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Delivered in the context of post-war cultural and social chaos, these lectures form part of Rudolf Steiner’s energetic efforts to cultivate social understanding and renew culture through his innovative ideas based on ‘threefolding’. Steiner develops a subtle and discerning perception of how social dynamics could change and heal if they were founded on real insight into our threefold nature as individuals, social beings and economic participants in the world. He doesn’t offer a programmatic agenda for change, but a real foundation from which change can organically grow. Social forms and reforms, says Steiner, are ‘created together’, not imposed by lone geniuses. Nevertheless, the detail of some of the thoughts and ideas he presents here as a possible model – down to the economic specifics of commodity, labour, taxation, ground rent and capitalism itself – are staggering in their clarity and originality. This is no mystic effusion but a heartfelt plea, backed by profound insights, to change our thinking and the world we live in. As he points out, thoughts create reality, and so it is vital how and what we think. Among the many contemporary and highly-relevant topics Steiner discusses here are: the nature of money and capital; taxation and the state; free enterprise and initiative; capitalism and Marxism; the relationship between employer and employee; ‘added value’ theory and the concept of commodity; and ‘class consciousness’, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
Psychological cognition; The social question; The social question and theosophy; Memoranda of 1917; The metamorphosis of intelligence; Culture, law and economy; Central Europe between East and West.
The healthy social life is found When in the mirror of each human being The whole community finds its reflection And when in the community The virtue of each one is living. Rudolf Steiner understood that human social, ethical, and moral development lagged far behind what had been achieved in knowledge, science, and technology; and that what human beings had achieved in these fields rested on what caused social and moral life to be untenable for so many, namely, the universal rule of egoism and self-interest. In 1905, a historic year of political and economic crises, Rudolf Steiner formulated what he called the basic "social axiom" or "the cosmic law of work": The well-being of an entire group of individuals who work together is the greater, the less individuals claim the income resulting from their own accomplishments for themselves, that is, the more they contribute this income to their fellow workers and the more their own needs are met not through their own efforts but through the efforts of others. Underlying this "fundamental social law" is the seminal realization that human social reality pivots on the question of work and compensation. Does one work for oneself, for one's salary? Or does one work for others, the community or larger society? For Rudolf Steiner, it was critical to understand that work should be a free deed. In other words, work and income should be completely separated. In this profound work, Peter Selg traces how, at the end of the Great War, with Steiner's tireless efforts for the threefold movement, this fundamental social-spiritual insight moved into the center of his activities as an overriding practical and spiritual concern, rephrased as the "motto of social ethics," and deepened and filled with the full reality of Christ's teachings and life. Anyone interested in a just, equitable, healthy, and spirit-based social future should read The Fundamental Social Law.
Although this book was first published in 1919, it remains highly relevant to social problems encountered today. Uniquely, Steiner's social thinking is not based on intellectual theory, but on a profound perception of the archetypal spiritual nature of social life. As he suggests in this classic work, society has three distinct realms - the economic, the political (individual human rights), and the cultural (spiritual). While social life as a whole is a unity, the autonomy of these three sectors should be respected if our increasing social problems are to be resolved. Steiner relates the ideals of 'liberty, equality and fraternity' to modern society. Economics calls for fraternity (brotherhood), political rights require equality, while culture should be characterised by liberty (freedom). The slogans of the French Revolution, he suggests, can only become truly manifest if our social thinking is transformed to correspond to the spiritual reality.
These lectures give a fresh and exceptionally clear approach to the anthroposophical path of knowledge. Imagination is described as a widening of our experience of memory to cosmic dimensions. Inspiration is described as an extension of forgetting. Intuition is shown to be the means by which the spiritual world bears fruit for the future of human evolution.
'Whatever turbulent outward events occur in the world, whatever form is taken by things seeking to work their way out of the depths of human evolution, we only really hearken to the true, underlying nature of these events ... if we observe the world from a spiritual perspective.' – Rudolf Steiner. In seeking to heal the many social crises of our time, Rudolf Steiner urges us to turn away from 'fixed principles, theories or social dogmas' and to rediscover the real nature of the human being. This inner reality – that cannot be understood in materialistic or deterministic ways – is the only basis on which society can truly be founded. But it is not sufficient to speak of well-meaning ideas, he says, unless we are also active in working for change; change that begins with each of us. In 1919, a year marked by strong social and political upheavals, Steiner was deeply concerned with questions relating to society. Having published a book on the subject (Towards Social Renewal), he embarked on a major campaign to publicize his 'threefold' social ideas. In addition to public lectures, however, Steiner sought to deepen the subject in a series of talks to members of the Anthroposophical Society. These lectures, gathered in this volume, reveal the 'inner' or 'esoteric' aspects of the social question. They complement Steiner's very practical efforts to realize threefolding in the historical context of his time. Whilst Steiner's suggestions for social change may not seem self-evident to pragmatic thinking, they will strike a resonant chord in many who seek deeper answers to the social problems of our times – problems that politicians seem unable to remedy. Amidst the many themes tackled here, Steiner addresses the issue of nationalism as a retrograde tendency; the tasks of Central Europe and Britain in relation to the East; the incarnation of Ahriman in the West, and the historical incarnation of Lucifer in the third millennium BC.
Lecture collection: January 19, 1911 - January 25, 1912 (CW 60/61) "In our long human journey, individual and collective, the journey that science calls evolution, many indeed are the turning points. But they are not so much turning points in outer, material manifestation in the fossils of paleontology, for those fossils are only the shed garments worn by humans in an earlier age, vestments designed by providence to meet the need of a changing human consciousness moving through time. Where the real evolution occurs, for which the necessary outer garments are tailored over time, is in the realm of consciousness as it transitions from spirit to matter and back to spirit." --Edward Reaugh Smith (from the introduction) Rudolf Steiner gave the six lectures in this volume between January 1911 and January 1912. Soon after Steiner's death in 1925, Marie Steiner--realizing the importance of those lectures for understanding the evolution of consciousness and the central role of the Christ event in that process--collected them under the title Turning Points in Spiritual History. According to Rudolf Steiner, Earth is the crucible of cosmic evolution, and earthly evolution is accomplished through humanity. Further, there were five turning points--or critical, transformative moments--in the process leading to the culmination of the Christ's incarnation through the Mystery of Golgotha. Each of those five points is exemplified by an individual: Zarathustra, Hermes, Moses, Elijah, and the Buddha. Each of these lectures deals in turn with one of these great beings. In them, Steiner provides us with astonishing views of esoteric history and shows the remarkable ways in which the spiritual world guided and nurtured the spiritual evolution in preparation for the Christ's appearance on Earth.
12 lectures and a question-and-answer session, Stuttgart, Jan. 1–2, and Feb. 12–17, 1921 (CW 338) From time to time, reading Rudolf Steiner’s Collected Works, one encounters a previously unknown set of lectures that seems to promise no more than a rather specialized content, of interest primarily to those concerned with its apparent theme—here a preparatory course for those about to embark on a speaking tour to promote the “threefolding” of society. Then one discovers various subthemes that unexpectedly spark new insights, not only into Anthroposophy, but also into Steiner himself, who suddenly appears in a new light. In such cases, we may encounter a passage or lecture that illuminates, challenges, and ultimately transforms what we think we know, and our perspective changes. Our habitual understanding falls away, and we grasp that what we are reading is not information or description; it is a call to act in a new way. Thereby, we are no longer simply readers, but also participants in the adventure of Anthroposophy. Here are two lectures given in Stuttgart, January 1921, at the request of, and to, anthroposophists from Breslau in Upper Silesia, who had written for guidance in a last-ditch attempt to interject threefold ideas into the political discussions surrounding the upcoming referendum to determine whether Upper Silesia would remain part of Germany or revert to Poland. Ten lectures were given about a month later, aimed to prepare speakers to travel around Germany to promote the idea of threefolding. Knowing that their task would not be easy, that it would be risky and even dangerous, Steiner paints the “big picture”—the “deep ground”—from which they were called to make their case. Reading these lectures, we come to realize that everything Steiner enjoins, and the way he does so, applies to a much greater field than what he is explicitly addressing. The participants—who would be going out to speak—were doing so as representatives of Anthroposophy. When they speak of threefolding, it would be as only one manifestation of what living Anthroposophy can be. As such, they must themselves become living manifestations of Anthroposophy. From this point of view, this course could also be called “How to Be an Anthroposophist.” This volume is a translation from German of Wie wirkt man für den Impuls der Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus? (GA 338). Cover image and frontispiece: Rudolf Steiner lecturing in the carpentry workshop, c. 1915 in Dornach, Switzerland. Photo by Max Benzinger; © Verlag am Goetheanum.
‘In the case of a solar eclipse, the evil that has spread over the earth can be carried out into the cosmos to wreak more havoc there, whereas in the case of a lunar eclipse, people who absolutely want to be possessed by evil thoughts can receive them from the cosmos.’ In the first full translation of this lecture course, Rudolf Steiner implores his audience to recognize the connections between the material and spiritual worlds. Eclipses of the sun and moon, for example, are ‘forces at work in the universe, just like those we study today in the clinic or in the chemistry or physics laboratory’. Even everyday thinking can have a strong impact on the outer world. Materialistic thought, he says, can quite literally atomize our surroundings: ‘if all human beings start to think that everything has to be explained in terms of atoms… then the earth will actually turn into atoms… these false ideas create false realities…’ Steiner speaks of the ‘world of will’ as being three-dimensional, the ‘world of feeling’ as two-dimensional, and the ‘world of thinking’ as one-dimensional. The ego itself is dimensionless, and only inner, living thinking can grasp the spiritual-mental. He discusses key cultural figures such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Herman Grimm and Julian the Apostate, and introduces multiple additional topics, including the effect of planetary forces on humans; the healing impacts of metals and other substances; the revitalization of thinking through meditation and concentration; the effects of the separation of science, art and religion; and the necessary transition from philosophy to anthroposophy. Thirteen lectures, Dornach, Jun.–Jul. 1922, GA 213