Explain Steiner’s teachings about human psychology. What are the differences between threefold, fourfold, and sevenfold human nature? How does the evolutionary dimension enter in?

Basic Anthroposophy

All published by Keryx on Amazon

1 CW 21; On the Enigmas of the Soul, 2017.

2 CW 322; The Boundaries of Science, 2017.

3 CW 135. What Do Reincarnation and Karma Mean to Contemporary Life?, 2018.

4 Basic Karma Lectures, 2018.

5 CW 25; Three Steps of Anthroposophy: Philosophy, Cosmology, Religion, 2018.

6 CW 289; Architecture as a Total Work of Art, 2018.

7 Rethinking the Social Organism, 2019.

8 CW 234; “The Inner Weaver, the Inner Musician, and the Cognitive Power of Love,” 2019.

9 CW 324; Observation of Nature, Experiment, Mathematics: The Stages of Knowledge in Anthroposophical Research: Supplemental Materials and Commentary, forthcoming.

General Introduction

Steiner inaugurates the idea of threefold human nature in the short appendix IV.6 entitled “Human Physical and the Spiritual Dependencies” in GA 21; Enigmas of the Soul, trans. Frederick Amrine, intro. Craig Holdrege ([Amazon:] Keryx, 2017), originally published in 1917. There he posits that human thinking is based in the nervous and sensory system, human feeling in the rhythmic system, and human willing in the metabolic and limb system. He then proceeds to repeat and elaborate this notion in countless lectures thereafter. The most important elaboration is an entire social theory that is based upon this threefold division in human nature.

A direct translation of the rather awkward German phrase “soziale Dreiglierung,” the “threefold social order” refers to Steiner’s social theory generally. Like much other radical political thought, Steiner’s begins with the inspired but misunderstood and misapplied ideals of the French Revolution: liberté, égalité, fraternité.

But Steiner turns all conventional social theory on its head by claiming that altruism (fraternité) should be the guiding principle in the economic sphere. He argued that ever-increasing division of labor actually underscores the truth of this principle, because it means that more and more, we work not for ourselves, but for others. Altruism’s main practical form should be an “associative economics,” in which producers and consumers confer and cooperate to produce what is really wanted as efficiently as possible. A good example of this idea in practice would be “community farms” or CSAs, in which consumers buy shares, have a voice in deciding what will be grown, frequent the farm, and shield the farmers from the vicissitudes of weather and the market by guaranteeing their income.

The “middle sphere” of rights and law should be governed by the principle of égalité or equality, and Steiner insisted unequivocally, at a time when many were unsure, that democracy is the only appropriate political form. This is the proper sphere of politics, and the only sphere in which politics should be determinative; moreover, Steiner also locates here not only labor and the wages of labor, which he views as fundamental human rights, but also – even more surprisingly – money and banks, whose proper function is to allocate capital justly for the good of all. Steiner’s thoughts on money are fascinating: for example, he views it not as a universal exchange commodity, but rather as a certificate of entitlement, and he argues that money exhibits fundamentally different qualities as it circulates through the three spheres. For Steiner, capital is born as entrepreneurial idea and initiative within the spiritual-cultural sphere, then manifests as loan money within the rights sphere, deploys itself as purchase money in the economic sphere, and ultimately yields revenue and profit to repay loans and support educational and cultural institutions with gift money, which allows the cycle to begin again. One practical outcome of Steiner’s thinking in this realm has been the creation of anthroposophical banks, which function more like non-profit foundations supporting worthy causes. Some of these banks publish regular newsletters, inviting depositors to choose among loan applicants who describe their projects.

For Steiner, freedom (liberté) should characterize not the economic, but rather the spiritual-cultural realm: in a healthy social order, it is not economic corporations, but rather ideas that should compete freely. Schools, churches, museums, universities, and other institutions belonging here should be shielded as much as possible from political and economic forces. Many different cultures should be allowed to flourish independently within each political entity. Ideally, cultural institutions should be funded by free gifts, and they should be self-governing. In this sphere, the cultivation of each person’s full creative potential should be an end in itself; schools are not for indoctrinating or even training: they are for educating. The Waldorf school movement is a shining example of these principles in action.

Introduction to This Specific Volume

The germ of the threefold social order is the sixth appendix to On the Enigmas of the Soul, where Steiner first laid out what he claimed to been working on for 30 years.[footnoteRef:1] His all-important discovery (oddly buried in the appendices of another work) was the tripartite division of human nature into thinking or representation, feeling, and willing, each of which has its locus principally (but not exclusively) in the nervous and sensory system, the rhythmical system, and the metabolic or will system respectively. [1: GA 21; Enigmas of the Soul, trans. Frederick Amrine, intro. Craig Holdrege ([Amazon:] Keryx, 2017), ch. IV 6, “The Physical and the Spiritual Dependencies of the Human Being,” pp. 118-127. The translation has been slightly modified for this edition.]

“The Roots of Social Life” was one of twenty articles from the newspaper The Threefold Social Order which are included in the collection entitled The Renewal of the Social Organism.[footnoteRef:2] This piece provides an excellent transition from the aforementioned appendix to the threefold social order proper. Here we learn more precisely the analogy between the human and the social organism applies. We must avoid “an empty game of analogies”; rather, study of the human organism trains a kind of thinking that can overcome traditional assumptions and the “sectarian passions” of party programs. This form of training will lead inevitably, Steiner claims, to the idea of the tripartition of the social organism. [2: Rudolf Steiner, The Renewal of the Social Organism. Foreword Joseph Weizenbaum. Translated by E. Bowen-Wedgewood and Frederick Amrine. Spring Valley, New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1985. Readers will want to consult this entire volume, which contains many excellent, short pieces. The translation has been thoroughly revised for this edition.]

“The True Form of the Social Question Grasped from the Life of Modern Humanity” is the first chapter of Toward Social Renewal.[footnoteRef:3] In it, Steiner recounts incisively the dilemma of the modern proletariat. They are longing for spiritual ideas, but instead they are taught the Marxist notion that spiritual and cultural ideals are unreal, merely the vaporous superstructure of real social and economic forces. This is the real heart of the proletariat’s striving: they long for substantive concepts that will give their lives meaning, but they are fed a doctrine that reduces all spiritual content to mere ideology. Only a spiritual worldview can give the proletariat what it needs and wants. [3: GA 23; Towards Social Renewal: Rethinking the Basis of Society, translated by Matthew Barton (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1999). Earlier translations of this text bore various titles: The Threefold Commonwealth (London: Anthroposophical Publishing Co., 1923); The Threefold Social Order (n.p.: Anthroposophic Press, 1966; rpt. 1972); Towards Social Renewal (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1977; rpt. 1992). An entirely new translation has been prepared for this edition.]

“The Threefold Social Organism, Democracy and Socialism”[footnoteRef:4] is a clarion call for democracy at the heart of social life. We must institute a sphere that is insulated from economics, in which every person is seen as equal. But what becomes of freedom if all are viewed as equal? What of individual talent and creativity? This need points to the necessity of creating a third sphere yet again insulated from the other two, an autonomous spiritual-cultural realm. [4: Another excerpt from The Renewal of the Social Organism. This translation has also been somewhat modified for this edition.]

Human Physical and the Spiritual Dependencies

I would like to present a sketch of certain conclusions I have reached regarding the soul and the physical body. I may add that, in doing so, I place on record the results of anthroposophical research extending over a period of thirty years. Only recently has it become possible for me to formulate the matter in question as thoughts expressible in words, so that I could bring what I have been striving for to a kind of provisional closure. If I may be permitted, I would like to give the results here only allusively. Their foundation can certainly be established with the scientific means present today. This would, however, be the object of a substantial book, which present circumstances do not permit me to write.

If we are seeking the relation between the soul and the body, we cannot take as our starting point Brentano’s[footnoteRef:5] division of the experience of the soul … into representing[footnoteRef:6] judging, and the phenomena of loving and hating. Partitioning in this way, we have to distort all of the relationships, and thus we cannot arrive at any objective results. On the contrary, we have to start from that very threefold division into representation, feeling, and will that Brentano rejected. If we comprehend all of the soul’s activity that is experienced as representation, and if we then seek the bodily processes that this psychic experience is related to, then we shall find the corresponding nexus by relying substantially upon the findings of current physiological psychology. The somatic correlatives of the psychic element in representation are observable in the processes of the nervous system, extending into the sense organs on the one hand, and into the inner bodily organization on the other. Even though we will have to rethink much of what contemporary science does from an anthroposophical point of view, nevertheless a superb foundation is present in that science. [5: See Appendix 1.] [6: See Appendix 2.]

It is otherwise when we seek to determine the somatic correlatives for feeling and will. There we have first to blaze the right trail within the data of current physiology. If we have accomplished this, we find that, just as representation is related to nervous activity, so also must feeling be brought into relationship with that vital rhythm which has its center in the activity of breathing, and is connected with it. We should bear in mind that, for this purpose, the rhythm of breathing, and everything that accompanies it, must be pursued into the outermost, peripheral parts of the organism.

In order to arrive at concrete results in this realm, the data of physiological research must be pursued in a direction which is today still decidedly unfamiliar. Only when we accomplish this do all the contradictions disappear that first present themselves when feeling and the rhythm of breathing are brought together. What at first looks like an objection turns out, on closer inspection, to be a proof.

Take a single example from the broad range that ought to be pursued here. The experience of music rests upon a feeling. But the content of a musical form lives in representation, which is mediated by the perceptions of hearing. How does musical feeling arise? The representation of the tonal formation, which rests upon the organ of hearing and the neural process, is not yet this musical experience. The latter arises when the rhythm of breathing, continuing further into the brain, encounters what is accomplished by the ear and the nervous system. And the soul now lives not merely in what is heard and represented, but rather it lives within the breathing rhythm. It experiences what is released by the breathing rhythm when, in a sense, that which is happening in the nervous system impinges upon this rhythmic life. Once we have seen the physiology of respiration in its true light, we are led at every turn to the recognition of the dictum: The soul experiences feeling in that it is supported by the rhythm of breathing just as the neural processes support representation.

And with regard to willing, we find that it is supported in the same way by the processes of metabolism. Again we have to take into consideration the innumerable offshoots and ramifications of these processes, which extend throughout the entire organism. Just as, when something is “represented,” a neural process takes place, on the basis of which the soul becomes conscious of what it represented; and moreover, when something is “felt,” a modification is effected in the rhythm of breathing, through which a feeling rises up in the soul: by the same token, when something is “willed,” a metabolic process unfolds that is the somatic foundation for what the soul experiences as willing.

Now in the soul, a fully conscious, waking experience is present only in the representation mediated by the nervous system. What is mediated by the rhythm of breathing lives in normal consciousness with the strength enjoyed by dream representations. That includes everything of the nature of feeling, and also all affects, passions and so forth. Willing, which is based upon the metabolism, is not experienced to any higher degree than the dull awareness of sleep. Close examination of what is in question here reveals that we experience willing entirely differently from representing. The latter is something like looking at a surface that has been painted a color; willing, however, is like looking at a black surface in the middle of a colored field. We “see” within the surface, upon which there is no color, because in contrast to the environment, from which color impressions come, no such impressions are coming from this surface. We “have the idea” of willing, because within the soul’s experience of ideational experience a patch of non-ideation inserts itself, much as the interruptions of consciousness experienced in sleep insert themselves into the continuum of conscious life. It is to these differing degrees of conscious experience that the soul owes the manifold variety of its experiences in representation, feeling, and willing.

Theodor Ziehen is led to significant observations on feeling and willing in his Guide to Physiological Psychology.[footnoteRef:7] This book is in many ways exemplary within contemporary scientific notions of the relation between the physical and the psychic. Representation in its various guises is related to neural function, which is entirely in accord with the anthroposophical approach. But when it comes to feeling, Ziehen has this to say (see lecture 9 in his book): [7: Theodor Ziehen (1862-1950), was a doctor and a psychiatrist. See his Leitfaden der physiologischen Psychologie – in 15 Vorlesungen [Guide to Physiological Psychology – in 15 Lectures], Jena, 1900. Theodor Ziehen was a great, universal thinker: contemporaries compared him to Einstein and Leibniz. While a medical student he studied the writings of David Hume, Spinoza, Plato, and George Berkeley. He was an assistant to Otto Binswanger at Jena, where one of his patients was Friedrich Nietzsche. As the holder of the most prominent chair of psychiatry in Germany, Ziehen published nearly 450 works of brain anatomy, brain physiology, psychiatry, neurology, anatomy, child psychology, and education. He was the author of a textbook entitled Die Geisteskrankheiten des Kindesalters [Mental Diseases of Childhood], which was reportedly the first systematic work on child psychiatry in Germany. He was a practitioner of associative psychology, and he advocated monistic positivism, or what he called the “principle of immanence.” His idealistic cognitive theory opposed the growing influence of materialism. [Wikipedia]]

The older psychology, almost without exception, treats the affects as manifestations as a special, independent faculty of the soul. Kant[footnoteRef:8] placed the feeling of desire and aversion as a separate faculty between the cognitive and the appetitive faculties, and he expressly emphasized that a further derivation of these three faculties of the soul from a common ground would not be possible. As opposed to this, our previous discussions have already taught us that the feelings of desire and aversion have in fact no such independent existence; they arise as properties or marks of sensations and representations rather than as so-called “notes of feeling.” [8: Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was surely the most important modern philosopher, a great revolutionary who changed philosophy utterly and irrevocably. Hans-Georg Gadamer went so far as to argue that all subsequent philosophy has been little more than a series of attempts to rewrite Kant’s Third Critique. He was the founder and the inspiration of both German Idealism and German philosophical Romanticism, and the German philosophers within those movements who influenced Steiner most directly (Goethe, Fichte, Schiller, and Hegel) were all profoundly indebted to Kant while simultaneously criticizing what they saw as shortcomings in his philosophy. Fichte and Schiller both described their philosophical work as attempts to rewrite the letter of Kant in the spirit of Kant. As a philosopher, Steiner was also both indebted to Kant and at the same time critical of him, although his most trenchant criticisms are usually directed not at Kant’s actual positions, but rather the reductive neo-Kantianism of Steiner’s contemporaries. For more on Steiner’s difficult relationship to Kant, see Frederick Amrine, “Rudolf Steiner as a Philosopher,” Research Bulletin [of the Research Institute for Waldorf Education], 19, No. 1 (2014), pp. 7-18.]

Thus this way of thinking concedes to feeling no independence in the life of the soul; it sees it as a mere attribute of representation. The consequence is that it sees not only the life of representation, but also the life of feeling as supported by the neural processes. The nervous system is thus the somatic element to which the whole of the soul is appropriated. Yet this whole paradigm is based upon presupposing unconsciously precisely what it pretends to find. It accepts as psychic only what is related to neural processes, and must for that reason see what cannot be assimilated to the nervous system, namely feeling, as having no independent existence, as a mere sign of ideation. To abandon this blind alley and return instead to unprejudiced observation of the soul is to be most definitively convinced of the independence of the life of feeling. Secondly, unprejudiced appreciation of the physiological data will provide the data that feeling is, as already indicated, to be aligned with the rhythm of breathing.

The natural scientific mode of thinking denies to the will any independent existence in the life of the soul. Unlike feeling, willing is not even a sign of representation. But this denial, too, is simply based upon an assignation of everything in the psyche to neural process (cf. the 15th lecture in Theodor Ziehen’s Physiological Psychology). Yet the plain fact is that what constitutes the peculiar quality of willing cannot be related to actual neural processes. Precisely when it has been worked out with the exemplary clarity that Theodor Ziehen displays, we can be forced to conclude that the analysis of soul processes in their relation to the life of the body “affords no support to the assumption of a special faculty of will.” And yet, unprejudiced contemplation of the soul compels us to recognize the independent life of the will; and objective insight into the physiological data shows that the will, as such, has to be tied not to neural but rather to metabolic processes.

If we want to gain clear concepts in this realm, then we must look at the physiological and psychological data in the light that is required by reality itself. We must not however look at it, as so often happens in contemporary physiology and psychology, in the light of preconceived notions, definitions – not to mention theoretical sympathies and antipathies. Above all, we must focus keenly on the relationship between neural activity, the rhythm of breathing, and metabolism. For these forms of activity subsist not alongside, but rather in one another; they interpenetrate and pass over into one another.

Metabolic activity is present everywhere in the organism; it permeates the organs of rhythm and also neural activity. But the somatic basis of feeling is not in rhythm, and the basis of representation is not in neural activity; rather, in both of these realms it must be ascribed to the effect of willing permeating both rhythm and the nerves. Only a materialistic prejudice can relate to representation what exists in the nerve as metabolic activity. Observation that is rooted in reality says something very different. It is compelled to recognize that metabolism is present in the nerve insofar as it is permeated by willing. Likewise with the somatic apparatus for rhythm. Everything within that organ that is of the nature of metabolism has to do with the willing present in that organ. We have to bring willing into connection with metabolism, and feeling with rhythmic activity, irrespective of the particular organs in which metabolism or rhythm reveal themselves. In the nerves something else occurs that is entirely different from metabolism and rhythm. The somatic processes in the nervous system, which provide the basis for representation, are difficult to grasp physiologically. That is because wherever there is neural activity, it is accompanied by the representation of normal consciousness. But the converse is also true: where there is no representation, there can never be found neural activity, but only metabolic activity in the nerves, and by way of suggestion, rhythmic occurrence.

Physiology will never arrive at concepts that are in keeping with the facts so long as it fails to see that the actual activity of the nerves cannot become at all an object of physiological sensory observation. Anatomy and physiology must bring themselves to recognize that they can find neural activity only through a method of exclusion. What is not visible to the senses is neural activity – though the fact that it must be there, and also the specific nature of its activity, can be inferred from what is yielded by the sensory. We can arrive at a positive representation of this neural activity only if we see in it that material process through which, in the sense of the first chapter of this book, the purely spiritual and psychic substantiality of the vital content of representation is numbed down into the deadened representations of normal consciousness. Without this concept that has to be introduced into physiology, it will have no possibility of saying what neural activity is. Physiology has developed methods today which conceal rather than reveal this concept.

And psychology, too, has shut the door in her own face. Look, for instance, at the effects of a Herbartian[footnoteRef:9] psychology. It confines its attention to the process of representation alone, and sees in feeling and in willing only the effects of the life of representation. But these effects vanish for cognition unless we keep a candid eye on actual feeling and willing. Because of this vanishing, we do not arrive at any real correlation of feeling and willing to the somatic processes. [9: Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841), a German philosopher, psychologist and founder of pedagogy as an academic discipline, who developed a metaphysical ideology of pluralistic realism (especially important for psychology) that rejected notions of faculties and innate ideas and constructed a full theory for a new kind of pedagogy.]

The body as a whole, and not merely the nervous activity impounded in it, is the physical basis of psychic life. And just as the latter, for normal consciousness, can be circumscribed as representing, feeling, and willing, somatic life is comprised of neural activity, rhythmic occurrences, and metabolic processes.

The question at once arises: How on the one hand does actual sensory perception inhabit the organism, in which neural activity only terminates, and the faculty of movement on the other, into which the will flows? Unprejudiced observation shows that both do not belong the same sense to the organism as do neural activity, rhythmic occurrences, and metabolic processes. What occurs in the senses is not something that belongs immediately to the organism at all. In the senses, the external world extends like gulfs into the organism’s own existence. In that the soul encompasses what takes place in the senses, it does not take part in the inner, organic events, but rather in the extension of the outer events into the organism. (I have discussed these relationships in an epistemological lecture to the Bologna Philosophers’ Congress[footnoteRef:10] in 1911.) [10: Lecture of April 8, 1911, “Die psychologischen Grundlagen und die erkenntnistheoretische Stellung der Anthroposophie [The Psychological Foundations and the Epistemological Stance of Anthroposophy]” in GA 35; Philosophie und Anthroposophie: Gesammelte Aufsätze 1904-1918 [Philosophy and Anthroposophy: Collected Essays 1904-1918], pp. 111-144. Translated by Frederick Amrine as Rudolf Steiner, The Bologna Lecture: The Psychological Foundations and Epistemological Stance of Anthroposophy. Keryx, 2018.]

And in a process of movement, one also has to do physically not with something whose essence lies within the organism, but rather with an effect of the organism in states of equilibrium (or other dynamic relation) between the organism and its environment. Within the organism it is only a metabolic process that can be ascribed to willing; but the process that is liberated is at the same time something substantial within the equilibrium, or the dynamics, of the external world. Exerting volition, the soul overreaches the domain of the organism and participates with its activity in the happenings of the external world.

A great confusion has been brought into the consideration of this whole matter by the separation of the nerves into sensory and motor. However firmly anchored this division might appear to contemporary scientific thinking, it is not firmly founded in unprejudiced observation. The findings of physiology on the basis of neural sections or the pathological elimination of certain nerves do not prove what the experiment or the experience yields, but rather something very different. They prove that the distinction between sensory and motor nerves does not exist at all. Both kinds of nerves are essentially alike. The so-called motor nerve does not in that sense serve movement as the doctrine assumes. Rather, as the bearer of neural activity, it serves to provide an inner perception of the particular metabolic process that underlies willing, just as the sensory nerve contributes to perception of what is coming about in the sensory organ. Until neurological theory begins to work with clear concepts in this regard, no satisfactory assignation of the life of the soul to that of the body can arise.

*

In the same way that we can, psycho-physiologically, seek the relations of the life of the soul that run their course in representation, feeling, and willing, so also we can, by anthroposophical means, strive for knowledge of the relations which the soul of normal consciousness bears to the spiritual. And there you will find that the anthroposophical methods described in in these and others of my writings that, while representation has a basis in the body in the form of neural activity, so it also has a basis in the spiritual. The soul stands away from the body in the other direction, in a relationship to something spiritually substantial, which is the foundation for representation in normal consciousness. This spiritual substantiality can however be experienced only by Intuitive cognition. And it is so experienced, in that its content displays itself to the intuiting consciousness in the form of articulated Imaginations.

Just as, toward the body, representation rests on the activity of the nerves, so does it stream from the other side out of something spiritually substantial, which reveals itself in the form of Imagination.[footnoteRef:11] This spiritual substantiality is what is called in my writings the etheric or life body.[footnoteRef:12] (And in doing so, I invariably point out that the term “body” is no more vulnerable to objection than the other term “ether,” because my exposition clearly shows that what is intended is not material.) And this life body (in the 4th book of the first year of Das Reich, I used the term “formative-forces body”[footnoteRef:13]) is the spiritual whence the representational life of normal consciousness flows from birth (or conception) toward death. [11: Steiner refers constantly to Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition. Like Wordsworth, Steiner saw Imagination as more than reason, as “reason in its most exalted mood.” A good way to understand Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition is to recall, and then expand, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, in which everyday thoughts are revealed to be but the shadows of a higher, more active and intuitive thinking activity. Steiner followed the German Idealists and the Romantics in calling this mode of intuitive thinking Imagination. By the same token, Steiner argued that there are higher modes of cognition of which everyday feeling and willing are but the shadows of Inspiration and Intuition respectively. For a brief introduction, see Rudolf Steiner, Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition. Trans. and ed. Frederick Amrine. [Amazon:], Keryx, 2018. The most systematic treatment is arguably GA 12; The Stages of Higher Knowledge: Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition (Great Barrington, MA: SteinerBooks, 2009). ] [12: See Appendix 3.] [13: See Das Reich, 1 (1917), Book 4, “Weitere Ausführungen über die Erkenntnis vom Zustand zwischen dem Tode und einer neuen Geburt [Further Discussion of the Cognition of the State between Death and a New Birth],” pp. 486-499. ]

The feeling component of normal consciousness is founded, on the side of the body, on rhythmic occurrence. From the spiritual side it streams from a spiritual substantiality, which is discovered within anthroposophical research through methods that I characterize in my writings as those of Inspiration. (Whereby I would ask you again to consider that I mean by the term only what I have circumscribed; my designation should not be confused with what is often understood colloquially as inspiration.) To Intuitive consciousness is revealed the spiritual substantiality, lying at the base of the soul, and to be comprehended through Inspiration, that is the human experience as a spiritual being beyond birth and death. It is in this realm where anthroposophy brings its spiritual investigations to bear upon the question of immortality. As the mortal part of the feeling human being reveals itself through rhythmic occurrences in the body, so does the immortal, spiritual soul-kernel reveal itself in the Inspired content of Intuitive consciousness.

Willing, which rests on the somatic basis of metabolic processes, streams forth from the spirit for Intuitive consciousness through what I term authentic Intuitions. What is, from one point of view, the lowest somatic activity, the metabolism, corresponds in the spirit to something highest in the spirit: what expresses itself through Intuitions. Hence representation, which relies on neural activity, comes almost perfectly to manifestation; but the will has only a pale reflection in the bodily processes of metabolism associated with it. True representation is vital, but as conditioned by the body it is deadened. The content remains the same. Real willing, also what realizes itself in the physical world, unfolds in regions that are only accessible to Intuitive consciousness; its somatic counterpart has almost nothing to do with its content.

In this spiritual substantiality, disclosed to Intuition, we find contained influences from previous earthy lives extending into later ones. In this realm that enters into consideration here, anthroposophy approaches the problems of repeated earthly lives and of destiny. As the body lives itself out in neural activity, rhythmic occurrence, and metabolic processes, so does the human spirit live in what Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition reveal.

Within its own realm, the body allows participation in its external world in two directions, namely in sensuous and in motor processes. Likewise, the spirit allows participation from the one side, by experiencing the representing life of the soul also Imaginatively in normal consciousness, and from the other side, by fashioning Intuitive impulses in the will, that realize themselves through metabolic processes. Looking toward the body, we find neural activity that lives as the whole realm of representation. Looking toward the spirit, we become aware of the spiritual content of Imagination that is flowing into precisely that realm of representation.

Brentano experiences initially the spiritual side of the soul’s experience in representation. Thus he characterizes this life as figurative (Imaginative occurrence). Yet when it is not merely the private content of the soul that is experienced, but rather something that requires acknowledgement or repudiation in a judgment, then there is added to the representation an experience of the soul flowing from the spirit. The content of this experience remains unconscious, so long as it is merely a matter of normal consciousness, because it consists of Imaginations of a spiritual substantiality underpinning the physical object. These add to the representation only that their content exists. Hence Brentano’s separation of representation in his classification into mere representation (which merely experiences inner existents Imaginatively) and judgment (which imagines an outwardly given), but brings that into consciousness merely as acknowledgement or rejection.

As for feeling, Brentano has no eyes for its bodily basis, the rhythmic occurrence; rather, he limits his observation to what arises out of Inspirations that remain unconscious in the realm of normal consciousness as loving and hating. Lastly the will is outside his purview altogether, because he wants only to observe phenomena in the soul, and because there is something in the will that is not enclosed within the soul, but rather with which the soul participates in the external world.

Brentano’s classification of psychic phenomena may thus be characterized as follows: he takes his stand at a vantage-point which is truly illuminating if we look to the spiritual kernel of the soul – and yet he insists on aiming from there at the phenomena of normal consciousness. I wanted to complement what I wrote above in this regard with what I have to say here about Brentano.

The Roots of Social Life

In my book Towards Social Renewal, the comparison between the social organism and the human organism is used as an analogy; at the same time it is pointed out how misleading it is to suppose that concepts acquired from the one can simply be transferred to the other. Anyone who forms a picture of the function of the cells or of an organ of the human body, as science represents them, and then proceeds to look for the social cell or the social organs in order to learn the construction and conditions of life in the social body will very soon fall into an empty game of analogies.

It is a different matter to point out, again as in Towards Social Renewal, that by an intelligent study of the human organism we can train ourselves in the kind of thinking required for a real understanding of the working of social life. Through such a training, we acquire the ability to judge social facts not according to preconceived opinions, but rather to judge them according to their own laws of existence. This is necessary above all at present. People today are bound to party opinions regarding social judgment, and party opinions are not formed on the basis of life and the organic requirements of the entire social organism, but rather by the blind feelings of particular people or groups. If the methods employed in party programs were transferred to the study of the human body, it would soon be seen that instead of assisting to understand it, these methods only hinder it.

In an organic body, the air that is inhaled must constantly be converted into an unusable substance: oxygen must be converted into carbon dioxide. Accordingly, there must be means by which the changed and no longer usable substance is replaced by something usable. Anyone who now brings to bear a judgment schooled by study of the human organism, and applies it with common sense and without preconceptions to the study of the social organism, will find that there is one system within the social organism, the economic system, which, if functioning properly, is constantly bound to produce conditions that must be counteracted by other functions. Just as the organs in the human body that are designed to consume oxygen cannot be expected to make the oxygen usable again, it should not be supposed that the economic circulation itself can give rise to the functions needed for making good what it is the nature of the system to convert, out of life, into a life-restricting product.

The necessary counteraction can be supplied only by the separate working of two other systems alongside the economy: a body of laws that determines its own form out of its own proper nature, and a spiritual-cultural life growing freely from its own roots, completely independent of the economic and the legal system. Only a superficial critic will say, “What, then! Is the cultural life not to be bound in its pursuits by existing legal relations?” Certainly it must be bound by them. However, it is one matter if the people who pursue the cultural life are dependent on legal life, and quite another if the pursuit of the cultural life rises on its own from the institutions of this legal sphere. The idea of the threefold social order will make it very easy for objections that abide by preconceived notions, but these objections fall to pieces when we think them through to the end.

The life of the economy has a lawfulness of its own. In following this lawfulness, it creates conditions that destroy the social organism if only this law is at work. If, however, one tries to abolish these conditions by means of economic measures, one then destroys the economic process itself. In the modern economic process, evils have arisen through control of the means of production by private capital. If one tries to exterminate these evils by an economic measure, such as the communal control of the means of production, one undermines modern industry. We can, however, work against these evils, by creating alongside the economy an independent legal system and a free life of the spirit. In this way, the evils that result – and result continually – from the economic life will be removed as they arise. It will not be a case of the evils arising first and people having to suffer under them before they disappear; rather, the other organic systems that exist alongside the economic institutions will, in each instance, turn aside the mischief.

The party opinions of recent times have distracted our judgment from the laws in the social organism’s life and have diverted it into streams of sectarian passion. It is urgently necessary that these party opinions should be corrected by a discipline through which we can learn to be impartial. We can learn this through the study of conditions which elicit impartial judgment of their own nature, and in which thinking therefore becomes its own corrective. The human organism affords such conditions.

Of course, if only the conventional scientific concepts are applied as correctives, they will not go far. In many respects, these concepts lack the kind of force necessary to strike deep into the facts of nature. Yet if we try to keep to nature herself, and not merely to these concepts of nature, we will be in a better position to learn impartiality than we would be amid partisanship. Despite the good will of many natural scientists, who have endeavored to overcome materialist convictions, the usual concepts of natural science are today still strongly imbued with materialism. A spiritual contemplation of nature will shed this materialism. And spiritual contemplation of nature will provide means for the kind of training and thought which, among other things, makes it possible to comprehend the social organism.

The idea of the threefold social order does not simply borrow facts from science and transplant them into the field of social life. It uses the study of nature only as a way of gaining the ability to observe social facts impartially. This should be kept in mind by those who learn about the idea in a superficial fashion. The threefold idea speaks of a threefold division of social life in much the same way as we might talk of a threefold division of the human organism. Anyone who studies seriously the characteristics of the human organism will be made aware that the one cannot be simply transferred to the other. However, the method of study one is obliged to use on the human organism will awaken the kind of thinking that will enable us to find our way among the social facts.

Such a method may be suspected of removing all social ideas to the far-off region of “gray theory.” It may perhaps be said that such an opinion can only be maintained as long as one regards this “removal” from outside. Then, certainly, everything that is seen indistinctly at a distance seems gray. On the other hand, those things that are born of more immediate passions will have color. Yet go near what seems gray and you will find that something begins to stir which is not unlike a sort of passion – but it speaks to all that is truly human, which we lose sight of when looking from the standpoint of parties and group opinions.

We have a burning need today to draw nearer to what is truly human. The polemical postures of rival camps have done enough. It is time that we come to see that the damage cannot be undone with new rival camps, but rather only by observing what history itself demands at this present moment of humanity’s evolution. It is easy to see evils and demand programs for their abolition, but what is necessary is to penetrate to the roots of social life. By healing these roots, healthy blossoms and fruits can be brought forth as well.

The True Form of the Social Question

Grasped from the Life of Modern Humanity

Did not the catastrophe of World War I prove how inadequate the thoughts were through which we believed for decades we understood the will of the proletariat?

We are compelled to pose this question now that the previously suppressed demands of the proletariat have come to the surface of life. The powers that effected this suppression have been partially destroyed. Only those without any understanding at all of how indestructible such impulses are in human nature can want to maintain the relationships that these powers bore to the social motives of a great part of humanity.

Many personalities whose life situation made it possible for them through their words or their advice to work to stem or to promote the forces in European life that hastened in 1914 toward the catastrophe of the War have surrendered to the gravest illusions about these motives. They believed that a military victory by their country would calm the social storms. Such personalities had to become aware that it was only through the consequences of their behavior that the unconscious social forces became clearly evident. Indeed, the contemporary catastrophe of humanity revealed itself as the historical events through which these unconscious forces received their full power to shape events. In the recent, destiny-laden years, the behavior of the leading personalities and classes was dependent on what lived in the socialistically inclined circles of humanity. They would have very often been glad to act differently if they could have ignored the mood in these circles. In the form which events have presently taken on, the effects of this mood have continued their work.

And now, when what has been in preparation for decades in the evolution of humanity has entered into a decisive stage, a tragic destiny is unfolding: the thoughts that have been engendered as these facts arose have shown themselves to be inadequate to the facts on the ground. …

We can ignore the opinion of those who even now believe that the old can be maintained against the new demands of a great part of humanity. We can look instead to the will of those who are persuaded of the necessity of giving new form to social life. We will be able to do nothing but confess to ourselves that party platforms are wandering about like mummies who are rejected by the facts on the ground. These facts demand decisions which the judgments of the old parties are not prepared to make. It may be that such parties have evolved together with the facts; but their habits of thought have remained behind the curve. We need not be shy about the views that still today are held to be authoritative when we can read from the course of events in the present. It is precisely this present moment that must be receptive to the attempt to characterize what remains peculiar to the social life of modern humanity. This social life also remains remote from the habits of thought among socially-oriented personalities and party platforms. For it could well be that the tragedy that arises in attempts to solve the social question ends precisely in a misunderstanding of true proletarian striving. In a misunderstanding even on the part of those whose views have grown out of those strivings. For it’s not at all the case that we always form the right judgment about our own will.

Thus the question is posed: What does the modern proletarian movement really will? Does this will correspond to what is usually thought about it from the proletarian or non-proletarian side? Does what many think about the “social question” actually reveal the true form of this “question”? Or is a thinking along entirely different lines necessary? We will not be able to approach this question without prejudice if our life’s destiny has not allowed us to live our way into the souls of the modern proletariat[footnoteRef:14] – and indeed, of that part of the proletariat which has participated most in forming the modern social movement. [14: Rudolf Steiner’s “destiny” certainly afforded him this opportunity. He was for several years at the end of the 19th century a revered teacher at the socialist Workers’ School in Berlin, which afforded him a unique perspective on the thought and will of the proletariat.]

People have spoken a great deal about the evolution of modern technology and modern capitalism. People have asked, how it is that the contemporary proletariat arose within this evolution, and how did it arrive at its demands through the unfolding of modern economic life? In everything that has been brought forth in this regard there is much that hits the mark. But that the decisive thing has not been touched. This can strike those who have not allowed themselves to be hypnotized by the judgment that external relationships set their stamp upon our lives. It reveals itself to those who maintain unprejudiced insight into the psychic impulses working in the inner depths. What is certain is that the proletarian demands have evolved during the life of modern technology and modern capitalism. But insight into this fact does not yield any insight at all into what actually lives in these demands as purely human impulses. And as long as we do not penetrate into the life of these impulses, we cannot hope to approach the “social question” in its true form.

There is a word of striking significance frequently used by the modern worker, and it can make a significant impression upon those who are able to penetrate into the deeper motives of human will. The modern proletarians have become “class-conscious.” They no longer follow, more or less unconsciously, the lead of the other classes. They know they are members of a class apart, and they are determined that the relation established between their class and the other classes be turned to good account for their own interests.

The way this word “class-conscious” is used by the worker is revealing to those who are able to intuit psychic sub-currents. It refers to the most important facts in the social conception of life among those working classes who stand within modern technology and modern capitalism. Such a person with insight must become attentive above all to the way scientific teachings about economic life and its relationship to human destinies have struck fire in the souls of the proletarians. Hereby a fact is touched upon about which many people who are only able to think about the proletariat and not with it, can have only very hazy judgments, indeed, considering the seriousness of contemporary events, downright destructive ones.

The idea that the “uneducated” working man has had his head turned by Marxism and by later writers of the Marxist school, and other such things in this direction, will not help to attain the understanding of the historical situation necessary in this realm at present. Expression of such an opinion shows only that the will is not present to turn the gaze to something substantive in the contemporary social movement.

And such a substantive issue is the filling of proletarian class-consciousness with concepts that have taken their character out of modern scientific developments. In this consciousness the mood persists which lived in Lasalle’s speech about “Science and the Worker.”[footnoteRef:15] Such things may seem inessential to many who hold themselves to be “practical people.” But whoever wants to gain a truly fruitful insight into the modern workers’ movement must pay attention to these things. In the demands of both moderate and radical proletarians today there does not live the economic life transformed into human impulses, in the way that many people imagine. Rather, the science of economics, which has taken hold of the proletarian consciousness, lives within this. This is apparent in both the academic and journalistically popularized literature of the proletarian movement. To deny this is tantamount to closing our eyes when confronted with the actual facts. And a fundamental fact that greatly determines the present is that the modern proletarian allows the content of their class consciousness to be determined by concepts in the form of science. Although the person working at a machine may be removed ever so far from “science,” they hear explanations about their situation from those who have received the means to this explanation from this “science.” [15: Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-1864) was “a leading spokesman for German socialism, a disciple of Karl Marx (from 1848), and one of the founders of the German labor movement” (Britannica). He was a charismatic personality, and a fiery speaker. The exact title of the speech to which Steiner refers was “Die Wissenschaft und die Arbeiter. Eine Verteidigungsrede vor dem Berliner Kriminalgericht gegen die Anklage, die besitzlosen Klassen zum Haß und zur Verachtung gegen die Besitzenden öffentlich angereizt zu haben” (16. Januar 1863). It can be found in Ferdinand Lassalle, Gesammelte Reden und Schriften, vol. 2 (Berlin: Paul Cassirer, 1919), pp. 203-285. The speech was a self-defense against a criminal charge of inciting hatred among the working classes. It is a ringing defense of free speech generally, but in particular it envisions a union of the two freshest and most useful forces of the time, the working class movement and modern science.]

All of the arguments about modern economic life, the machine age, and capitalism may point in ever so illuminating a way at the basis of the modern proletarian movement. What is decisive for the present social situation does not flow immediately from the fact that the worker has been placed at a machine. It is not that they have been harnessed into the capitalistic order. It flows from a different fact: that very definite thoughts have taken shape within their class consciousness at the machine and in their dependence on the capitalistic economic order. It could be that present habits of thinking prevent many from recognizing the whole scope of this state of affairs, and cause them to see in emphasizing this only a dialectical play with concepts. To this it must be countered: so much the worse for the prospects of a healthy intervention in social life of the present if people are incapable of keeping the essential thing in view. Whoever wants to understand the proletarian movement, must know above all how the proletarian thinks. For the proletarian movement – from its most moderate strivings for reform up to its most devastating excesses – is not formed out of “extra-human forces” or from “economic impulses,” but rather by people, by their thinking and impulses of will.

The determinative ideas and forces of will in the present social movement do not lie in what machines and capitalism have inculcated in the proletarian consciousness. This movement has sought the source of its thoughts along the lines of modern science, because the machine and capitalism can give the proletarian nothing that can fill his soul with a content worthy of humanity. A medieval hand worker received such a content from his profession. In the fashion in which these hand workers felt themselves bound humanely with their profession lay something that allowed life within human society to appear to their own consciousness as something worth living. They were able to view what they did in such a way that they could believe what they want to be as human beings was realized.

At the machine, within the capitalistic system, people were thrown back upon themselves, upon their inner life, when they sought a foundation upon which a view could be erected that bore consciousness of what it meant to be human. But from technology and from capitalism there streamed forth nothing that could support such a view. Thus it is that proletarian consciousness turned in the direction of thoughts of a scientific nature. They had lost all human connection with immediate life. However, that took place at the time when the leading classes strove for a scientific way of thinking, which itself no longer had the spiritual vitality necessary to lead human consciousness to a satisfying content for all its needs. The old worldviews situated humans as souls in a spiritual framework of existence. To modern science, humanity appears as a natural being within a merely natural order. This science is not felt to be a stream flowing from a spiritual world into the human soul, one that bears us up as souls. However we might judge the relationship of religious impulses to the scientific mode of thinking, which is related to the religious, if we observe the historical evolution in an unprejudiced way, we will have to admit that the scientific way of thinking grew out of the religious. But the old worldviews, resting on religious foundations, were not able to impart an impulse that could bear the soul in the modern scientific way of thinking. They stood apart from this mode of thinking, and lived on with the content of consciousness to which the souls of the proletariat could not turn. This content of consciousness could still be something valuable for the leading classes. It connected in one or another way with their life situation. These classes did not seek a new content of consciousness because tradition itself allowed them to hold fast to the old.

The modern proletariat was torn out of all the old context of life. They are the people whose life was given a wholly new foundation. For them, the destruction of the old foundations of life simultaneously made it impossible to draw from the old spiritual sources. They stood in the middle of a realm from which they had become alienated. With modern technology and modern capitalism there evolved simultaneously – in the sense that one can call the great historical streams simultaneous – the modern scientific point of view. The modern proletariat turned its trust and belief to that point of view. With it, the proletariat sought the new consciousness that was necessary to it.

But the leading classes were placed in a different relationship to this scientific way of thinking. These do not feel it necessary to make the scientific mode of thought into the conception of life that bore up their souls. However much they permeated themselves with a “scientific thought” that within the natural order there was a linear chain of causality from the lowest animals up to the human being, this mode of thought nevertheless remained only a theoretical conviction. It did not call forth the drive to this mentality a content also a feeling, as is appropriate to this conviction. The scientist Vogt,[footnoteRef:16] the scientific popularizer Büchner[footnoteRef:17]: they were of course permeated entirely by the scientific way of thinking. But alongside this mentality something was at work in their souls that allowed them to hold fast to contexts of life that can only be justified meaningfully by belief in a spiritual world order. [16: Karl Christoph Vogt (1817-1895) was a German scientist, philosopher, and politician, who published in zoology, geology, and physiology. He was a strong proponent of atheism and scientific materialism.] [17: Ludwig Büchner (1824-1899) was a German philosopher and scientist who became one of the most popular exponents of 19th century materialism. He was the younger brother of the famous playwright, Georg Büchner. His principal work was Force and Matter (1855), which was so blatantly materialistic that he had to resign his position at the University of Tübingen over it.]

….

I also hear inwardly the objection that the proponents of the proletarian view of life make from their mood of soul: Here is another one who wants to shunt the actual social question off onto a siding where they can ride in bourgeois comfort. These proponents do not see that destiny has brought them the life of a proletarian, and how within this life they are trying to move in a way of thinking that has been handed down to them by the ruling classes as heritage. They live as proletarians; but they think like the bourgeoisie. The modern age calls forth the necessity not only to find our way into a new mode of life, but also into new thoughts.

….

The Threefold Social Organism, Democracy and Socialism

One of the significant issues that has been transformed by the catastrophe of the Great War is that of democracy. Anybody with an open mind for historical change ought to see that inevitably democracy will have to permeate the various nationalities completely. The worldwide catastrophe has also shown that the factions opposing democracy have no future. Everything anti-democratic has brought about its own destruction. Advocates of antidemocratic institutions should not forget what reality has demonstrated with torrents of blood.

The question of how to make democracy a reality requires that adherents take a stand not previously possible in the same way. Before the social movement entered its present historical stage, it could still be considered differently. But now we must ask, “How can the social movement be incorporated into democratic life?”

It is not just a matter of promoting vague political ideals or demands, nor of shaping political ideals as a result of what one-sided interest groups understandably raise as demands. A true understanding of the social organism becomes more necessary with every passing day.

The servants of capitalism were not alone in their apprehension when they considered the consequences of the social wave threatening to inundate contemporary life. In addition to a majority of self-centered individuals, a few honest persons recognized in the precise shape assumed by this wave a danger to true democracy. When spiritual life, even in practical affairs, comes to be seen as an ideological superstructure of economic life, how will a genuine unfolding of human individuality be possible? For it has become such a superstructure in the thinking of those who want to make a social form of life dependent on humanity’s adopting a materialist view of history. If it does not make possible the free unfolding of human individuality, socialism will not be able to liberate culture from its capitalistic prison, but rather it will bring death with no hope of revival.

If we judge the demands made by the social movement not in accordance with the interests that have resulted from its earlier stages, but rather as a historical necessity that cannot be avoided, a very grave question emerges: How can these demands be accomplished without suppressing human talent or creativity, the free unfolding of which determines the extent and future of human development? In a social order founded upon a capitalist economy, democratization was something entirely different from what it has to be in an order imbued with social impulses.

Ever more urgent is the need to seek possibilities of developing the life of the human spirit together with social impulses. We should not allow ourselves to be hypnotized by the dogma that socialism in the economy will generate, on its own, a healthy spiritual-cultural life as a superstructure. An economy standing alone without constant fertilization by a cultural life founded on free individuality cannot continue to develop and becomes rigid. Only those immersed in such a dogma can fail to understand this. The quality of human individuality that must creatively influence and direct social life has to be wrought from the very essence of human nature through impulses that economic life cannot produce. Economics are the foundation of human existence, but human spirit rises above it. Economic forces are confined within much narrower boundaries than human nature as a whole. As obvious as this may seem for the comprehension of the individual, it has not been assimilated by contemporary thinking. More and more, public opinion and, above all, public action reveal a trend of thought that resists this self-evident truth. Men become accustomed to certain conditions, and come to demand modes of existence that would seem impossible to them if they truly wanted to think about it. By deadening their sensibilities to this contradiction, they conceal it from themselves and are thus able to live with it.

A significant fact of life reveals itself in this contradiction. Our innate powers of judgment and feeling, which should be developed through a healthy nurturing of cultural life, do not find their way into our modern social institutions. These institutions then smother the free development of the individual.

This suppression makes itself felt from two sides: from that of the state, and from that of the economy. Consciously or unconsciously, we fight against the oppression. Here lies the real cause underlying the social demands being raised. What lives in these demands is like a wave driven along the surface, hiding what really is at work in the depths.

The rebellion against state oppression manifests itself in the aspiration of the people to true democracy; their revolt against an oppressive economy finds expression in their endeavor to structure economic life in a truly social way.

In response to what has developed over the last three to four centuries, humanity demands democracy. If democracy is to become a reality, then it must be built upon the forces in human nature that actually unfold themselves democratically. If nations would become democracies, then they must become institutions that permit human beings to bring into play what governs relationship among all who have come of age. Every adult citizen must share equally in the regulatory process. Administration and representation must provide a climate in which a healthy consciousness of rights and responsibilities is allowed to unfold.

Can such administration and representation also regulate the cultural life – life that must bring about the full development of individual human potential – if this development is not to wither and be thwarted to the detriment of social life? The premise for such development is that it be tended in a milieu encouraging only such actions as have their source in the cultural life itself. Specific talent can be truly recognized and properly nurtured only by someone endowed with the same abilities. Emerging talent can be properly channeled only if a knowing guide acts from experience gained precisely in that realm of life into which they are to show the way. The proper nurture of a socially sound community requires individuals who have acquired intimate knowledge of the various branches of life through their own experience, and who have cultivated within themselves the ability to explain their experience to those who need to know. Think for a moment about the socially most significant branch of cultural life – schools on every level! Is it not true that development of individual human capacities and their preparation for life in a particular field can best be guided by that teacher who has personal experience in the field? Or can social renewal ever take place if the criterion for hiring such teachers is something other than their own individual capabilities? Democratic sentiments can relate only to that which each adult has in common with every other adult. It is impossible to find within democratic processes a regulatory function for matters that lie entirely within the domain of the individual. If true democracy is to become a reality, then we must exclude from its province everything that belongs to the domain of the individual. Within the province of democracy and the administrative establishments growing out of it, no impulse directing the free flow of individual human talent can arise. Democracy has to declare its impotence to provide such an impulse if it wants to be a true democracy. If a true democracy is to be formed out of the state that has existed heretofore, then we must remove from it and deliver to full self-regulation all those matters where only the individual development of each particular person can manifest the right impulses. Such matters cannot be regulated just because a person is of age and a citizen.

The social relationships that every adult is competent to judge are the legal relationships between one person and another. At the same time, they represent conditions of life that can maintain their social character only because in democratic institutions they manifest the collective will – a composition of equal individual human wills working together. By contrast, the collective will cannot express what is to arise from individual human abilities; here institutions must function so as to allow the individual to achieve full expression. In a way, the human being might be compared to a natural landscape. We cannot cultivate and manage an expanse of land without considering its different aspects. The nature of each part must be studied so that we can learn what it might produce. Thus, in the realm of culture, individual initiative based on individual capabilities needs to become socially effective; cultural life may not be determined through the will of all. Within the realm of culture, this universal will becomes antisocial because it deprives the community of the fruits that individual human capabilities can provide.

Thus self-administration of the cultural life is the only way to promote individual abilities. Only through self-administration will conditions exist that give rise not to a universal will that suppresses the fruitfulness of the individual for social life, but rather a condition in which individual human accomplishments can be taken up into the life of the whole for its benefit.

Certain criteria will be established from within such a self-governing spiritual-cultural life whereby the right people may be put into the right positions, and immediate, vital trust can take the place of laws and regulations. Educators will not look to laws and regulations for their educational aims; instead, they will become observers of life and seek to learn, by listening to life, what it is they have to inculcate. It will be possible within the cultural sphere to avail oneself of persons who, through years of experience in practical life, are well-versed in the ways of law and economics. In the cultural sphere, they will in turn encounter people with whom they can, through lively intercourse, exchange and reshape their practical experience and bring it to educational fruition. On the other hand, administrators in the cultural sphere may occasionally feel the need to enter the arena of practical life in order to utilize and revitalize their own knowledge.

If the structuring of the social organism is done in such a way that a self-governing cultural life can unfold within it, this will not destroy the vital unity of the organism; on the contrary, it will support and enhance it. Only the administration is articulated: in the life of the people unity will be allowed to develop. We will no longer need to isolate ourselves from life by encapsulating ourselves within a rigid condition. A lively exchange can take place between the cultural organism and other branches of society. When tradition and public opinion is reshaped in the cultural life, the potential for vitality is far greater than in an inflexible system. The structuring of the social organism should, in the future, be based on real social facts, and these concrete forces should develop, through self-regulation, into something that is a source of a power that can leave us free. ….

Appendices

Appendix 1

Franz Brentano

Franz Clemens Brentano (1838-1917), nephew of the German Romantic poet Clemens Brentano, was a German philosopher and psychologist. Some of the most important figures in early 20th century European thought were his students: Sigmund Freud, Edmund Husserl (the founder of phenomenology), the Czech liberal politician Tómaš Masaryk, Alexius Meinong, Christian von Ehrenfels, Carl Stumpf, and, not least, Rudolf Steiner. By all accounts, Brentano was an extremely charismatic teacher, and especially through his students, he exerted a great influence on the further development of philosophy.

Aristotle and Scholasticism were his principal interest during years studying philosophy at a number of universities. Brentano received his PhD from the University of Tübingen in 1862, writing a thesis On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle. Initially ordained as a priest, he eventually left the priesthood for a number of reasons, chief among them the doctrine of papal infallibility, which he opposed. Unable to marry as a former priest, he had to resign his position at the University of Vienna. When he returned, he could only be appointed Privatdozent, an unsalaried position, which he resented bitterly. Nearly blind, he retired to Florence, but returned to Zürich with the outbreak of World War I.

His major work was Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874), which was followed by a second volume, The Classification of Mental Phenomena (1911), and then by fragments of a third volume, Sensory and Noetic Consciousness (published posthumously in 1928). Among many other writings were Inquiry into Sense Psychology (1907) and On the Classification of Psychological Phenomena (1911). He made important contributions to many fields in philosophy, especially to metaphysics and ontology, ethics, logic, the history of philosophy, and philosophical theology.

Brentano is mainly known for his work in philosophy of psychology, especially for having introduced the notion of intentionality to contemporary philosophy. Originally a Scholastic concept, intentionality was revived and modernized by Brentano. In brief, it posits that every mental activity has an object. “He suggested that, fundamentally, the mind can refer to objects by perception and ideation, including sensing and imagining; by judgment, including acts of acknowledgment, rejection, and recall; and by loving or hating, which take into account desires, intentions, wishes, and feelings. The ideas expressed in the Psychologie formed the credo of his followers and became the starting point of their work.” (Britannica)

Upon Brentano’s death, Rudolf Steiner wrote a long eulogy, which he included as part of his book On the Enigmas of the Soul.[footnoteRef:18] There he imagines some of Brentano’s thoughts and potential objections to anthroposophy. See Rudolf Steiner’s other writings on Brentano: [18: Rudolf Steiner, “Franz Brentano: A Remembrance,” in On the Enigmas of the Soul ([Amazon:] Keryx, 2017), pp. 64-99.]

· “Franz Brentano: “Über die Zukunft der Philosophie [On the Future of Philosophy],” in GA 30; Methodische Grundlagen der Anthroposophie 1884-1901: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Philosophie, Naturwissenschaft, Ästhetik und Seelenkunde [Methodological Foundations of Anthroposophy 1884-1901: Collected Essays on Philosophy, Science, Aesthetics and Psychology] (Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1989), p. 526 ff.

· “Franz Brentano und die Aristotelische Geistslehre [Franz Brentano and the Aristotelian Doctrine of the Spirit],” in GA 115; A Psychology of Body, Soul, & Spirit, translation by Marjorie Spock, introduction by Robert Sardello (Hudson, New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1999)., p. 217 ff.

· “Die Lehre Jesu’ von Franz Brentano [The Teaching of Jesus by Franz Brentano],” in GA 36; Der Goetheanumgedanke inmitten der Kulturkrisis der Gegenwart: Gesammelte Aufsätze aus der Wochenschrift “Das Goetheanum” 1921-1925 [The Thought of the Goetheanum Amidst the Present Cultural Crisis: Collected Essays from the Periodical “Das Goetheanum” 1921-1925] (Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 2014), p. 153 ff.

· “Das Verstehen der Menschen (Brentano und Nietzche) [The Understanding of Men (Brentano and Nietzsche)], ” in GA 36, p. 158 ff.

Unfortunately, only the second of these four pieces has been translated into English.

[sources: Britannica, Wikipedia, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]

Appendix 2

Representation

Translators’ introductions or notes invariably comment on the difficulty of translating vorstellen/Vorstellung and a few other German philosophical and psychological terms such as Geist, Anschauung, and Gemüt. Tellingly, in the title of Schopenhauer’s magnum opus, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, the term has been three different ways: initially as “Representation,” but then more recently as “Idea” and “Presentation.” Both Michael Wilson’s translation of Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom and Owen Barfield’s The Case for Anthroposophy begin their discussions by noting that the standard translation of this Kantian philosophical term is “representation.” But then Wilson goes on to argue (rightly) that this is too technical a term for most contexts, and that “representation” has other, distracting meanings outside of philosophy, which led him to translate Vorstellung and its variants as “mental picture.” Barfield chooses “representation,” which is understandable given that the context is Steiner’s discussion of Brentano’s neo-Kantian treatise. The reasons why this term is so very difficult to translate are (1) that it encompasses many different kinds of mental acts; (2) it refuses any sharp distinction between subjective and objective; (3) it can refer to a faculty, the activity of a faculty, or the result of that activity; (4) it often has a distinctly visual quality, but it can also refer to abstract concepts; and (5) it straddles the conventional divide between philosophy and psychology.

Appendix 3

The Etheric and the Astral Bodies

“Etheric body” is Steiner’s early, theosophical term for the subtle body of supra-physical forces that sustains life. Later he would also refer to it variously as “the life body,” or the “formative forces body,” or (echoing Spinoza’s distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata) the realm of “living working” as opposed to the physical realm of “finished work.”

The etheric body is known through Imaginaton, and first reveals itself to strengthened thinking as supra-sensible pictures. The etheric body consists of centrifugal forces, expresses itself in all aqueous processes, and flows in great currents through the cosmos. The etheric is a “time body”; here time becomes space. It is a unity that is always there as a temporal totality, right up to the present moment.

The individual etheric body is precipitated out of a vast cosmic ether. It can be subdivided further into warmth ether, light ether, chemical or tone ether, and life ether. Theodor Schwenk’s Sensitive Chaos: The Creation of Flowing Forms in Water and Air (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1996) is a scientifically compelling and aesthetically beautiful exploration of these forces.

“Astral body” is Steiner’s early, theosophical term for the subtle body that corresponds generally to “soul” or “psyche.” Like Freud and Jung, he sees it as internally differentiated and gradually transformed by the activity of the higher faculty of the “I” or “ego.” The astral body reveals itself to Inspiration, and emerges in a sense from behind Imagination. The traditional concept of the Music of the Spheres is an experience of macrocosmic astrality. It consists of centripetal forces, and expresses itself in breathing and in the airy element generally. It also expresses itself as the human nervous system. The astral body has remained behind in time, and casts its beams forward into the present incarnation; it remains in the spiritual world before conception and birth

The locus classicus for both of these bodies among Steiner’s introductory works is the uncharacteristically schematic and static description in his early book Theosophy (1904; many English editions are available, including now a very inexpensive Kindle Edition from Amazon). A much more dynamic (but also much more difficult) account is to be found in the middle four lectures of Rudolf Steiner, A Psychology of Body, Soul, & Spirit (New York: SteinerBooks, 1999), which includes a valuable introduction by Robert Sardello. See also Lecture 5 (February 2, 1924) of the cycle GA 234; Anthroposophy: An Introduction, trans. and intro. Owen Barfield (London: Anthroposophical Publishing Co., 1961).

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