you are only obscuring the real facts. Of course, this contract is concluded, and a great deal is made of it; but what use is this contract in real life when it is concluded about something that should never be concluded about, according to the nature of the economic process and the legal process? According to the nature of the social organism, an employment contract can only be concluded about what the employee produces for the employer as goods. If it is concluded for the purpose of regulating the relationship between the employee's labor and the employer, then it is based on a false social foundation.

As you can see, esteemed attendees, one must look for things at much greater depths than one usually does today, otherwise one will increasingly encounter the objection: Yes, what you want is actually already there, that is already being striven for. But if it is pursued in the very wrong way, it destroys the healthy organism instead of contributing to its healing. Since human labor can never be compared to a commodity, it must be lifted out of the mere economic process and placed in the realm of the legal, and no contract should be made at all about it. It should be placed in human social life by means of quite different forces and impulses. Contracts that are concluded within the economic sphere between the person who manages the work and the person who does the work should relate only to the services. Then, if they were based on performance, the proletarian would be able to see how he actually stands within the economic process; then he would have an overview of what can flow from his own free will into his own upkeep from this economic process, and what is necessary for the upkeep of the entire social order. However strange it may still sound to people today, the worker would be in complete agreement with what is withdrawn from his own labor, from his work performance, for his own gain. Because he would reasonably understand: I must be part of the social organism, I must serve it, and I enter into a contract with the entrepreneur, by which I do not sell my labor, but through which what I achieve is regulated in a healthy way in the social organism.

What is important, dear attendees, in real life, is not that rights develop out of economic life, but rather that life itself is shared, so to speak, on the one hand economic life, on the other the legal life, that on the one hand people integrate themselves into the circumstances of economic life according to human interests, human needs and according to what must be produced afterwards, and that on the other hand they in turn lift themselves out of this mere economic process and can place themselves in such a human coexistence in which only the relationship between human being and human being plays a role. What matters is that we really separate these two areas in life, not just in thought, not just in institutions, but really separate them in life.

Therefore, when we speak of the recovery of the social organism today, we must also speak of the fact that, in addition to other needs, this healthy organism has, on the one hand, the economic body, which is concerned solely with the circulation of goods, and, on the other hand, the legal body. Both bodies have their own legislation and their own administration. The legislation and administration of the economic body arise out of the economic process of circulation, out of the needs of this process of circulation. What is determined by the legal body in relation to the relationship between people will arise out of quite different prerequisites. And one can say: the actual state life, which has to include the determination of public rights, security, what is called political in the narrower sense, and economic life – must stand side by side like sovereign states. They will best interact like the individual parts of the human organism when they are independent.

If this seems too complicated to you, dear attendees, then you should also remember that what really matters is not whether something seems complicated or not, but whether it is necessary for life; because life itself is complicated. As soon as legal life is distinguished in a healthy way from mere economic life, the socialization of the social organism occurs. For the legal life as such has an effect, proceeding from the democratic principle on which it must be based, socializing.

Of course, you may already believe that some of the things being tried are similar to what is being called for here. But anyone who delves deeper into the matter will find that the very thinking of today's world is moving in the opposite direction. A certain idolatry of the state is what has taken hold in all minds. That is why economic life and the state, political life and the economic process should become one.

As I said, in this point proletarians and non-proletarians do not see eye to eye. It is not a matter of drawing up a social program, but of realizing how human social life must develop so that out of this social life, through what people will do, the healthy will arise, the healthy will form. But in modern times, this healthy element has been resisted. Nationalization has become more and more popular. And those who wanted to retain control over their private economic lives sought at least some kind of support from the state, so that they could then use the state to further their private interests. Confusion, a merging of economic life with political life, which should be kept strictly separate for the healthy organism, has become the ideal for many.

The situation is similar with regard to intellectual life. Today, the social question is not only a unified one, but, in the sense that I have just tried to explain, it is first of all an economic question, because ways and means must be sought to lift labor out of the circulation of commodities in the social organism itself, through the right interaction of humanity. This social question is a legal question because it must first be comprehended in a comprehensive way as an independent legal life, which is precisely what will have a socializing effect. This independent legal life, of which we do not even have the beginnings today due to the course of recent history. But something similar must be said with regard to the intellectual life. In the last two lectures I have already indicated how deeply it actually intervenes in the proletarian question of the present, without proletarians and non-proletarians having the right ideas about it. And I have already pointed out one thing: Again and again, those who, as I said, do not think about the proletariat but with the proletariat, can hear from the proletariat itself or from the leaders of the proletariat: What is going on in intellectual life, everything artistic, everything religious, everything scientific, customs, law and so on, that is actually an ideology, that is not something that has its own independent reality in itself, but it is something that arises out of the economic process, which is, so to speak, a spiritual superstructure of the economic process, depending on the relationship between the economic classes in the historical course of humanity, depending on how they stand today, depending on the way in which the individual is connected to what he does in economic life, depending on that he forms ideas, artistic perceptions, religious beliefs. This economic, purely material life is reflected in these ideas and feelings. Indeed, they may in turn have an effect on economic institutions, arising from these ideas and feelings. But originally these ideas and feelings are rooted entirely in purely material economic life, they are merely its reflection. This is the fundamental conviction of the proletarian soul today. You can hear this over and over again, and it is encapsulated in the saying: All spiritual life is actually just an ideology. And you can see how this attitude towards spiritual life, arising from the proletariat's entire disposition, fills the proletarian soul, even if it does not yet realize this, but all of this takes place in subconscious concepts. You see, these things can actually only be learned from life. What has emerged, I would say, simultaneously with the development of modern technology and modern capitalism in the historical development of humanity, modern, scientifically oriented thinking, has a completely different effect on the members of the previously ruling class and on the proletarian. No matter how much the ruling classes may be inclined to say, “Oh well, the proletarian doesn't want what he demands out of some scientific way of thinking, but it's a bread question or something like that.” Of course it is also a bread question; but how this bread question comes to light depends on completely different things, it is by no means as banausically oriented as many members of the ruling circles believe. And it is true that at the time when a certain form of scientific orientation had taken hold of the intellectual life of people in the leading circles, it was precisely at that time that the worker was tied to the machine, to the factory, that he was torn out of other life contexts and had no other context. Because the bleak machine and soulless capitalism do not provide him with a sense of life. He was forced to answer the question, “What am I as a human being in the world and in social science?” from within himself. Then he turned his great trust, his boundless trust, to the leading circles and took from these leading circles, as his heritage, the scientific orientation. The proletarian was in a completely different situation from the members of the leading circles. These leading circles could easily turn to the modern science that provides good information about nature and the natural course of human development from the lowest living creature to today's perfect human being. But these leading circles did not need to ask themselves the question: How do I actually stand within human society if this is true about man? They had their old traditions, even if they no longer believed in these old traditions, even if they were or are free spirits, even if they are atheists. They are part of human society, as it has been formed, certainly not according to the principle of scientific orientation, but out of old religious, out of old social impulses that really have nothing to do with today's scientific orientation.

Yes, dear attendees, one can be a naturalist, a natural scientist like Büchner, one can be completely convinced that everything that happens is only in the natural order, but one will only come to a certain theoretical conviction for the head. With one's whole being, one is part of the human social order, the structure of which is conditioned in a completely different way than by such a scientific foundation. One must learn in life what it means that the bourgeois-oriented person can gain a scientific conviction through the scientifically oriented way of thinking. The proletarian, however, needs what religion gives the other person, and he demands that from the scientific orientation.

If you let life teach you, you can see the difference in how the scientific orientation speaks from the soul of the member of the previously leading circles, and how differently it enters into the soul of the proletarian when you speak to him of this fully scientific orientation, which is supposed to instruct him about his position as a human being among other human beings, as a human being in the world and in human society in general. Let me give you an example that could easily be multiplied a hundredfold, even if I have to go into the personal for a moment. I once stood on the same podium, directly in front of a rather large gathering of the Berlin proletariat, giving a speech together with Rosa Luxemburg, who recently met a tragic end. Rosa Luxemburg spoke to the proletarians about science and the workers. She spoke in her own simple and inspiring way. She spoke like someone who speaks in the spirit of modern scientific orientation. She made it clear to these people that it is a prejudice to believe that man descended from something angelic, that he was somehow rooted in a spiritual life of the distant past. No, she said, man was not such an angel in prehistoric times, man was not such an angel at all in the place of prehistoric man; he behaved most indecently by climbing like monkeys in trees, and from such beginnings he had raised himself to his present existence. This does not justify the distinctions that are made in the human order today, it justifies a completely different consciousness of man as man.

You see, dear attendees, this is something that the proletarian has heard over and over again. And when one speaks of the uneducated proletariat, one simply does not know what is going on in the proletarian movement. But this is also something that seizes his soul quite differently, seizes it with the power of a creed, than the soul is seized by the leading circles. One must look at it. And then one will be trained to reflect on where it actually comes from. Then one arrives at the following. Then one arrives at being able to answer the question of how it actually happened that, as I said, another thing developed at the same time as modern technology and modern capitalism. The other thing that has developed is that the earlier, relatively independent spiritual life has developed out of the instincts of humanity, which today, however, must be transformed into conscious impulses. The leading circles, whose interests were linked to the emerging state, were guided by these instincts. What we call the “state” today is actually only four centuries old. And it is a prejudice to believe that there have always been states in our sense in our historical development. The earlier development was something quite different. But with what has developed there, the interests of the leading, guiding circles have become connected. Only the interests of the modern proletariat have been excluded from this, they have simply been excluded by the modern economic process. The consequence of this was that just as individual circles and individual areas of economic life have been introduced into the state in modern times, so has intellectual life been introduced into the state, schools, secondary schools, universities; and efforts are being made to introduce more and more and more into this purely political life of the state.

What happened as a result? The state sucked out the spiritual life. And anyone who follows the process that took place here closely knows that not only did the administration and legislation of this spiritual life become dependent on the state, but the content of so-called science and the other branches of the spiritual life became very dependent on the state life of the circles that had previously been in charge. The state became the decisive factor for the impulses of humanity's intellectual activity. Therefore, the state had its interests represented by these intellectual powers. And the consequence of this was that what emerged in intellectual life now really became only a reflection, only a superstructure, of those interests that were connected with state life by the ruling circles. It is the truth that through an historical process, the spiritual life has become a reflection, a superstructure, an ideology at the time when the proletariat was excluded from participating in this state life. What could it want other than to participate in this state life like the other classes?

And so we see how this intellectual life – it can't just be mathematics, but it can be in other branches – has really become a mirror image of what is happening outside in purely political life according to the interests of the ruling circles. Perhaps especially in the present catastrophe of humanity one will already be able to see this for oneself. Anyone who has taken the trouble to follow the course of German history, culminating in this world war catastrophe, will be able to see quite well that what the scholars have told the people as “history” was only an expression of the various areas of the state will of the ruling powers. For I would like to ask the question: Will the history of the Hohenzollerns perhaps look the same in the future as it has done so far? It will very much reveal how it has so far been a reflection of what the leading circles wanted according to the powers they had. (Applause.) That is particularly striking in such an example. But these examples could be multiplied, where the corresponding thing may not be so radical, but perhaps all the more effective precisely because it is hidden.

The modern proletarian saw this, dear attendees. From this he formed the view that all intellectual life is merely a reflection, merely a superstructure of what is happening below in the real process. And since he was deprived of participation in political life, he formed the view that everything intellectual is only a reflection of the economic process as such.

Those who really have the opportunity, and even the ability, to penetrate these processes will come to the realization that, at the dawn of modern times, the proletariat great confidence in the leading circles, to accept from them as inheritance what had been developed in the intellectual life, [this germination, which became an unhappily soul-destroying inheritance]

And so it has come about that the modern proletarian has indeed been placed in circumstances that he, in his nature, perceives as inhumane, but that he still thinks today, continues to think about the circumstances in the same way as he has learned from the leading circles. In this regard, esteemed attendees, one makes the strangest experiences about human illusions. Those who know that the last consequences of bourgeois thinking are rampant in the proletarian soul and in the soul of thinkers who serve proletarian life know that it is necessary for the social question to be understood as a spiritual question in its third aspect as well. It will only be understood as a spiritual issue if the proletariat also experiences the fact that it will want to think differently from what it has learned from the leading circles in addition to everything else that it experiences in its soul.

This is perhaps not what one would expect if one looks more deeply into the events of recent history. Perhaps it will be even more terrible than what is happening today, for those who are frightened by such things, when not even the proletarians have come to the conclusion that they do not have to transform the conditions in which they feel unhappy, but that humanity has to rethink, to think differently about the conditions themselves. Then they will realize that what must be overcome is the modern scientific orientation, and that a new spiritual life must be accepted – a new spiritual life for which perhaps the proletarian, precisely because he can be the first to be disillusioned with the old, is being prepared in the right way. Perhaps he, the proletarian, is the right modern man, while the others cannot break away from that which is old tradition.

Now, one can, again, especially me – forgive me for mentioning something personal for a moment – one can perhaps make the objection to me in particular: Well, you usually speak of an intellectual life, you must think that is the right thing. Do you think that today's proletarians are more willing to accept this intellectual life than the bourgeois or other leading classes? I certainly do not believe that for the present time, for the facts clearly indicate the opposite. But in this respect, do the proletarians as proletarians judge at all? Have the proletarians become free enough to gain an inner judgment, a truly inner judgment? Have they not received the scientific orientation, the whole way of thinking of the inner man, from the leading circles? The ruling circles are opposed to this new spiritual life because they live in old traditions, and because the newer school of thought must radically break with the newer traditions with regard to the thinking, feeling and willing of man. And to be against it, the others have learned from these ruling circles – except for a few exceptions, of course. When the time comes that the proletarian realizes that the human soul must become desolate through the lack of a spiritual life, that something quite different is needed than a mere ideology, a mere reflection of purely material reality, then he will certainly not go back to the old world-view traditions; but he will need the realization of the connection between man and the spiritual world. This knowledge of the connection between man and the spiritual world can only be properly integrated into the social organism if a third element is added to the two already mentioned. This means that the developments of recent centuries, which have been pushed forward to a certain extent, must be reversed. what has been nationalized in the field of intellectual life is denationalized, when, alongside the independent economic body and the independent legal body, a third area of the social organism is the area of intellectual life, which is immediately freed from all other influences and impulses and is left to its own devices. It is only when it can arise out of free human initiative that the spiritual life can flourish and take hold of people. Of course, one can learn something when forced to do so by circumstances. But one cannot let the spirit take effect on one, experience the spirit as it can only truly be effective for human coexistence when the spirit is left to its own devices. And however strange it may sound to the thinking habits of today's people, we must strive for a time when not only the economic body receives its own legislation [and] administration from its own relationship, when not only the legal life receives its democratic structure from the relationship between human and man, but where the spiritual life is also completely independent of the economy and the state, purely on its own, so that it can only give the state and the economy even more good through its achievements, because it only develops them energetically in its own field.

I would say that people today still think very retrogressively about this matter. Above all, they think according to comfortable habits of thought. Time and again, the question is raised, also with regard to the spiritual part of the social question: what do the proletarians actually want? Are there not enough aspirations today? Are not all kinds of educational associations being founded here and there, lectures being given by the leading circles, and other educational opportunities being provided for the proletariat? Well, dear attendees, the proletariat may go to all of this. What does it receive there? It receives what it has received for centuries and what it perceives as an ideology, as a mere spiritual superstructure of the economic order, which it basically cannot use for the real development of its soul. One may well-intentionedly justify all of this, but it has no value for the recovery of the social organism. For the recovery of the social organism, it has value only if one turns to a school of thought that makes itself independent of the other two social fields, which is therefore suited to bring real spiritual life into the development of humanity.

What will be the consequence of this spiritual life also imprinting itself on the human being for his entire human existence and for the consciousness of his human dignity, so that it can be a real asset in life for him? The proletariat can only think of the intellectual life that has passed from the ruling circles to the proletariat as a legacy in the manner described, as being there more or less for the entertainment of the ruling circles. And finally, in most cases it is only there to serve these leading circles, for they have ultimately managed to form a closed society for themselves with their intellectual life. There is an abyss between what the members of the leading circles receive for themselves as art, religion, science, custom and even as law, and what those outside these leading circles, as proletarians, cannot understand at all, because it is born out of the mere impulses of the ruling circles, which are aimed at making these ruling circles a closed society.

Mutual understanding would only be possible if there were a common spiritual life. This common spiritual life can only develop on the basis of a socializing constitutional state that has been established from the economic body. And it can develop on the other side when there is complete emancipation from the other two powers, the spiritual life itself. For this spiritual life will have a completely different impact than what is regarded as the spiritual life today. And this spiritual life will be soul-bearing, will be able to fulfill man quite differently than religious views once fulfilled, to which the modern proletariat will certainly not return.

Thus the social question is indeed, in the most eminent sense, a spiritual question, ladies and gentlemen. What is needed is a yearning for a new spiritual life. And an attempt at a solution in this area can only come about by acquiring a sense of what such an independent new spiritual life wants to bring into humanity. Objections are always easy. You can start with the very lowest objections; you can say: No, let's free the school so that, firstly, its maintenance is based only on what people voluntarily give for it, then we will return to the age of illiteracy. We shall not do that, dearest attendees, nor will the highest studies suffer if they are freed from the other powers; but we will see how, precisely when this spiritual life is emancipated from the other powers, it will have the right effect on those people who are otherwise involved in economic or legal life. It will have an effect because they and those who lead them will then be aware that they are voluntarily leading to this spiritual life so that they can grow into the rest of the healthy social organism. What matters is not what one or the other wants today with regard to this healthy social organism, but what people will do when it is striven for, or when it is at least realized to a certain extent. People will then most certainly, let us say, for example, only admit to the administrative body of the constitutional state those who have a certain school education. And I really believe that I am one of those who can not only think about the proletariat, but can think with the proletariat. I know that which will prevail in the people who grow out of the modern proletariat and integrate themselves into the tripartite, healthy social organism. These people will certainly not refuse to admit only those into political life who have received a certain education. But illiteracy will have ceased to exist wherever it still exists today; it will certainly not begin again.

This is how specific questions are answered, because today it is important above all to point out the major impulses as such. Today we need a realistic view of these things, a view that can be immersed in life and can form ideas about the forms that life must take so that, in this life, people gradually turn their impulses into a healthy social organism. Because it must be repeated again and again: The social question has emerged, is manifesting itself, revealing itself in powerful facts, in facts that are quite terrible for some. It has not emerged in such a way that it will be solved by doing this or that tomorrow, and then it will be solved, then it will cease to exist – no, the development of humanity is such that this social question is now here, that it must be viewed in this threefold way as an economic, legal and as a spiritual question, and that when people see it this way, when a feeling about it becomes a social feeling in such a way that it becomes a self-evident demand for people to distinguish between the three parts of the social organism, then the ongoing solution of this social question will always arise from human behavior. For economic life will always consume people to a certain extent. The legal system must always protect him from this consumption, always protect him from what economic life wants. The social question cannot be solved all at once; the social question is solved in a continuous process of becoming. And to gain insight into it means to delve into the becoming of humanity from the outset, as its dawn is in the present, as the sun must rise for it more and more towards the future.

Thus it turns out that a realistic view of the social question must be seen in a completely different way than it is usually seen. One thinks that it can be solved by this or that; it could be solved by offering one's hand to a reorganization of the social organism itself, indeed only to a real formulation of the social body, to an organism that has the three limbs described, which, if they are independent, can then work together in the right way. As long as we do not engage with these things, we will not be able to practice a real healing art of the social organism in the social question. Wherever the attempt may come from, from the proletarian or non-proletarian side, it will be quackery. And things have come so far today, esteemed attendees, that one should truly ask oneself the serious question: how do you practice real healing in this field, rather than quackery?

Of course, I do not think that such a thing can be achieved overnight. The socialists do not think that either; they talk about a slow development, insofar as they are based on a certain rationality. But with every single measure that man takes, he can already orient his thinking and acting towards the threefold social organism. If those who want to take part at all - and basically, every human being is granted this, to one with greater, to the other with lesser responsibility - if those who want to take part in the development of the social order, if those who want to take part in the development of the social order, if those who want to take part in the development of the social order, if those who want to take part in the development of the social order, if those who want to take part in the development of the social order, if those who want to take part in the development of the social order, if those who want to take part in the development of the social order, if those who want to take part in the development of the social order, if those who want to take The social organism must be structured into the three distinct parts described, if everything that is done in legislation, everything that is done in administration, and everything that is done in ordinary life is oriented in this way, then we are moving towards what we must move towards. It is easy to think about how happiness is established by the social organism. It is not a proper thought. A proper thought, Most Excellent Presence, is to realize, above all, how the social organism can be made viable and healthy. Then, precisely because the spiritual life is emancipated from other powers, because the legal life stands in its independence, because this legal life, in its independence, has a socializing effect on economic life, precisely because of this, the possibility will arise that in this healthy social organism, through completely different factors than through its processes themselves, what people call a dignified, perhaps even a happy existence, will be established. The human organism, the natural organism, must be healthy. Does its healthiness already give us the elevation of the soul, the satisfying soul life? No, it does not give us that. Our organism, when it is sick, certainly it depresses the soul life, it makes us unhappy, humanly speaking. But when it is healthy, we must still strive for something else in order to have a gladdened, a contented soul, one that is inwardly filled with spiritual life, in a healthy organism. We will only be able to do this if we have a healthy organism, if we are not paralyzed by illness. The social organism must be made viable; then the people who live in the viable, healthy social organism will be able to base their happiness on other factors of life. The proletarian world – we must not harbor any illusions about this – cannot do it today, because it is tied to the mere economic organism. It must be liberated from the mere economic life in the healthy social organism. Only then will the social impulse be able to take on the right modern character, especially in the proletarian masses of humanity.

Simply by saying these things, the weight they carry for present-day life must be felt, esteemed attendees. In these matters, he who devotes himself to them, as I believe with real inner understanding, is not so absorbed that he merely wants to gain a view or merely wants to be right in some form or another, but is so absorbed that he thinks above all of gaining something that can have an effect on real life, that can enter into people's hearts, into their souls, from which their actions and their life situation must surely arise.

What I am saying here in these lectures is what I have been saying for a long time, even while the terrible catastrophe of war raged. I have said it to many who were in leading positions at the time, saying on the one hand: It is not invented, it is not that one should think that I am representing something imagined, but what is represented here has been taken from the views of the developmental forces of humanity, namely of European humanity for the next ten, twenty, thirty years. This wants to be realized. That it wants to be realized does not depend on any of us, it will be realized because it is inherent in the development of humanity and wants to be realized objectively. One can only say to the person who wants to intervene in social life in some way: You have the choice either to intervene in the sense of these forces or to oppose them. In the first case it is possible to serve the development of the times through reason; in the other, one simply has to wait idly for revolutions and cataclysms. These revolutions and cataclysms have come more quickly than many people believed, to whom I spoke of them years ago.

And now it is taking on different forms, though. And there are already more people who are sympathetic to such things because the facts speak even more clearly today. But on the other hand, I also said the following to those to whom I was allowed to speak about the same thing that I have already discussed here: I could imagine that people would set about attacking things in reality in such a way that they would move in the direction indicated in the treatment of the social question. Then something could arise from it that might not leave a stone unturned in what I myself say today, but that would be beneficial. Because I don't have the faith that I am so clever as to know every single thing that needs to be done, but I do have the unquestioning faith that reality itself is tackled with these things. And if you open yourself to such reality, then those people who place themselves in this threefold organism will be so clever that they will work together to achieve the right thing. Therefore, of what I say today, no stone need be left unturned; everything can turn out differently, but it will turn out as it lies in the direction of developmental reality. That is what matters.

Therefore, it was a certain satisfaction for me – everyone tries to do what they can do in the place where the fate of life has put them – it was a certain satisfaction for me to see how an appeal that wants to speak to people about the terrible catastrophe of the last few years, an appeal that also contains in brief words, with a few suggestive sentences only, but which indicates that this can be justified in full detail, that this appeal has found well over a hundred signatures in Germany, and around a hundred signatures among the Germans of Austria, in a relatively short time, and now also signatures of Swiss personalities, which we must value particularly highly for this cause.

And I believe that through this appeal, which is to appear in the near future, supported by those personalities who today can already more or less intensively, or less intensively, identify with such a will as it is characterized here, that with this appeal, I believe a beginning will be made. I will then support what is only hinted at in this appeal, what one must feel more through this appeal, with what one already understands oneself. This booklet is already in print. And so I hope, dear readers, that precisely those ideas which I believe correspond to a realistic social view can enter the human soul in these difficult times, now supported by a larger number of people reflecting on them. And that is necessary. The facts that are emerging today on the horizon of world-historical becoming challenge us to do so.

And it would be a failure if everyone did not try, in their own place, to arrive at some kind of judgment that can be realized in their actions, to arrive at a judgment about what is actually needed. What is actually the true nature of what is called the social movement? Today we have to start with what later has to be a kind of schooling like the multiplication table is today, or like the four types of arithmetic. We must begin with the insight: how is the social question shaped as an economic, legal and spiritual question? And will humanity be able to live in the future if it must continually solve recurring problems within the development of the social structure as an economic, legal and spiritual question?

Today's facts speak so strongly, and they are already intervening so strongly in the lives of many people. And it is already becoming apparent that they will intervene in the life of every single person. These facts are so strong. They reveal themselves in such a way that they must lead people to the conclusion, to the feeling: I must acquire some kind of view in this area, I cannot continue to stand in the present turmoil of facts with a sleeping soul. Otherwise, if it is impossible to find any understanding for a development in these matters that is born out of the soul, then it would have to come to the point where people's instincts simply gain the upper hand, that these instincts bring about the decision, which would then be not a decision but a terrible test for humanity, a gruesome test for humanity, that the instincts bring about this test, this horrible fate. In view of what is now emerging, but which can perhaps still be averted if only each individual consults with himself, the words repeatedly come to our lips, welling up from the heart that wants to take part in the fate of the times and in the fate of people in this time: one tries to penetrate into the essence of the social movement before it is too late.

Dearly beloved! The significant facts that have emerged in the social life of the entire civilized world today, and which are being spoken of loudly and clearly, have arisen out of the catastrophe of the World War, which has lasted almost five years. Those who look at the world today with an alert consciousness instead of being spiritually asleep, in order to perceive what is on the horizon, cannot help but come to the conclusion that only significant, far-reaching measures can meet the challenge that stands before humanity today as a requirement of world history.

The time when it was easy to talk about all kinds of understandings through which, in a certain way, the old could be maintained in a comfortable way, that time is well past. Today it can only be about a completely, completely different understanding, about man's understanding with the great world-historical forces that want to be realized sensually from the present into the near future.

But although one has heard enough from some people in the last four to five years to say that with the world war catastrophe, an event has befallen humanity such as has never occurred in the course of what is usually called history, on the other hand, one cannot experience many feelings for the fact that in a time in which things are happening that have not yet happened in history, thoughts and measures must also be conceived and taken that, in a certain way, have never been taken before in the history of humanity.

Can it be said, esteemed attendees, that in recent times much understanding has been shown for the world-historical situation and its demands, in which we have come to be? If one wants to answer this question, then it actually presents an almost hopeless picture for today. Because, if you will allow me a personal comment, in the spring of 1914 I tried to summarize the judgment that I had been able to form from an honest observation of the situation over the past decades regarding the European and world situation. In the spring of 1914, before the terrible events of that year occurred, I tried to express to a small circle – a larger one would probably have laughed at me with my views at the time – how I actually see this coming world situation. And I had to say: That which is observed by someone who really has an eye for observing the great destinies of men, must say: We live in a time in which social and great political life is unfolding as if there were a great social ulcer, a kind of cancer that must soon break out in a terrible way. And I added the words at the time: One would like to shout out such a realization, so that people understand what is actually at stake.

Of course, “statesmen” – I say that today with caution, because one would be wise to only mention statesmen in quotation marks today – (laughter), “statesmen” spoke differently in the spring and early summer of 1914. For example, in the German Reichstag. The foreign minister, who was responsible for the events, said something like this: Through the efforts of the European cabinets, one can say that there is hope that world peace will not be disturbed in the near future. This was said by a leading statesman in May 1914. One may well ask oneself: What do people actually see of what is being prepared?

Well, this peace, which was so secure, has, at least, brought about twelve million deaths and three times as many people maimed in Europe. One may ask: Were the responsible leaders at the time somehow prophetic? They certainly were not. And now, again, from the most authoritative quarters, we are hearing similar unfounded judgments about that which is now pulsating as the most important thing in human development. The most important thing in human development, which lives and which pushes towards events that are just as meaningful, much more meaningful than those that have taken place in such a terrible way, is the social question, that is the social movement.

Now, it cannot be said, my esteemed audience, that the people who belong to the leading circles to date, out of some kind of devilish malevolence – even today, when the water is running into their mouths, so to speak – out of some devilish malevolence, are showing themselves to be absolutely unintelligent towards what is to happen and what wants to be realized. But something quite different underlies it. And it is actually because of this quite different thing that I would like to speak from my point of view on this very question.

What is at the root of the matter can be seen if one takes a little time to study the origins of what is known as the social question, which today – as the loud facts testify – has become something completely different from what it actually was four or five years ago; but it is a question that has been around for more than half a century. Due to modern developments, people are separated from each other as if by a deep chasm, by an abyss. On the one hand, there are those who have never tired of praising the high civilization of humanity that modern times have brought about, tremendously and completely. What songs of praise have been sung about this modern civilization! One only needs to remember a few. How often have people, when it suited them, said: There we have modern achievements, modern means of transportation, through which one can travel long distances at speeds that would have seemed fabulous to ancient people. Thoughts flash across the seas with lightning speed. And what about the actual spiritual culture, how it has been showered with adulation. But one must ask oneself: on what foundation did all that live, which was literally inundated with this adulation? Without what has all this modern civilization not become possible? It did not come about without being built on the foundation created by the great mass of humanity who were not allowed to and could not participate, who were in an economic situation that prevented them from participating in all the things that were praised. (“Bravo!”) This civilization has grown up on this basis, the basis of the physical and mental hardship and misery of a large part of humanity, on this basis it has grown up, through which a large part of humanity has actually lost its human dignity. One only has to look – I would say – at the time when the social question first arose in its very first attempts.

The people who sang the praises of this modern civilization came together, well, in mirrored halls for all I care; they talked a lot about the divine order of the world, talked a lot about what makes people good; talked a lot about the fact that people have to love each other; talked a lot about brotherhood. They spoke about these things in well-lit rooms with well-heated stoves. Where did they get the coal for these speeches about brotherly love and loyal fraternity, speeches that were made with all kinds of justifications? Yes, until the middle of the nineteenth century, it was possible to determine the basis on which this modern civilization had developed, through an investigation that the English government had conducted at the time. This indulgence in all sorts of empty talk about brotherhood of man and so on arose only from the fact that in the coal mines people work from a very young age. Some children as young as nine, eleven, thirteen! So they were put down into the mine shafts and never saw the light of day except on Sundays, because they were led down into the shafts so early that the sun was not yet shining, and so late that the sun was no longer shining. Due to the nature of the mining work, it was inevitable that these workers in particular would lose all sense of shame; naked men with half-naked women had to work together down there, on the one hand doing the most terrible work, on the other hand constantly in mortal danger. Well, I don't need to describe this to you any further. These things have truly not improved through the merit of those who sang the praises of civilization, but through the organization of the oppressed, they have improved somewhat since then. But the abyss has remained. The gap is there. Not much understanding has been gained since then for what the proletarian social movement really is. (“Bravo!”)

Now, when you see something like this, you may well ask: what is it about the ruling circles that makes it seem almost hopeless that anything favorable will come from them in the near future? Above all, in an age when so much is said about spiritual progress and so on, above all it is – this must be said without reservation – thoughtlessness. (“Very true!”) This lack of thought has taken a terrible hold on people because, above all, they are far too lazy to look at the realities. And so it has come about that the most unfounded judgments can be heard today about what is pushing its way to the surface as a legitimate demand from the souls of the broad masses of the proletariat. Of course, one does not have to go as far as the former German Kaiser – admittedly a man who was as far removed from the demands of modern times as any human being can be – one does not have to go as far as he who once said: social-minded people are like animals (Pfuil) that gnaw away at the foundations of the German Reich and must be exterminated. One need not go as far as he did, but a greater understanding of what is necessary is certainly emerging from certain quarters that were previously in the lead.

What must be emphasized again and again is that what today appears to some as such a terrible fact, which above all arises out of the life of the proletariat, is a powerful world-historical critique of what the ruling classes have done over the centuries. Until now, it was mostly a criticism that came from the assemblies in a very significant way – you just have to know it – in which the proletarians, for decades, again and again, shouted in the face of those who were the leaders up to now: It can't go on like this! In those gatherings, which the proletarians struggled for after working all day, in those gatherings, in which - as those who have lived with the issues know - the most serious human questions were discussed in a meaningful way over decades, at the same time as people outside were sitting in some worthless theater or spent their time in an even more reprehensible way, or even played cards. During this time, tremendous intellectual demands have emerged from the depths of the proletariat, something quite different from a mere question of bread or wages, as many today would like to believe, conveniently. Not many on the part of those who were the leading circles until now have any idea of this.

If we now ask: what were the underlying reasons for the views of the proletarian world? – we come across three human areas, those areas that we encounter again and again in social life. Firstly, there is the area of spiritual life; secondly, the area of legal life; thirdly, the area of economic life. These three areas are also the basis for consideration, for true, realistic consideration of the social question, which is actually threefold: an economic, a legal and a spiritual question.

Allow me, esteemed attendees, to speak here in this Goetheanum, as elsewhere, but especially here, first of all about the proletarian question as a spiritual question. When speaking of the origin of the social question, namely the origin of the proletarian movement, much has been said, and it has always been pointed out again how, under the influence of modern technology, of modern industry, and under the influence of, above all, modern capitalism, that which is called the proletarian movement has developed. Of course, what has been said is all true, to a certain extent; but something else comes into consideration.

Above all, it is important to consider that with modern technology, with modern factory systems, with what must be described as the soul-destroying modern capitalism, a newer spiritual life befell humanity. This spiritual life was, however, initially developed in the bourgeois classes. The bourgeois classes have developed this newer intellectual life, which could be called scientifically oriented intellectual life, out of the old religious and other ideas. The proletarian world, which has been torn away from the circumstances in which it used to be, which has been led to the desolate machine, has been harnessed to the desolate capitalism, this proletarian world accepted this intellectual life of the bourgeois class with trust.

It is an important fact that in more recent times this proletariat has, so to speak, placed a last great world-historical trust in the bourgeoisie, and that this trust has been betrayed. («Very true! Bravo!») Let me speak first of this betrayal of world-historical trust.

I believe that I am not speaking out of some abstract theory, because I know how the intellectual life is lived within the proletariat, having worked at the Berlin Workers' Education School founded by the old Wilhelm Liebknecht. I myself taught the most diverse branches of this intellectual life. And from there I was able to gain access to the intellectual life of the various trade unions and cooperatives, as well as the political parties. There one saw how quite differently in the souls of the modern proletarians that which is called the modern, scientifically oriented enlightenment lives on. There you could learn not to think about the proletariat, as many believe today – that has no value – but to familiarize yourself so that you can think with the proletariat. That is what matters today. (“Very true!”) What matters most is to recognize that however enlightened we may be with regard to the newer natural science orientation, which has replaced the old religious orientation, it remains an enlightenment of the head. It remains an enlightenment alongside which all sorts of other things can persist in social life. One can be honestly convinced in one's mind by this newer scientific world view, just like the great naturalist Vogt or the popularizer of science Büchner, but if one belongs to the real leading circles, one is still part of a social order that is actually still made up of the old views. With their theoretical understanding, they accepted this scientific orientation; but they did not take it seriously for their whole being. This is what the modern proletariat had to do in its deepest soul.

Once, in Spandau, I stood on the podium at the same time as Rosa Luxemburg, who was recently tragically killed in Berlin. We were both talking about science and the workers. What Rosa Luxemburg said in her measured, thoroughly noble manner was, I would say, a perfect reflection of how the newer worldview affects the souls of proletarians. I will just hint at what Rosa Luxemburg said at the time. She said, for example, that the newer worldview had driven out of people the belief that they had all actually lived like angels at the beginning of the development of the earth; no, she said to the people, actually we were all quite indecent as humans at the beginning of the development of the earth and climbed around in the trees like climbing animals. That gives no reason to find justified the present class and rank differences. That gives a quite different idea of how people, in fact, should stand side by side in the world according to their physical origin. Yes, when this is said to the proletarian, who is compelled to make what used to be called a religious worldview out of these things, when it is spoken in such a way that it is received by the whole person, not just by the head, one can see what has struck the soul of the modern proletarian, how something completely different than a mere bread-and-butter question, which is certainly also the social question – we will talk about this in a moment – but something other than a mere bread-and-butter question, a question of human dignity, which is intimately connected with the other question that every human being must somehow ask, with the question: What am I actually in the world as a human being?

The medieval craftsman, who still said of his trade with a certain justification that it had a golden floor, could answer this question from his relationship to the craft. There was still a kind of professional honor for him from this relationship to the craft; there was also something that told him clearly: I have a certain value in human society. The dull machine, the soulless capitalism, they said nothing about that, absolutely nothing. They simply pointed out to the human being who had been put in front of one of these machines, who had been harnessed to capitalism, that this human being had to answer this question for himself in the modern scientific orientation: What am I actually as a human being? Above all, what is important from the world view, from science, is what has to do with human development, with human value and human dignity.

As I said, the proletarian placed his last great world-historical trust in what had been worked out – though it had been worked out by significant minds from within the bourgeois social order. He placed this last great trust because he believed that the question could be answered for him: What am I as a human being within human society?

Now, people said, based on their now enlightened worldview: human development is part of the divine order of the world. Or: it is the expression of the moral order of the world; or: historical ideas prevail. And what takes place in the human being is the result of historical ideas, of great world-historical thoughts.

The proletarian saw nothing when he was attached to his machine, harnessed to capitalism, by a divine world order, by a moral world order; he saw only modern economic life; he saw how all that what took place as intellectual life and what people called the divine world order, how it sprouts and emerges from what modern technology and modern capitalism have offered to the leading circles.

That then also became his view. His view was that basically everything that these leading circles have as intellectual life is basically a kind of luxury for them, in which those who are just as entitled to participate in what is produced as these leading circles are not allowed to participate. (“Very true! Bravo!”)

This was deeply ingrained in the souls of the proletariat. And in the scraps that fell from the table where what was concocted in bourgeois intellectual kitchens was offered to the people. They did not want to be fobbed off with that, but they placed above all the greatest value on understanding the spiritual life of humanity, understanding it differently than it has shaped itself out of the bourgeois development of modern times. What had developed there was, of course, seen as nothing other than a mirror image of what had developed in the state and economic life for the leading circles. It was rightly asserted that, in more recent times, this intellectual life was a mirror image of the economic life of those circles that had been favored by the newer economic life. This intellectual life was repeatedly called an ideology. The term “ideology” for this luxury intellectual life became that which, on the one hand, showed what the proletarian felt this intellectual life to be; on the other hand, it showed what he longed for: a real intellectual life that could penetrate his soul in such a way that this soul felt its connection with something that went beyond the most everyday interests in the machine and in capitalism.

Here, too, one need not always go as far as the late German emperor, who once called the proletarians not only enemies of the ruling circles, but enemies of the divine world order; (movement among the audience) but in a certain sense, one felt in the ruling circles in this area no different. What did the proletarian see of this whole intellectual life when he wanted to get a clear idea of it according to the truth? What did he see of it? Oh, what he saw of it – in one word it resounded again and again through decades and decades, since Karl Marx coined and processed this word in an understandable way for the proletariat, that is the word surplus value. Today, timid minds talk about this word surplus value in a very strange way. But the proletarian actually understood the following about surplus value: I have to produce this whole luxury intellectual life, this surplus value that feeds it. The proletarian felt nothing other than that he had to produce the surplus value for this intellectual life, and that this surplus value produces an intellectual life that erects a deep chasm between itself and the innermost needs of the soul. That is why Karl Marx and his followers found so much understanding in the souls of the proletarians, because from their deepest feelings – they did not even need to penetrate into everything theoretically – they experienced in their bodies what the added value actually means, which is subtracted from their labor and flows into channels that do not lead to their own habits of life. («Bravo!»)

Thus, in the realm of intellectual life, the first part of the modern social question arose, which is expressed in the concept of surplus value. The proletarian had to look into this surplus value; and what was produced from this surplus value escaped him, in that he could not participate in it as a human being. This is the first part of the social question, in so far as it took place in the realm of intellectual life. The proletarian could only see some kind of capitalism in this spiritual life, something that was entirely built on the basis of modern capitalism; certainly, on other foundations as well, but initially on this foundation of modern capitalism in the form of surplus value.

The second basis of life, from which the social demand arose, was the legal basis. What is justice? Dear attendees, talking about justice is actually just as difficult and just as easy as talking about the color blue to someone who is color-blind or blind, blind to what wells up in the healthy human mind, blind to what true justice is. A large part of humanity has indeed become blind under the influence of the modern economic system. That is why it is so difficult to talk to these people, just as it is difficult to talk about red or blue to a blind person. For if he wanted to stand on the legal ground and looked around him, what has the proletarian found on this legal ground in modern times? Rights? No, not rights, but privileges, especially for those who have come to these privileges through the modern economic order, or who have come to these privileges through old rights of conquest. What expressed itself on this legal ground was not the effect of the law; it was what the modern proletarian grasped with the word: class struggle. (“Bravo! Very true!”) The modern proletarian looked at the modern state by placing himself in relation to this modern state in such a way that he said to himself that this modern state did not represent what, as we shall hear shortly, every state should be: a living out of the law; but this state was the soil for the modern class struggle. And that is the second thing, in addition to surplus value: the modern class struggle, which confronted the modern proletarian; his class consciousness arose from this surplus value and the class struggle. His great longing is to overcome this class struggle. A social order in which there is no longer the terrible struggle of the rule of one class over another. That is the second form of the social question: the one against the rising class struggle.

The third form arises from economic life, if one has a healthy grasp of economic life. That which can actually be called economic life. What moves in this economic life? What should move in this economic life? Production of goods in the broadest sense, of course, that every human achievement that is required by human need is a commodity, production of goods, circulation of goods, consumption of goods.

But in more recent times, something else has been mixed into this economic cycle of production, circulation and consumption of goods, a remnant of an economic order of ancient times that had passed away, and which the modern capitalist people did not want to help overcome.

In ancient times, esteemed attendees, there were slaves; not only goods, not only what was produced by man or what was under man in nature, like the animal, was bought and sold on the goods market according to supply and demand, but man himself, who was a slave. Man was mixed among the goods. Man was pushed down into the economic order.

In the Middle Ages, serfdom existed for this purpose; less so, people were bought and sold. In more recent times, what remained was what Karl Marx again drew attention to. But in this area, one must be even more radical than Marx in view of the demands of modern times; he pointed out that within the modern commodity market, the human labor of the proletarian is still available as a commodity. This labor power is bought and sold on the market according to supply and demand, like any other commodity. (“Disgusting!”)

Basically, esteemed attendees, can the proletarian, as he has to live today, separate his humanity, his human dignity from his labor power? He must sell his labor power, sell in a certain sense his whole human being, when he sells his labor power [as a commodity]. (“Very true!”) That is the last remnant of the [medieval] world order in capitalism. That is the third great socialist demand, to divest human labor of the character of a commodity. Anyone who thinks sanely knows that human labor and human strength are something that cannot be compared to any commodity, that must not appear on the market like a commodity, that cannot be compared in price with any other commodity. Nevertheless, people are reluctant to remove from the economic cycle what human labor is.

People who are highly valued today because they played a certain, sometimes quite dubious role in the last period of the war, such as Rathenau, for example, he wrote in his latest book, “After the Flood” - by flood he means the last war catastrophe - he wrote: It would not really be appropriate to remove labor from the economic cycle. — That the actual proletarian demand for this is what such people sense; but in their anxious, thoughtless minds they do not find it advisable for the labor force to be stripped of the character of a commodity. Because – so Rathenau thinks – as a result, a great devaluation of money would flood over the entire modern economic order. — This is what is feared: the devaluation of money through the detachment of labor from the pure economic cycle. But it was precisely in this third demand, the detachment of labor from the mere pricing by the economic process, that the modern proletarian sensed that with which he summarized his question of human dignity and human value. Over the course of the last few centuries, and particularly in the nineteenth century, he had been drawn into the economic process in a new way.

This economic process, dear attendees, can be the subject of very interesting studies if we follow this modern economic process across the entire civilized world and see how it led to the terrible catastrophe of recent years. In essence, it was the economic process that grew out of capital that led to this terrible catastrophe, and we will not emerge from it merely as the people who want to conduct peace negotiations imagine. The fact that we will emerge in a completely different way is shown by the weather signs, for which, unlike in the case of world war, there are no hostile forces and neutral ones; it is shown by the social question, which will somehow stop at no territorial borders. This question, which will be an international question in the most eminent sense, and will bring international facts to the surface of human existence that the world has never seen before, shows this. This must be revealed at some point. Those who do not want to see it will be able to experience it first hand. (“Bravo, very true!”)

Now, esteemed attendees, in the economic process, the one who, although still in a cautious way, but in a very clear way, criticized the modern social order, as it was already possible in his time, found out, cautiously, but nevertheless very radically, pointed out to Goethe in the second part of “Faust” what it was actually due to. He lists the saints and the knights as actually originating from times gone by within the economic process, as he says. They stand every storm – so says the chancellor in the second part of Goethe's Faust: They stand every storm, the saint and the knight! – So says Goethe about the leading, guiding circles, the saints and the knights.

Now, in more recent times, dear attendees, these saints and these knights have changed somewhat. The saints have sometimes become quite unholy statesmen (laughter), and the knights have become modern militarism in its most diverse forms. (“Bravo, very true!”) They also stand and have stood their ground in every storm. But Goethe goes on to say something very true: they demand church and state as a reward, namely, everything that he understands by the spiritual life. And they also demand the state as a reward. (Laughter.) They have economic life for themselves anyway, they don't need to demand that first.

This is the part of Goethe's world view that still shines brightly in our time. And we need not stop at the old Goethe, but understand his applications in terms of the immediate present. («Hear, hear!»)

From all this we see that there is actually a threefold social question: the proletarian demands, as they arise as world-historical demands in this period, they show a threefold character, as I have stated. One is based on the spiritual, on the spiritual ground; the second is on the legal ground, the third is on the economic ground. Of the spiritual goods, the proletarian only recognizes that which he must provide as his basis, the added value. On the ground of the state, he sees himself only in the class struggle. And on the ground of economic life, he sees himself harnessed into the cycle of economic life, so that not only goods circulate in it, but also his own labor, that is, his flesh and blood.

Now I come to what I have had to form for myself from decades of observing European social conditions, from observing all that is being prepared and that will take shape in the coming decades. Of course, I can imagine that there are many here in this hall who will not entirely agree with the ideas that I can only sketch out here, as I present them. I can understand that. (Laughter.) But that is not the point. The point is that these ideas, as I intend to present them, are taken from reality. We can agree on this reality. If the agreement is built on an honest foundation, then an agreement will be found with those who are truly honest about the demands of modern times, which will be different from the one that people often talk about today.

During the war catastrophe itself, my dear attendees, I said to many a statesman – I emphasize once again, I say today “statesman” only in quotation marks – I said to many a “statesman”: said: What needs to be done is already clear today: You have the choice of either accepting reason today or letting what should and must happen befall you, facing revolutions and cataclysms. – One preached to deaf ears during the war catastrophe.

For example, not very far north of here during the war catastrophe, the world only had an ear for a personality who was considered to be quite practical at the time. What was not known about this personality – I am referring to Ludendorff – was that he was a visionary of the very first order , a person who was completely out of touch with reality, the likes of whom have not been seen since; anyone who had the opportunity to get to know this person, despite all the underlying reasons, knows that this person had not been fully compos mentis since August 5, 1914. Of course, you can make very clever strategic plans, but you can also be crazy. Every psychiatrist would have to admit that. (Laughter.)

The history of the war in recent years, ladies and gentlemen, will in many respects be a social psychiatry, a social doctrine of delusion. We will be able to learn a lot in this area; but we will have to have the courage to look into the truths. And this truth is, above all, that in recent years humanity has got itself so bogged down in false ideas that these false ideas have come to light in the horrors of this terrible war catastrophe.

When I ask myself: What is it that has actually caused everything that has developed in modern states over time to become the way it has become? I will start by giving you an example. The example is not taken from Switzerland. However, the social question is now an international question, and it must be studied where the examples are most clearly evident – the example is taken from Austria, which has now fallen to its fate. Austria would never have come to the disastrous Austro-Serbian conflict if social, legal and intellectual life in Austria had not developed in the way it did under the influence of completely wrong ideas, since the 1880s, when the development of a constitutional life, the constitutional life of the Austrian Reichsrat, began. What was that like? Members were elected by curia of the large landowners, the cities, markets and industrial centers, the curia of the chambers of commerce, the curia of the rural communities. The latter were only allowed to vote indirectly; the others were allowed to vote directly. (Laughter.) From these economic curia – for you will admit that they are purely economic curia – the members of the Austrian Imperial Council were elected. But this Austrian Reichsrat had to decide on the law. That is, one was guided from the outset by the view that legal life should develop only through the transformation of economic interests. Economic life was completely shifted into legal life. This has also been evident in other areas.

Of course, the German Reichsrat, for example, had universal suffrage. This had often been discussed, even direct suffrage – but it was precisely in more recent times that the new farmers' alliance was able to establish itself very firmly, that is to say, purely economic interests on the legal ground. I could now present you with countless examples of this kind, in which it is shown how precisely the blessings of modern times were sought, precisely the true progress of the times, by merging economic life with legal life. And today there are still people who cannot imagine that economic life should not actually be treated as one with the legal life. The propertied, leading classes, those who demand church and state as a reward, they initially found it convenient to include the telegraph, postal and transport systems in the sphere of the state. Then it went on and on. But especially for certain branches, they did not try to directly merge economic life and state life, but they tried to get the protection of the state for the dominant economic interests. And when one day one studies without prejudice why this war developed, then one will also find among the causes the unfortunate amalgamation of economic interests with legal and state interests in Central Europe. (“Bravo!”)

On the one hand, there is the attempt to fuse state life with economic life. On the other hand, intellectual life has been linked to state life. This intellectual life – after all, it was seen as a very special advance in modern times that this intellectual life did not develop independently, but was harnessed into state life. Indeed, most people today cannot even imagine that it is possible and necessary to retreat in this area, that one must work towards emancipating intellectual life again, detaching it from the state, and allowing economic life to develop on its own free foundation. People have developed and are still developing all kinds of short-sightedness in this area. This intellectual life, one can see, and I believe I have the right to say so, ladies and gentlemen, because I believe that this gives me the right, that throughout my whole life I have never stood on any ground other than that of the freely developing spiritual life, never in the spiritual life of any servant of one or the other state, nor was it the servant of any economic system, but always tried to develop the spiritual life from its own foundations. Therefore, I know what it means to have kept this intellectual life free. But has it been kept free in more recent times, when it has become more and more intertwined with state life? Well, much has been made of the fact that in the Middle Ages, certainly, the times, we would not wish them back, of course not, in the times of the Middle Ages, science was the drag-bearer of theology. Of course that was the case, and it must never return. But is it much different in more recent times in other areas? Of course, that which is formed as science within the state, the state institutions, is no longer as strongly in the background of theology as it was in the Middle Ages, but it is most certainly in the background of the state.

Not only are the scientific institutions and the schools administered by the state, but the state's influence has penetrated into the very content of intellectual life. Science has not become what it is in many constitutions of one country or another: free research, free teaching. No, science has become a servant of the state. There are already states in which modern science does not follow in the footsteps of theology, but, as the last few years have shown, this science is very strongly attached to the sword cord (laughter) and the garrison order is not completely out of touch with the garrison order, and that which has developed as the proletariat's view of this science is perhaps not so unimportant after all when it says: this science as an ideology is only a reflection of the prevailing economic and state order. Have similar conditions not prevailed in the fields of mathematics and physics in more recent times? It's not so clear-cut there, you can't just serve the state; but on the other hand, in areas that directly affect human life, you can serve the state quite strongly. In many cases, science, especially history – you can see it in that, but also in other branches of science – became a servant of the state. The respective rulers decided what was taught; the respective rulers appointed their theologians, lawyers, physicians, philologists, and so on, and science became a clear reflection of the state order, but science can only flourish if it is left to its own devices and develops on its own terrain.

Take history. Do you think that the history of the Hohenzollerns would be written in the future in the same way as it has been written by German professors in the past? (“No!”) That will not be the case. (Laughter.) This history of the Hohenzollerns was a perfect reflection of the intellectual life of the ruling powers. One need not go as far as the famous physiologist – he was otherwise a capable man, “honorable men they all are,” as Shakespeare says – who once spoke in a brilliant assembly and said: We German scientists are the scientific protection force of the Hohenzollerns. – Oh, it was a sincere word. (laughter)

You see, dear attendees, it was a sincere word, but not exactly the description of a desirable state. We need not go that far. But we can see how things will be quite different if the teacher at the lowest level of the school system no longer knows that he is treated according to the maxims of the mere political order, but that he is only administered by an administration that grows purely out of the soil of spiritual life itself. What happens when political life and spiritual life come together has been seen in the German Reichstag, but it can also be seen in other areas. In the German Reichstag we had the so-called Center Party, a party based purely on religion. It entered into coalitions with all kinds of other parties, and what was taken out of purely religious foundations flowed into the law of the Reich. These things, which could be multiplied a hundredfold as examples, testify that it is necessary that in the future that which has just been merged under the influence of modern capitalism - spiritual life, legal life or political life and economic life - that this in turn must be separated again, that a threefold social organism must come into being, that there must be a standing side by side, like sovereign states, an independent administration of spiritual life, an independent administration of political or state life, an independent administration of economic life. Only then will these three areas combine in a proper way to form a unity, when each of these three areas can develop out of its own strength.

Let us take the example of economic life. There we can see how this economic life is dependent on the one hand on the natural foundations, depending on the social territory in question, whether the soil is fertile or more or less infertile, depending on whether this or that thrives or does not thrive, the economic life of this or that is also. We can learn this from extreme examples. In a banana-producing country, where bananas are an important food, it turns out that the labor required to bring bananas from their place of origin to the consumer is a hundred times less than the labor required in our own, in our own Central European regions, to bring wheat from sowing to consumption. Of course, such extreme examples do not exist in the individual territories of our regions; but the individual economic branches of production differ so much from each other that different human labor is needed for them, and so on, and so on. Economic life depends on the natural foundation on the one hand. One can improve this natural foundation through all kinds of technical achievements; but a limit has been created on this side. On the other side, this limit must be met by another limit, which comes from the independent constitutional state. This other side will be created when we no longer see such peculiar things, which, while supposedly working with modern human rights, only cover up delusions.

Such institutions are, for example, the modern employment contract. As long as the worker has to conclude a contract, like a commodity, with the so-called entrepreneur, there can be no question of a legal relationship between entrepreneur and worker. Even if the entire employment relationship is removed from the economic process and placed in an independent legal organism, if real democracy prevails within the independent legal organism, where what applies equally to all people comes into consideration, if decisions are made on this legal basis regarding the duration and type of work, if a decision has already been made about the work before this work is even applied in the economic process, as is decided in the earth itself by the forces of nature about fertility and infertility before the economic process begins, only then is a real legal relationship possible between the so-called worker and employer, which must take on completely different forms in the future.

First of all, it must be determined how long one may work, how one works, and so on; then it must be determined what the relationship between the worker and the supervisor must be before the economic process can even be considered. But then the employment contract will only be able to extend to the appropriate distribution of what the worker and the supervisor produce together. Only then will justice be able to prevail in this area. (“Bravo!”)

Do not think, honored attendees, that by saying this I am somehow advocating a return to the old piecework wages. Only someone who fails to take into account what I am proposing here, in the context of a completely healthy social organism, would think that. The old piecework wages were also a wage. What I am proposing here is a contractual relationship, based on a self-evident legal relationship, between the person who performs the physical work and the person who, through his individual abilities, is to direct this work for the benefit of the social organism, not for his own capitalist, personal, selfish gain.

This is what I have to say about something quite different from, say, a renewal of the old piecework wage. The wage relationship ceases altogether. And what takes its place is a contractual relationship for the work produced. Then the worker will know where his surplus value goes; because then he will be in a position to stand freely in relation to the labor manager, because his relationship to the work is created on the basis of the law, then he will know how he can carry out the distribution in this free contract.

On the one hand, there is the employment relationship, but this can only be created if it is as independent as the relationship between the economic process and the rule of law in modern times.

Oh, I know, esteemed attendees, how many prejudices there are against this independent constitutional state on the one hand and the independent economic state on the other. But that is just what people have been deluding themselves about in recent times. The state as such has become a pure idol for the people, not to say a pure god. One can apply a saying of Goethe to this idol or god-state, although it is a saying that Faust speaks to the sixteen-year-old Gretchen in relation to religious questions: “The All-embracing, the All-sustaining, does not it grasp and sustain you, me, itself?” The modern capitalist, the modern employer, could say to the employee, much as Faust said to God: ‘The All-embracing, the All-sustaining, does it not embrace and sustain you, me, itself?’ And in private he might even think: but especially me. (Laughter.)

Dear attendees, the habit of thinking has become a strong one, and it will resist this autonomization of economic and state life. It will not be possible to achieve what must be achieved by way of mere cooperation, of cooperation encompassing the whole state. On the contrary, it will be necessary to separate legal life from economic life. Then, on the one hand, economic life will be able to develop merely as the circulation, production and consumption of goods, and what Social Democracy has always talked about will be realized, namely that it is no longer the case that production must be for production's sake, but that production is for consumption. (“Bravo!”)

But this cannot develop in any other way, my dear attendees, than if there is an independent legal basis that extends, on the one hand, to labor law, but on the other hand, mainly extends to so-called ownership, to so-called property, namely private property.

Anyone who wants to come to terms with private property, or more precisely, wants to come to terms with it, should, above all, be aware that for the social organism, for social life, the ownership relationship can only be a legal relationship. Initially, it is a privilege, a class relationship; but it is a legal relationship by nature. After all, what is ownership? Everything else is wishy-washy. What is important about property in social life is the right to dispose of some thing. That is a right, and it comes into consideration as a right, comes into consideration as a right, in that the right must be the object of the political state, in that this right is determined and regulated from person to person. In a purely democratic way, the economic state is that which arises out of human needs and out of necessary production. Thus, the constitutional state is that which arises out of that in which all people are equal, which concerns all people. We have an understanding from person to person, which must be established on democratic ground. The economic organism will develop out of what has been shown in the beginnings, but only in such beginnings, in the cooperative and trade union systems and so on, out of the various professional groups, out of the interests that develop between production and consumption, where associations are formed, and on the basis of these associations, which are managed purely appropriately, the economic state will be managed, for my part I say the economic state; I could also say the economic organism will be managed, the economic cycle, in which only goods will circulate. And in this economic organism, above all that which is still administered by the state laws today will prevail. Not the state will have to determine by laws what the currency is, which actually causes the strong price fluctuations, but in the economic organism that which is the administration of money can arise out of the mere administration of this economic organism. Money is what, after the natural economy, causes people living in a social organism to engage in a common economy. Money can be nothing other than the instruction that I have, on the basis of the fact that I myself have produced something, the instruction that I have, that at the right time, on the basis of what I have produced, I can get something else from someone else that they have produced. But this can only be achieved on the basis of the economic organism.

The actual state ground will only contain that which can be built on a democratic basis, on the legal basis, on the legal basis where all people are equal.

And spiritual life, which must be separated as the third element from the other two: today, spiritual life truly lives in very strange connections with state life, with political life. When I lectured on the same subject in Basel last Wednesday, a speaker in the discussion replied – I disagreed with much of what he said, but one point he made was something that really spoke of the mixing, the unnatural combination of spiritual life, or part of spiritual life, with economic life.

With regard to intellectual life, modern social democracy has only one link from which it says: religion must be a private matter, a religion separate from state life. Whatever the motive for this may be, the continuation of what this demand implies for intellectual life as a whole, the separation of intellectual life from state and economic life, is the key to the future. Otherwise, strange customs will continue to arise that point to the unhealthiness of our social life. As I said, this gentleman pointed out that, in this latest nuance, I don't know how to describe it without hurting its feelings, so let's just say that in this National Assembly of the German Reich there is once again a coalition between the Center Party and the Majority Socialists. (“Yuck!” and laughter) The Center Party and the Majority Socialists, they're going out together. The Center Party is made up of Catholic people, isn't it, very good Catholic people – yes, I don't know how Catholics can get together by working together in this way, even if it is with the majority socialists, but always with the social democrats, if you have seen the last pastoral letter from the Bishop of Chur, and read what it says! It says nothing less than that anyone who rebels as a soldier violates the divine world order, and that therefore no sins can be forgiven in confession by anyone who professes any social party. That is the latest pastoral letter, dated February 2, 1919. Yes, I wonder how that squares with the coalition of the Center Party and the Social Democrats in the German National Assembly? There the good Catholic people have allied themselves with others, of whom the Archbishop of Chur demands that no sins be remitted to them in confession, so they will have to go to hell laden with sins. So we see them walking hand in hand in the German National Assembly, these Catholics with those who cannot even be absolved of their sins in confession. I just want to know what is supposed to become of this coalition on its way to hell. Yes, the whole thing really does look quite ridiculous. But these absurdities, esteemed attendees, are realities in our present time. We can only escape from these realities and find our way back to a healthy state if we really commit ourselves to the threefold social order, striving ever more earnestly to ensure that the entire spiritual life, from the lowest school level up to the highest university level, is truly on its own ground. Anyone who is familiar with intellectual life knows that this intellectual life can only flourish from its own inner forces if it is independent of both the state and economic life. But if the person who is supposed to produce spiritually has to obey the instructions of a state, or even if he is a slave to this or that capitalist, this or that clique – some people are unaware of it, don't even know it, believe they are only following their genius by painting a picture, and in truth they are not following their genius at all, but they are following the capitalist economic order. (“Very true.”) People are just not sufficiently clear-minded to see the laws of modern social life in which they are immersed.

But this is the task above all: to look into it. Then one will also come to understand what this threefold social organism means. With the dawn of modern times, at the end of the eighteenth century, three significant words emerged from the French Revolution, and already at its beginning, like the motto of modern times: liberty, equality and fraternity. In the course of the nineteenth century, quite clever people, honorable men, have repeatedly emphasized how these three qualities contradict each other, how freedom is incompatible with equality; because if all people are equal, then the individual cannot develop freely. Now, in the book that will be published in the next few days about the social question, I will show that the progress in the development of what is called capital can only lead out of the damage of modern capitalism if everything that is capital is related in a certain way to the link of the social organism where individual spiritual abilities are administered. There it will be possible for that to occur – I can only hint at this here, you will find it more clearly explained in my book – which today, within certain limits, is only admitted for the most insignificant property that one can have in our present-day capitalist, materialistic time. What exactly is the most insignificant, most contemptible property for the leading people? The spiritual. At least, to be fair, it is still allowed to be transferred to the public domain, to become common property, 30 years after the death of the person who produced it. In the near future, things will have to be quite different with material goods. We will have to find the same way of transferring material goods to the public domain as we have only found for the most shameful matter, intellectual property. This spiritual property is rightly transferred. Because however it may be with the material abilities of a person and so on, you need talent and so on to produce something; but if something has been produced on the basis of the social community, then just as language is only found in the community, so all material goods can only have come about through the social community, and only have a relationship to this community in so far as one's abilities are linked to it. As long as a leader's abilities can be linked to a production company, he will continue to lead it in the future. Ways and means must be sought to ensure that material goods, like intellectual goods today, are included in the cycle of capital, of the means of production.

This is what must be considered, this is what must be incorporated into the future development of humanity. (“Bravo!”) There must, however, be freedom in the realm of intellectual life. But, as I said, people have always shown, very astutely, that this freedom would contradict equality. On the other hand, they had proved that equality would contradict fraternity. It would indeed contradict if it were understood according to the principle: And if you will not be my brother, I will smash your skull. Well, people talk like that, at least some people. But these three, they will be what flows into my heart, equality, freedom and fraternity.

What matters is that we do not merely examine them for superficial contradictions, but that we ask deeper questions, for example, about what lies behind them. And here it becomes clear to us that when these three meaningful social impulses were heard, people were still hypnotized by the unitary state, quite obviously hypnotized by the unitary state: the state that maintains you and yourself and me, but especially maintains me.

People were hypnotized by it. But these three impulses have their meaning precisely when the threefold social order is carried out. People still talk about it today; they use buzzwords: individualism, socialism, democracy. Certainly, dear attendees, just as liberty, equality and fraternity are three impulses, so too are individualism, democracy and socialism three impulses. They can only be understood if we know that individualism is that which is connected with the individual abilities and talents of the human being. This must be in the realm of spiritual life, democracy in the realm of the state, where the equality of all people comes into consideration, where what happens concerns all people, where labor law and property law - there will be no ownership - but management law will come into consideration. That which develops as socialism in the future will prevail in the field of economic life. And it will be the same with freedom, equality and fraternity. Freedom must be in the field of spiritual life. Therefore, the spiritual life must also be able to develop freely. Fearful minds, who say: But if the school is free, what will it turn into? Well, I think people know little about the modern labor movement. The modern worker has every interest in not falling back into the subservience of the ruling classes through some kind of ignorance. If you leave it up to him to send his children to school, then he will certainly do so. Others may stay away, however: those who belong to the class that already know what their little attempt at education has actually cost them and how often they skipped school while they were training. They didn't just skip school for days at a time, but sometimes skipped school to such an extent that their certificates are now of very little value.

Freedom in the field of intellectual life, equality in the field of political or state life, fraternity in the broadest sense in the field of economic life through associations and cooperatives, which will truly extend fraternity to the whole of economic life: Only then, my dear attendees, when it is realized that the social organization must be tripartite, will it be known how freedom in spiritual life, equality in democratic state life, and fraternity in economic life will develop alongside each other in the future. This will be the fulfillment of what has been resounding through humanity for more than a century.

So, looking at the interrelationships, at what is actually in the forces that already lie in the historical development of humanity today, will lead to the necessary recognition of these three elements, which I have only been able to sketch for you and which you will find further developed in my book.

But I believe, dear attendees, that however much people today, with all sorts of buzzwords, because it would be convenient for them to be able to remain in the old order, will struggle against such thoughts, it should be realized, however, in what way these thoughts are new. Many a person today says that he considers this or that to be good for the future. Oh, one can consider many things to be good! But I certainly do not imagine that I am any smarter than other people when it comes to the details of what should happen. That is why I am not proposing a utopia; on the contrary, what I have presented is the opposite of a utopia. What I have presented can be tackled anywhere, regardless of one's starting point. No matter how far the [revolution] has progressed in Eastern Europe or how far away it still is in other parts of Europe, it can be started anywhere by starting from a specific, real point and working, on the one hand, towards establishing free schooling and free spiritual life; on the other hand, establishing economic life that is independent of the state, which must develop in the future in the form of a cooperative, namely through the fraternization of production and consumption. This is the most real thing, the most practical thing that can be conceived at all in the present. For it is not based on some kind of program, it is based on the reality of the human being. It is said again and again: If you want to introduce a threefold social order, where is the unity? The unity will be the human being, esteemed attendees, because when it is objected: Do you want to restore the old class order, the lower class, the military class, the teaching class? Certainly, there is nothing particularly wrong with the lower class today, because people need it.

The military estate – well, so much has been said about it in recent years that I don't need to repeat the things! The teaching estate – well, that has become not unlike the teaching profession, the civil service. For it is not a matter of establishing new estates; it is a matter of the administration, the organization, which is completely separate from the human being, that is tripartite. The human being himself will be in all three organisms; insofar as he has individual abilities to develop, he will belong to the spiritual organism, will have relationships to it, will have to decide how he wants to integrate himself into the spiritual organism, and will, of course, belong to the state organism with regard to that which is the same for all people. The law applies to the economic organism that everyone must be included. The human being will be the unit. But in this way the human being will be able to be placed in terms of his true human dignity. That is what matters, that people are no longer divided, but rather that the social order itself is divided.

I believe, esteemed attendees, that those who are most likely to understand such a social order can arise from the proletariat. The proletarian truly has no reason to have much preference for the old orders that have been transferred to modern times, which some people today would still like to find so comfortable if only they were not challenged too much. (Laughter.) The proletarian has learned to rely on himself. He has learned to look for something other than what some people have received so far. He has perhaps also learned that new thoughts are necessary, that one must rethink, that one must not merely transform a few institutions with the old habits of thought, but that new thoughts are necessary, that rethinking is necessary. The fresh intellect of the modern proletarian is underestimated in many circles; it will find itself in such thinking. One should entertain such thoughts in a time when people so often say: The catastrophe of war has revealed something that has never been seen before in history. Those who absolutely do not want to believe that one needs these thoughts should consider that in such a time, when events have occurred that have not yet occurred, thoughts must also arise that are unfamiliar, unfamiliar to those people who only live in the old well-worn tracks. But I do believe that the proletariat, as it feels dissatisfied with the legacy of the old bourgeois order, will find its way into what is necessary as a new social order, especially for the healthy threefold social organism. Therefore, I believe that it is not in vain that it is spoken into the souls of the proletarians when this social order of the future is spoken of, which I believe wants to and must be realized because it lies within the innermost human impulse for the near future.

At the same time, this is what fills me with the hope that those who will come from the proletarian world will understand a reasonable, progressive movement in this sense, towards a healthy social organism. Then, precisely from the proletariat, would come that humanity which, through what it now strives for, out of need and misery, out of contempt for its human dignity on the part of the other classes, what it strives for , but for its class, it would develop out of what must become the development of the future, not for the benefit of one class, but for the benefit of all humanity, which must be striven for: the liberation of all humanity, the liberation of that in humanity that is worthy of liberation.

But this can only come about through social views that are not based on some kind of idea, but on observation of life. It is certainly true that enough words have been exchanged to date; but the only thing that can be done is to deepen our understanding of what can happen and what can be transformed into action. I wanted to talk to you about such views, which do not just repeat worn-out words and old views , but I wanted to speak to you of such thoughts that can be realized everywhere where there is goodwill. These are thoughts that should soon be transformed into deeds, because they must be transformed into deeds according to the demands of world history and are also required by people, more or less unconsciously, for the next stage of development. (Lively applause.)

We will now take a short break of about five minutes. Then there will be a free discussion. Those who wish to speak or have something to say on the subject should do so voluntarily and give me their name, or if someone wants to ask a question in writing, there will also be an opportunity to do so. Rudolf Steiner: Well, it seems that is not the case, dear attendees. I do not take this as a sign that you all agree with everything I have said, but nor do I take it as a sign that you all disagree with what I have said. But I do think that, yes, in fact, in terms of discussions, the matter is quite difficult today; because most discussions in this area are very often conducted in such a way that people bring their preconceived point of view with them; and those who take the questions at hand take the questions seriously, know how difficult it is to arrive at views that are grounded in reality, to arrive at reasoned views that can really lead to what we all long for. In our time, more than one would think, schoolmastering and the like is the order of the day.

And I myself, after having written the “Appeal” that has been signed by a whole series of people in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and which I presented at the Goetheanum, have recently had to learn, to my great satisfaction, that it was highly unusual for the doctor to come from Dornach, from the Goetheanum, when we know that book on the social question, which will be published soon. I myself have had to experience, for example, that someone told me it was highly remarkable that the doctor is coming from Dornach, from the Goetheanum, where we know that the spirit is constantly being talked about, and yet the whole appeal says nothing about the spirit. Well, it does say that spiritual life should be built on itself, and I have confidence that if it is built on itself alone, it will develop healthily. But I am not convinced by the declamations that one hears again and again today, that people will become healthy in their social lives if they turn away from matter and turn to the spirit – no, I am not convinced by these declamations.

Now you see, my dear audience, I am not looking for the spirit where people always talk about the spirit, but I believe that the real spirit is the one that has the strength to immerse itself in practical real life, that really has understanding for life. A spiritual worldview that only ever talks about spirit and ghosts, for my part, whatever it calls this spirit, that only ever has this lip service of the spirit, such a worldview seems to me, especially in the present time, not at all to point to something future, but rather it seems to me to be precisely the most terrible result of the order that is coming to an end.

This is what I would like to say in response to people telling me to speak more of the spirit: I do not seek the spirit in what is said, not in the what, but in the how, how life is understood, how one tries to understand life. And so, precisely because this view of the School of Spiritual Science that is to be established is taken as a starting point, I have been met with a number of objections, because people have expected something different. But the work that spiritual science, as it is meant here, actually wants to do is something that serves life. And in our time, dear honored attendees, those who devote themselves above all to those questions that today do not speak to us through mere words, but that speak through facts, serve life.

And do we not see it? Party views are walking around among us like mummies. Thoughts have been left behind by facts everywhere. Facts of greater force have emerged from the catastrophe of the world war; these facts must be dealt with. They will not be dealt with if we continue to dwell on the thoughts we have formed so far. We must learn to think differently today.

That is what I would like to have evoked as a kind of feeling. And in this feeling, in the feeling that a new era must come and that a new era is indeed heralded by the demands, however they may arise, that express themselves through the loudly speaking facts throughout Europe, however much some may resist them, in this feeling I would like to be understood by you above all. For when people find themselves more and more in common feeling, in common feeling, then that among them will be able to revive, which we are striving for through something that also wants this threefold social organism that I have established. I would like you to understand me in this sense. And so we can understand each other without having a discussion, which, as it seems, is not desired. But just because I would like to be understood in this way, I may also add to what I have already said today: It is a real source of great satisfaction for me to be able to welcome you here today, to these rooms, where I believe you will form an opinion that is different from those that have been formed here or there. I hope that you will be able to form the opinion that it is not just some kind of luxury ideas that are developed here in these rooms, but that serious and honest efforts are made to serve the highest interests of humanity. In this sense, these rooms aspire to be a university for spiritual science. And it gives me a very special inner and heartfelt joy to be able to welcome the ladies and gentlemen of the surroundings here in these rooms, especially when discussing such an important question. I hope it will truly not be the last time within these walls. (“Bravo!”)

Dear attendees, first of all, before answering the discussion, some questions have been received, and I would like to answer these questions first. Some of these questions are also related to what was said during the discussion, and so I may summarize some of them in my concluding remarks, which will not take long.

First of all, there is the question: “Isn't it a big mistake for social democracy to deny the spiritual and the soul and to recognize only the body [and the corporeal]?”

Now, it is not so easy to deal with this comprehensive question in just a few words, for the simple reason that what is often described and represented in the vaunted scientific circles as spiritual and soul life is actually not something that is in the process of ascent for the discerning person, but something that is basically undergoing its last phase of development, its full descent. When speaking of the spiritual, one should not speak in general terms of the spiritual, but one should always be clear about the fact that the spiritual is undergoing descending developments, ascending developments. And those who today reject the current, conventional spiritual life, which I also characterized in the lecture, which is a result of the leading class in the last centuries, when this spiritual life, which has become great through the state and economic development, especially of the last centuries, particularly of the nineteenth century, is rejected, then one can understand that this must be rejected. The important thing is to find a real spiritual life, a spiritual life that retains its own reality.

And then I must say that, above all, it is necessary today that the one thing I dared to say in my lecture be fulfilled: that people really learn from events. And then I must say; above all, it is necessary today that the one thing I dared to say in my lecture be fulfilled; that people really learn from events. You see, with reference to some of the things that the various speakers have said, I would like to say the following: One gentleman spoke very beautifully about an eternal word, which he described as a Christian word, and which of course could not be more beautiful in its meaning: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Yes, but esteemed attendees, is it really about simply pronouncing such a word today? (“Very true!”) Is it not also a truth that this word, if we want to acknowledge it as a Christ-word, has been spoken by those who thought they were called for almost 2000 years, and yet we have come into today's circumstances? Do these circumstances prove that the power has been found to really bring this word to life in people? I would like to ask you whether it should not depend on something other than just living in the emphasis of a word, in the hearing of such a word in sermons and the like?

You see, I have often tried to make myself understood in discussions and meetings by pointing out the worthlessness of merely emphasizing a word in the abstract, saying, for example, “Let us suppose there is a stove is here; it is its duty as a stove to warm the room, and I say to it, speaking as the sentence dealing with neighborly love was spoken: Dear stove, it is your real duty as a stove to warm the room! I speak to it warmly, I might say with the most heartfelt tone of preaching – it will never warm the room unless you put wood in it! (Laughter.) But when I heat it up, the room gets warm even if I don't talk to it, but just put wood in it; the room will then get warm. (Lively applause.) I don't want to say anything against the truth of such a word; but the point is to actually put such a word into practice in life, to make it known.

That is precisely the peculiar thing, my dear audience, that within the much-praised civilization, people have found each other who have spoken of love for one's neighbor, of love for God, of brotherhood – spoken, now, from the age of so-called humanity. They spoke very cleverly, very reasonably, often in rooms with mirrored windows, in heated rooms; but the heating was coal-fired, and as inquiries have shown, particularly in the rise of the social movement of recent times, children aged nine to eleven, twelve, thirteen worked in the mining of these coals! Coal that had been mined in mines where naked men stood among half-naked women, where there was truly no reason not to notice even the sense of shame, let alone to stop to consider any other Christian ideas. You really have to bear in mind that it is not just a matter of blurting out such a word. Due to the correctness and importance of the emotional content, one will naturally always make an impression with it. But the point is to find, in a particular age, those things that are as practical as the wood that I have to put in the stove so that it can warm the room, and that may, under certain circumstances, spare us from repeatedly saying the words, “Lord, Lord”! Incidentally, this is also a Christian saying: “You shall not say, ‘Lord, Lord,’ for that end; but to do the will of God, who has sent us heavenward.” You should not always say, “Lord, Lord,” but try somehow to absorb into your mind, into your whole being, what is the inner essence of Christianity.

One has very peculiar experiences in this. I don't think there is anyone in this hall who can surpass me in representing what the true inner essence of Christianity is. But, dear ladies and gentlemen, I have also had my experiences with it. I once gave a lecture on the nature of Christianity, and there were two clergymen present, both Catholic. Since I always speak from the heart, the gentlemen had no real objection to what I said. They approached me after the lecture, and it was even the case that they had to say: There is not much to object to; but – they said – the big difference is this: We, we talk so that all people can understand; you only talk to a few educated people. – So I said to the man who objected to me: Yes, you see, pastor, I will ask you something else: I believe that you believe you speak to all people; every person ultimately imagines that, otherwise he would probably be able to stop talking; but one can also gain experience in this area. It does not matter that you or I imagine that we speak to all people, but we let the experiences speak for themselves, we let the facts speak. And I ask you: Do the facts speak in such a way that they prove you right? Do all people still go to church with you? Yes, you see, you won't be able to tell me that you speak for everyone! And, you see, I speak to those who stay away. - That was when I spoke truly about Christ and Christianity.

Dear attendees, it is not a matter of us repeatedly and repeatedly warming up the old in the field of Christianity, but rather that we can actually hear the signs of the times. And we know that time marches on, and it is not possible to just keep repeating the same thing over and over again; otherwise you end up - I recently heard a Christian speaker in Bern who said something extraordinarily effective; he spoke very humanely; he spoke about the divinity of Christ. But after the words that had earned him the loud applause, I couldn't help thinking: 45 years ago, I read exactly the same words – they had been taken verbatim, in fact – in a Christian Catholic report that the pastor, who is a university professor, I believe, proclaimed to his audience in Bern! I just said to myself: How is it possible not to learn anything from contemporary history in the 45 years since I read those words as a child? And today we have the clearly written, blood-written words of the world war! And people believe that you can only repeat the same thing over and over again!

So, dear attendees, it is better to accept being less understood at first and to present what can serve the new era than to have to repeat the old over and over again. The question must be raised for all those who say: Keep your old religiosity, keep the old belief in God and the like. For all of them, it must be said: Well, you have had almost 2000 years of time after all, and have spent 2000 years trying to achieve something. How much have you actually achieved by opposing that which wants to serve the times? Remember that you would have had enough time! You have been given 2,000 years; now it is necessary that you recognize that something new must break through to mankind, which has been tried and tested and is suffering.

This must be said by someone who stands entirely on the point of view that he alone may cherish the hope, because he stands on the ground of true social thinking, that a new spiritual life will be established through this, a spiritual life that will truly bring people together again with a spiritually alive, not dead, to which the old traditions and the like have already become.

Of course, one can reproach socialism if one wants, for having so far taken little account of intellectual life. But let us wait and see. The intellectual life that can be heard today even from our universities cannot find any particular favor with those people who want something human: the intellectual life that will again give people - all people - the awareness that their [physical] human being is connected with inner necessity to the human being's soul and spirit. Let us wait and see whether it is not precisely the socialist-minded people who will be the next to turn to the actual spiritual life and no longer oppose it without understanding! And if one raises the question: One cannot say that one finds particular favor in today's bourgeois circles when one tries to bring them this school of thought - well, dear attendees, it is extremely difficult to talk about this question, for the reason that it seems necessary to the factually thinking person, and above all to me, to know: Whoever does it, it is essential that the right thing can be done! And when asked how some of the things that could develop out of this world war could be averted, I had to tell some people: It is not at all important to me to think that I am smarter than other people; rather, it is important to me to provide a stimulus for reality!

Do you, dear attendees, notice how what I have said differs from what many others say? People come and want to have programs. They have all kinds of desires, beautiful goals for the future, and the like, and they see these expressed in this or that word. Programs are as cheap as blackberries these days! Societies are founded, programs are written, and so on and so forth. But that is not the point. The important thing is to grasp reality.

I am convinced that if we can say: we must organize ourselves in a healthy social organism – and I see something healthy in the threefold social organism – then people will find what is good for them. I would even say that if they can only find the form, the structure of the social organism in which people can appropriately realize what must come for humanity. That is what I must always say to people. Perhaps no stone of what I have to say today will remain standing; that does not matter; what matters is that if things are approached in the way I mean, then something quite different may come of it, but is a matter of the suggestion to seriously do something in the realm of reality, something that has been thought out of the threefold social organism, out of life experience, not out of some dull theory or out of some selfish prejudice. That is what is important.

That is why my program is the one that calls on people, above all, to have the opportunity to realize this in a certain sense. What I have just expressed differs significantly from the usual programs. And that is why I believe that time will take its course, of course. And basically, what is being said so often today is not so very new. One of those who have inspired the most, Karl Marx, the socialist confessor, spoke the following words in the first half of the nineteenth century, when he was still young: Should all enlightenment and persuasion rebound off the stubbornness of the propertied class, then it is the most sacred duty of the proletariat, the fighters for the highest goods of humanity, to storm the bulwark of capitalism, justified before the court – [gap in the transcript]. So, you see, that is how people spoke in the first half of the 19th century. Marx appealed to the most influential circles for understanding and enlightenment for the propertied classes!

It cannot be said, dear attendees, that much of this has been fulfilled so far. But that is not the issue now. Rather, the issue is that at least the most necessary things must be done for the future. And so I think it is necessary, above all, to spread enlightenment to the widest circles; for it is out of enlightenment, out of social understanding, that something will come about that can never come about through force, whether it comes from above or from below. Through force, you can destroy a lot; but through that which can be brought into the world in a fruitful way, you can build. Therefore, I see something successful only if, within the proletariat in the broadest sense, efforts are made so that the individual, as far as possible, increasingly strives for social understanding. And then he can want to penetrate to the highest philosophical problems of life, strive to climb as many rungs of social conduct as possible: he will then be able to work fruitfully. First and foremost, we must imbue ourselves with social understanding! For it is the lack of social understanding that has brought about the present terrible situation. Therefore, I expect the proletariat, in particular, not to commit the mistake of lack of understanding, not to want to avoid enlightenment in social matters! Even if this or that particular measure should still be necessary, the best and most effective way forward is to continue along the path of enlightenment.

And in answer to the question, “Is it really so easy to put the threefold social order into practice when the hand is offered to do so?” the following should be said:

Dear attendees, I certainly said: You can start at any point – but I don't know what it means to “offer a hand”. Who should offer a hand? I think it is more important that, above all, minds are offered; the mind of each individual. And it is reckoned that now more and more people will be found who will thoroughly immerse themselves in all the consequences, in that which can improve the social structure of the social organism.

Then here is the remark: “The capitalist soul has no feeling for the proletarian soul,” an experience that, well, one can already have plenty of in the present day. Now, various necessary points have been raised today. Above all, because the time is already too far advanced, it is not possible to go into each one individually, and so I would just like to make a few comments on some of the points of view that have been put forward. Above all, it has been said that what I have said contradicts the Social Democratic program.

Ladies and gentlemen, whether or not such contradictions exist is not for me to decide, I believe, on the basis of what I have to say today; that will be decided only by the future.

Thus, I have touched on some of the points that seemed particularly important to me from this discussion.

However, it was also said that “we still lack intelligent people”. I think about the relationship between intelligence and true progress today in the following way. Allow me this historical comparison: Christianity, which has indeed had a great and significant influence on the development of humanity in the form in which it emerged almost 2,000 years ago, spread from Asia through the highly developed Greek world and the highly educated Roman world. There was the peak of intelligence, but it did not take root there! It took root among the people who came down from the north as a result of the mass migration, who were regarded by the Romans as barbarians and by the Greeks as unintelligent people. They had the fresh intelligence; they had the new, then young intelligence. The others had the old, faded, fruitless intelligence.

This is what we recognize again today as the basis of the main movement of contemporary history: we are living, so to speak, in a new mass migration. Those people who are considered intelligent today sometimes say something highly unintelligent. They talk about something that is not at all capable of moving the times forward. We are living in a mass migration of peoples, which is not moving horizontally, but from bottom to top - even if the expressions are meant symbolically, they can still be used for it. It is precisely those people who, with fresh intelligence, emerge from the circles from which the previous civilized outlook has arisen, that they break into. And even if it still has to be said many times today: In these souls there is an underlying understanding of what the future must bring. I believe in this fresh intelligence because it is healthy, not decadent. It is not in a downward spiral like the intelligence of the circles that often lead today.

I see a mass migration in the modern proletarian movement, a mass migration that is only moving in the opposite direction. And it will bring something into the world that will carry humanity upwards again for a long time.

This is what allows one to look into the future, what provides some clues. Even if today there is still inadequacy and unhealthiness everywhere, even in the most hopeful movements, we need not be pessimistic. Rather, it is something that makes one believe that, after all, on the part of those who can feel what the old culture has done, that something will finally be brought from those who can feel what the old culture has done, that something will finally be brought from those who can feel what the old culture has done, that something will finally be brought from those who can feel what the old culture has done, that something will finally be brought from those who can feel what the old culture has done, that something will finally be brought from those who can feel what the old culture has done, that something will finally be brought from those who can feel what the old culture has done, that something will finally be brought from those who can feel what the old culture has done, that something will finally be brought from those who can feel what the old culture has done, that something will finally be brought from those who can feel what the old culture has done, that something will finally be brought from those who can feel what the old culture has done, that something will finally be brought from those who can feel what the old culture has done, that something will finally be brought from And you may have gathered from my remarks that I have no intention of further dividing people into estates or classes. In older times, a distinction was made between the teaching estate, the nourishing estate, and the military estate. That is not the issue. Precisely that which is separated from the human being in the institutions that we have, I would say, in the threefold social organism: Man is that which unites all three. And he will have his representation in a democratic state, or even stand in it, and he will have to stand in economic life and in spiritual life, and thus stand in the whole threefold social organism – standing out of this threefold nature. Man is that which unites the three separate areas. That is what I meant when I said: to make the human being free. And he will become free when we no longer swear by the abstract unified state.

Interjection: Yes, but there must be laws and courts for all three areas, for example?

Rudolf Steiner: Of course, dear attendees, it must be, but the point is that if anything is to live properly in all three areas, it must be generated in one area. Just as the human head is a part of the whole organism and also needs air, it cannot breathe the air itself; the lungs must breathe the air. And the air is then conveyed to the whole organism.

(Regarding the question of milk for the whole family): The whole family needs milk; but it is not necessary that, if the whole is a unit, that is, that everyone gives milk, but rather the whole family will be properly provided with milk if the three members function properly. What matters is that, if all three areas are to be properly lived in, then the law is created in this one area and is fairly administered. What matters is that the right judgment is to be made. What matters is that economic life is structured in the right way, that legal life and spiritual life are also structured in the right way, in the way I have said.

It is precisely this that consistent, penetrating thinking, in harmony with nature, should finally take hold among people; only then will we be in a position to change anything.

Our old habits of thinking have basically brought us into today's situation. These old habits of thinking have basically brought about what we today perceive as pressure and oppression. What we need is to replace these habits of thinking, to replace the old thoughts with new ones! And I believe, ladies and gentlemen, that people will be found, even if today many are still quite hostile, as we have seen; they will recognize this threefold social organism as practical. And the great lesson will have to be learned from the misery of recent years, that those who thought they were practical were in fact the most impractical of all – that from a completely different direction, practice, true life practice, will have to come. And so I am pleased that I have been able to speak to you, to speak to younger people who have their hearts in the right place. It is something very gratifying when a person not only has a faith but also a certain strength in his heart. For it is from these strengths that unspent intelligence will be able to arise.

I would like to call out to everyone who thinks like many of you: Very well, even if some things may remain incomprehensible to some today – if your hearts are in the right place, the time will most certainly come when you will be able to understand what still had to remain somewhat incomprehensible to you today!

Dear attendees, I will soon be entering my sixth decade, have grown old in the meantime and have seen the social movement come of age for the most part. I know how much still needs to be overcome. But that is also why I have the opportunity to rejoice in what is happening today, especially among young people. And if young people hold fast to what can be expressed in words as “having one's heart in the right place,” then the time will come that must come, because otherwise all of humanity will end up in a terrible situation!

Let us believe in this time; because we must believe in it, because we cannot do otherwise if we really want to live properly, my dear attendees.

And today we can have a certain hope that things will come to pass that have not yet come to pass, simply because so much disaster has been wrought in recent years. Humanity must, if only as atonement, want this, must want to do something to ensure that things that could not be realized before are gradually resolved in a possible way. That is what I wanted to say in conclusion.

Excerpt from the lecture, published in: Schriften des Bundes für Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus, Mitteilungsblatt Nr. 7, n.d. [1919/20]

In economic life, the fact that modern capitalism, with its longing for rent, the competition of capital, throwing things onto the market and rules based on supply and demand, has crept in – it has crept into this economic life, first of all, through capitalism, a way of administration that, due to the nature of economic life, does not necessarily have to be in this economic life. For what is needed in this economic life? You need the soil with its ability to produce products for people; in the industrial economy, you need the means of production: you need the worker at the means of production, the manual laborer on the one hand, and the intellectual laborer on the other. Individuals have always realized that an economic life is complete in itself, which has the means of production, which has the soil, which has the physical and the intellectual laborer. That is why stronger thinkers of economic life, one of whom was even able to become a Prussian minister, spoke out: “Capital is the fifth wheel in the cart of economic life.” We cannot imagine economic life without the intellectual administrator of the means of production and the land; we cannot imagine it without the physical laborer; we can imagine it without the capital being disturbed, the work of capital.

That this is an economic truth is felt by today's proletarian; he feels it through what economic life brings him in body and soul. What is involved in an economic life in which only the factors I have just mentioned really prevail? Intellectual and physical labor, and the products of the means of production and the soil. Performance arises, which necessitates reciprocation in human life, and the archetype of economic life arises. Today, it is necessary to clearly define this primal structure of economic life in order to make social understanding possible. When a person enters into economic life – he must produce for himself and for other people. That is the yardstick by which he can keep himself and others economically in his achievements. That is the big question, as simple as it sounds, for all economic life. The big question for all economic life is this: I must be able, within the economic life, whatever kind of production I devote myself to, to exchange so much from the rest of the economy for what I produce that I can satisfy my needs of life from what I have exchanged until I am able to produce an equivalent production with what I have produced. Included in what comes into consideration here, I would say, as the atom of economic life, as the primary element of economic life, must be included, all that I have to give for those who cannot be directly productive labor in the present; included must be everything that is necessary for the children, for their education and so on; included must be the quota that I have to give for the poor, the sick, and the widows as old-age support. All this must be included in this original cell of economic life, which is expressed precisely by the fact that every person in economic life must be able to exchange for what he produces so much that he can satisfy his needs from what he has produced until he produces a product the same as what he has produced. But it is clear from this primal cell of economic life that it can only be regulated if it has nothing else in the cycle of economic life than the services themselves; if one has nothing else in the cycle of economic life than what the individual works for as his service and what the others can exchange with him as their services. Within this economic cycle, there is no place for what can be called 'capital'; it only enters in to disturb this economic life and contaminate this economic process. The economic process can only become pure if the equalization of value of goods, which is called for by life from its original cell of economic life, can take place in it.

Dr. Steiner's lecture on the threefold social order
Newspaper report by Hermann Heisler, published in: Tübinger Chronik, June 7, 1919, No. 130

Dr. Steiner's first impression on June 2 seemed to be a certain disappointment for some of the numerous listeners. For Steiner undoubtedly makes extraordinary demands on his listeners. He does not speak in the language of fixed scientific terms and avoids all the partisan slogans of professional politicians, the use of which is very convenient for the listener but which contribute nothing to the clarification of our situation. The strongly Austrian-sounding tone of the speech also seemed strange to some listeners. But such superficialities were soon outweighed by the impression that Dr. Steiner is a thoroughly independent and powerful personality who has thoroughly grasped the driving forces of our decisive time and who is motivated by the burning desire to save our people from the horrors of a second impending revolution and the resulting conditions of Russian Bolshevism. Steiner sees the means of salvation in the threefold social order.

In order to lead his audience to a proper understanding of our present circumstances, Steiner first revealed the roots of proletarian sentiment, which he knows not only as a sensitive observer of the people's soul, but also from his own experience. The domination of the machine and capital had inexorably harnessed the proletarian, as a person without freedom, into the economic cycle. The longer this state of affairs lasted, the more he came to see it as degrading. Nor did he find any compensation in the materialistic intellectual life offered him by bourgeois society for what the soulless machine robbed him of in the way of human dignity and inner satisfaction. Thus the conviction took root in the soul of the proletarian, which arose from bourgeois materialistic thinking, that the whole of intellectual life is only an ideology, a reflection of economic life; and therefore one need only change the economic life, then one will automatically arrive at a different intellectual life. Therefore, the proletarian threw himself with all his might into economic life and sought to transform it. He became a practical materialist in order to arrive at a more dignified spiritual life. Despite appearances to the contrary, the social question is thus fundamentally a spiritual question. The proletarian wants to escape from the soul-destroying existence into which modern capitalism and scientific materialism have pushed him.

Help should have come from the intellectual life. But this could not provide the help because it was itself dependent and completely in the thrall of the capitalist state and consequently became more and more alienated from the people and their lives. Our leaders know nothing about what moves the soul of the proletarian and how the monotonous work at the machine affects his soul. The government councilor Kolb experienced this when he gave up his office and worked in America first in a brewery and then in a bicycle factory as a simple laborer. There he confessed that he now understands why the workers have no joy in their work and often no longer want to work at all. Steiner is convinced that spiritual life would be less divorced from life and therefore more fruitful if it were removed from all state influence and paternalism, and left to its own devices. The state is only concerned with legal life, i.e. with everything that relates to the relationship between people. The legal is that which is the same for all people. Spiritual life, on the other hand, deals with what is individual, what the individual human being produces on the basis of his or her talent. This cannot be administered from the legal state, but the spiritual must create its own organs on the basis of complete freedom. Only then can it make the contribution to the advancement of state and economic life that it is called to make.

The political link of the social organism, the legal link, only has to do with the relationship between people, that is, with what makes all people equal. Therefore, economic life cannot be merged with state life. Otherwise, economic life cannot flourish. Every person is part of economic life through their occupation and consumption. To be active in economic life, it is not enough to be human; economic associations are also needed. This economic life can and must have nothing to do with anything other than the production, circulation and consumption of goods.

But now human labor, land and the means of production have crept into economic life, and with them capital. Capital is the “fifth wheel on the wagon” of economic life. It can be completely eliminated from the economic process. The big question of the economic process is only how am I able to exchange what I produce for something else that satisfies my needs? Therefore, in the cycle of economic life, there must be nothing other than goods or services, which in this context are also goods. When capital enters into the economic process, it contaminates the value balance of goods. The wage relationship is connected with capital, i.e. the consideration of human labor power as a commodity. And that is precisely what the proletarian finds unworthy. Because he cannot separate himself from his labor power as from a coat that one takes off, so he has to sell himself with his labor power and thus ends up in a real wage slavery. Therefore, labor power must be redeemed from [the character of a commodity]. This is one of the key issues of the social question. But this is only possible by removing labor from the economic process, in which it does not belong by nature, and bringing it onto the legal ground of the state. The constitutional state, which regulates the relationship between people, decides in principle on the type, extent and time of work. These questions must be decided before the person approaches a job. Then the “employee” does not conclude an employment contract with the “employer” as is the case today, but - these terms are no longer used - the worker and the manager are partners and jointly manage the land and the means of production, and reap the rewards of their individual performance at the means of production in an appropriate manner. In this way, the worker becomes truly free and is no longer a wage slave. His rights and his human dignity are secured by the constitutional state, because his labor power can no longer be drawn into the economic process like a commodity.

The same applies to land and the finished means of production. These cannot be included in the economic process, which is only concerned with the production, turnover and consumption of goods, because they are not for sale at all; but at most one can acquire the right to the sole use of the land or a means of production. Here, therefore, it is not an economic matter, but a legal one. And rights are decided on the basis of the state. Land and finished means of production therefore belong to the people as a whole, as an economic community, and are entrusted by the economic councils to the management of the spiritual leader who has the confidence of his colleagues and who promises to make the best use of the means of production. Capital no longer has a share in land and means of production. The extent and nature of production is based on existing needs. It must no longer be produced pointlessly in the private capitalist interest.

Steiner's vision of dismantling capitalism and transferring ownership of land and the means of production to the community has already been implemented to a certain extent in the field of intellectual production, in that intellectual property becomes the property of the general public 30 years after the death of its creator. Similarly, all property, including material property, must be put into flux. Just as the body falls ill when blood stagnates in any of its organs, so the social organism falls ill when, due to private capitalist economy, there is a stagnation in the circulation of economic goods. Money must be nothing more than an order to receive goods without any intrinsic value. Then its accumulation, that is, capitalization, will automatically become obsolete.

Thus we arrive at a solution to the social question without violent upheaval, by way of a proper structuring of the social organism, as required by circumstances themselves. There is no other way. Dr. Steiner emphasized in conclusion that such a threefold social order does not mean that the state will be cut into three parts. It is only to ensure that, for example, religious and ecclesiastical interests do not have a harmful influence on political life and vice versa, and that economic issues do not confusingly spread to the political sphere. This is how those tangles and ulcers develop in the social body, which must lead to crises and wars. Threefolding, on the other hand, leads to the recovery of the social organism. It does not artificially tear it apart, but simply puts it on its three healthy legs. Thus the three watchwords of the French Revolution, liberty, equality and fraternity, also cease to exclude each other, but find their fulfillment in our being able to say: liberty in the spiritual sphere, equality in the political and legal sphere, and fraternity in the economic sphere.

With an urgent appeal to those present to consider the seriousness of the hour and to follow the path to recovery of the social conditions offered by the threefold social organism, the speaker concluded his more than an hour and a half long remarks. The increasing attention of the audience and their generous applause showed that his words had not gone unheeded. Of course, given the scope and difficulty of the subject matter and the novelty of his ideas, Dr. Steiner's remarks left a lot of questions unanswered; and so there could be no lack of concerns and misunderstandings. These were expressed in the debate, which lasted until after 12 noon and in which 16 speakers took part, along with plenty of approval. We must refrain here from going into all the details of the debate. It was noteworthy, however, that despite various factual concerns, all speakers except for a few, whose speech was cut short by the assembly itself due to continuous unobjective personal attacks against Dr. Steiner, had received a deep impression of the seriousness and power of Steiner's ideas. It was particularly impressive that two representatives of proletarian parties spoke warmly and gratefully in favor of Dr. Steiner, while Mr. Kommerzienrat Molt from Stuttgart pointed out that he had already implemented Steiner's idea in his company by appointing a workers' council freely elected by the workers, as far as possible under the current circumstances, and that in his opinion nothing stood in the way of the general practical implementation of Steiner's ideas. Dr. Unger announced that a cultural council had just been established in Stuttgart with the aim of establishing a free, independent cultural life. Prof. Wilbrand, as a scientific expert, advocated the feasibility of Steiner's ideas and thus refuted a number of concerns that had been expressed from other quarters. Dr. Steiner attempted to do the same in a longer closing speech, in which he reminded the audience that one should not weigh the new against the old, but that one must first of all adjust oneself completely in order to be able to understand the proposed new order. In particular, Steiner reminded the audience once again that the three limbs of the social organism are not in hostile opposition to each other, as is apparently often assumed, but that they mutually enrich each other in a peaceful division of labor. The idea of threefolding does not serve any party or template, but the inner recovery of our ailing social organism. - Strong applause from the participants, who stayed until after 12 noon, thanked the speaker for his powerful remarks.

Some may ask what we can do to help implement Steiner's ideas. The answer is to join the “Bund zur Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus” (Stuttgart office, Champignystraße 17) and thus strengthen the effectiveness of its efforts, so that they can prove themselves in the difficult times that will undoubtedly come as a remedy against the danger of Russian-style conditions. The Federation is non-partisan and calls on members of all parties to join in a common rescue mission. Steiner's idea has already been understood and taken up by many thousands from all parties. This proves that the idea of threefold social order is capable of inspiring the broadest circles with hope for an inner recovery of our social organism and of building a bridge between parties that are still hostile to each other today.

In view of this momentous fact, small concerns and anxieties about practical feasibility should recede, especially since Dr. Steiner allows the greatest freedom of movement here and in no way prejudges one's own judgment and the coming development. He says about this in his book 'The Core Points of the Social Question': 'A way of thinking that, like the one presented here, wants to be true to reality will never want to do more than point to the direction in which the regulation can move. If one enters sympathetically into this direction, then one will always find something appropriate in the concrete individual case. But the right thing will have to be found for life practice out of the spirit of the matter, out of the particular circumstances. The more realistic a way of thinking is, the less it will want to establish laws and rules for particular cases out of preconceived demands.

The first practical step that Steiner's ideas should take into consideration for workers is that they should immediately join together in the sense of the call of the working committee of the Federation for the Threefold Social Organism to form proper, free works councils, which should form the core for the future free organization of the cooperative economy. For intellectual workers in particular, but also for everyone else, it will be a matter of joining the newly founded Cultural Council, whose call is loud:

To all people! For centuries, our cultural life (school, science, art and religion) served the state and the economy. Legal paragraphs and regulations turned us into uninspired, dependent beings. Tightly bound into the one-sided economic life, there was no escape from the social hierarchy. A people completely untrained in politics – that is how the world war catastrophe found us. The collapse was the result. The lack of social insight on the part of the ruling class overlooked the needs of the proletariat, which had no property of its own and only received the crumbs of cultural achievements, while otherwise wasting itself in the struggle for its existence. The proletariat hoped that the revolution would liberate it from soul-destroying capitalism. Within economic life, it sought its salvation only in economic betterment. In truth, however, the urge for human dignity is striving to break through. Only in the cultural sphere, through schooling and education of the mind, can the great goal be achieved. There is a threatening danger that cultural life will be enslaved once more, with intellectual products being stamped as commodities. This must not be allowed to happen if human culture is not to perish. The whole of intellectual life must be placed on a free and independent footing. Only then can it fruitfully fertilize economic and political life. Only in this way will it be possible to truly educate the truly capable. Just as economic life is administered by the works council, so must intellectual life be administered by a cultural council. In it, all those must come together who are seriously willing, each in his or her own position, to renew intellectual life and to work towards it, free from the influences of the state and the interests of the economy, so that it can follow its own laws. A spiritual worker is anyone who strives for true humanity. His place of work is in the cultural council. Whether he is active in the old order in the political, economic or cultural field, whether he is a proletarian or non-proletarian, everyone should join immediately before it is too late! The time is serious!

In this foundation, we have the germ for building a free intellectual life. For all these organizations, the undersigned is willing to accept correspondence and forward it to Stuttgart.

Hermann Heisler