Education, Teaching and The Practical Life PDF

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Education, Teaching, and Practical Life

2 EDUCATION, TEACHING, AND PRACTICAL LIFE
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Education, Teaching, and
Practical Life
by
Rudolf Steiner
Publications Research Institute for
Waldorf Education
Printed with support from the Waldorf Curriculum Fund
and
An anonymous donor through the Rudolf Steiner Foundation
Published jointly by:
The Association of Waldorf Schools of North America
Publications Office
65-2 Fern Hill Road
Ghent, NY 12075
and
The Research Institute for Waldorf Education
PO Box 307
Wilton, NH 030086
Title: Education, Teaching, and Practical Life
Author: Rudolf Steiner
Translator: Mado Spiegler
Editor: David Mitchell
Copyeditors and Proofreaders: Ann Erwin, David Sloan
Cover: David Mitchell
© 2007 by AWSNA Publications
ISBN # 978-1-888365-71-9
Original Title: Erziehung zum Leben: Selbsterziehung und padagogische Praxis,
GA 297a, published by Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach, Switzerland
Original ISBN # 3-7274-2975-5
This book is printed with the permission of the Rudolf Steiner
Nachlassvervaltung in Dornach, Switzerland
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ......................................................................... 11
I. EDUCATION, TEACHING AND PRACTICAL LIFE QUESTIONS
FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF ANTHROPOSOPHICAL
SPIRITUAL SCIENCE
Utrecht, February 24, 1921 ...................................... 15
True knowledge of the human being through knowing
the soul-spiritual realm. Reverence toward supersensible
human essence descended from the spiritual world, as
foundation of pedagogical-didactic art. “Leaps” in the
development of the child (example: change of teeth in
seventh year); metamorphosis of organic forces of growth
into thinking force. Imitative force till the change of
teeth (example: the purported theft); meaning of child
play for later life. School age: child’s desire for authority;
nonsense of democratic principles in the school. Details
of pedagogical practice in Waldorf school: working on
children through images (example: butterfly as image
of immortal soul); learning to write: artistic transition
from ego-feeling to ego-concept between ninth and
eleventh year; natural sciences and foreign language.
Problem of education as social problem. Concept of
Maia in East and West; denial of spiritual reality in the
concept of “ideology.” Necessity of free spiritual life and
self-administration of the schools. Appeal for creating
a World School Association. Threefold Social Organ-
ism: individual judgment of individuals in spiritual life
(freedom), majority rule and law in legal life (equality),
consensus in associations and contracts in economic life
(brotherhood).
II. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS AT A PEDAGOGICAL EVENING IN
UTRECHT
Utrecht, February 24, 1921.......................................... 37
Difference between animal and human blood. Precondi-
tions to foundation of Waldorf schools in other countries.
World School Association. About the relationship between
spiritual science and Christianity. Threefold organization
of both the social and human organism. Significance of
the feeling of authority between seven and fifteen.
III. TEACHING, GOVERNMENT, AND EDUCATION:
QUESTIONS FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF ANTHROPOSOPHICAL
SPIRITUAL SCIENCE
Amsterdam February 28,1921 ................................... 43
Intellectual modesty as starting point for supersensible
knowledge. Acquisition of higher capacities through the
soul’s dormant capacities: training of memory; percep-
tion of life-panorama from birth. Perception of spirit-
soul independent from body. Force of love as cognitive
force; effect on practical life. Waldorf school in Stuttgart.
Education not through theoretical program but through
knowledge of human being. Details from pedagogical
life praxis: the first seven years. Children’s play and its
connection with later life (example: purported theft).
Transformation of the soul configuration at age seven:
child’s demand for authority. Significance of the “Rubi-
con” around ninth and tenth years. Reading and writing
instruction; object lessons; necessity of a free spiritual life
for such a teaching practice. Contemporary perception of
spiritual life as “ideology.” Significance of an independent
school. Creation of World School Association. Condi-
tions of economic life (example: the four Curiae in late
nineteenth century Austria). Associative principle and
right pricing. The three great human ideals applied to
the threefold social organism; freedom in sporitual life,
equality in state life, brotherhood in economic life.
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IV. EDUCATIONAL CONVERSATION
Darmstadt July 28, 1922 ........................................... 63
Teaching observation: the object lesson. The educational
principle of the first two life-stages: imitation (example of
purported theft) and authority. Significance of concepts
and conceptions growing for later life (example: but-
terfly). School problem as teacher problem. Connection
between thinking and bodily coordination; importance
of teaching manual dexterity. Waldorf school not the
school of a philosophy; converting anthroposophy into
pedagogical practice. Origin of the Free Religious Class.
Using natural images to form religious concepts; develop-
ment of Christian sensibility around age of nine.
V. ANTHROPOSOPHY AND THE RIDDLES OF THE SOUL
Stuttgart January 17, 1922 ........................................ 73
Soul riddles as existential riddles: different states of con-
sciousness in representations, will and feelings. Fearful-
ness as the subconscious accompaniment of images in life
of representations; irascibility and subconscious side effect
of will-life. Two examples of the scientists’ giving up on
riddles of nature: DuBois-Reymond about the boundaries
of knowledge and Brentano’s attempts to overcome them.
Awakening latent cognitive capacities in the human soul
through strengthening representations by way of plastic
spiritual forces (meditation and concentration): represen-
tations become reality; overcoming of anxiety and experi-
ence of supersensible; prenatal reality spiritualizing the
will through release from daily life (example: backwards
representation. Enhancing the force of love. Thinking as
the spiritual-plastic element of the human soul, will as
a destructive/loosening element. The nature of memory.
Knowing what comes into physical existence at birth
and what is released at death. Taking in anthroposophi-
cal contents. Solution of soul riddles: taking in spiritual
meanings and beings. Anthroposophy is not a theory, but
an experience (example: Waldorf school and the social
riddle). Revelation of eternity in feeling-life.
VI. THE SUPERSENSIBLE IN MAN AND THE WORLD
Rotterdam, November 1, 1922 ................................ 97
Division between natural scientific and religious-ethical
concepts in modern humanity. Perception of moral ideals
as abstractions. Possibility of knowing the supersensible
in the human being and in the world. Walking upright,
speaking and thinking perceived as supersensible gifts.
Knowledge of soul-spirit in the ancient East; correspond-
ing exercises: body postures, mantras and experience of
cosmic children (example: butterfly as image of immortal
soul). Necessity of pious mood in education. The child’s
religious mood toward the sense-world in first seven years.
Resurgence of religious mood as soul-requirement in
ninth and tenth years; the child’s attention to what is car-
ried by authoritative person. Transformation of religious
feeling of second seven-year stage in formation of religious
ideals around age eighteen. Experience of conflict between
religious feeling and scientific knowledge in twelfth year.
Moral education founded upon gratitude, love for the
world and knowledge of the human being. Importance
of bodily education (eurythmy); striving for realistic art
of education in Waldorf school pedagogy.
VII. RELIGION AND MORAL EDUCATION IN THE LIGHT
SPIRITUAL SCIENCE
OF
The Hague, November 4, 1922 ................................ 117
True knowledge of the human being as foundation of
education. Seven-year life-stages. First seven-year stage:
the child as imitative being (examples: learning to speak;
purported theft). From change of teeth to puberty; need
for self-evident authority; training for reverence. Human
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being as time-body (example: consequences of accepting
truth on authority; importance of concepts growing with
the person). Artistic form of teaching (example: teaching
of writing in Waldorf school). Educator as caretaker of
child’s characteristics. The right use of image with chil-
dren (example: butterfly as image of the immortal soul).
Necessity of pious mood in education; child’s religious
mood toward sense-world in first seven years; resurgence
of religious mood as soul-requirement in ninth and tenth
years; child’s attention to what is carried by authoritative
person. Transformation of religious feeling of second
seven-year stage in formation of religious ideals around
age eighteen. Experience of conflict between religious
feeling and scientific knowledge in twelfth year. Moral
education founded upon gratitude, love for the world
and knowledge of human being. Importance of bodily
education (eurythmy) striving for realistic art of education
in Waldorf school pedagogy.
VIII. EDUCATION AND TEACHING AS THE BASIS OF
A TRUE
KNOWLEDGE OF THE HUMAN BEING
Prague, April 4, 1924 ............................................... 137
Education and schooling in the spirit of anthroposophy;
consideration of life-stages of growing person. Human
being as comprehensive sense organ until change of teeth;
effect of educator and principle of imitation. Life-stage
after change of teeth: pictorial quality; educator as self-
evident authority. Teaching reading and writing. Onset
of puberty; working with abstract conceptual capacities.
Later effects of education.
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INTRODUCTION
During the early years of the twentieth century, Albert Schweitzer
was introduced to Rudolf Steiner at a conference in Strasbourg, France.
Since they were the only two German speakers at an otherwise French-
speaking event, Schweitzer arranged for Steiner to be seated next to
him during the conference meal. Their conversation stretched well into
the remainder of the day as they ranged over a wealth of philosophical
and ethical issues. In his account of this meeting, Schweitzer recalls
how at one point, standing in a corridor of the conference hall, the two
of them got into a lively discussion concerning the spiritual decline
of culture as a crucial yet widely ignored problem. “We learned that
we were both preoccupied with the same question,” Schweitzer later
wrote from his home in Lambarene, Gabon. “Each of us discovered
from the other that we had set ourselves the same life task, to strive
for the awakening of that true culture which would be enlivened and
penetrated by the ideal of humanity, and to guide and hold men to the
goal of becoming truly intelligent, thinking beings.”1
The two men never met again, but both remained aware of the
other’s attempts to bring social and cultural healing to humanity––
Schweitzer through his celebrated hospital deep in the jungles of
Africa, Steiner through his less famous but perhaps more far-reaching
contributions to homeopathic medicine, organic farming, new artistic
forms, and several initiatives for cultural renewal including Waldorf
education.
Already with the opening of the first Waldorf school in the
aftermath of World War I, Steiner began to campaign for a worldwide
association of Waldorf schools to bring a new cultural impulse into
education. With this task in mind, he set off in February and March
of 1921 on his first lecture tour beyond the German-speaking world
since the end of the war. His travels included two open lectures in
Holland––one in Utrecht, the other in Amsterdam––during which he
described the essentials of Waldorf education for the general public.
In the next year he toured widely from England to Austria, including
another visit to Holland with lectures in Rotterdam and the Hague.
During thes two years Steiner was also working on other impulses
for social and cultural renewal. His lectures to priests resulted in the
formation of the Christian Community, his work with medical doctors
led to the opening of a new clinic in Arlesheim, Switzerland, and his
twelve-city tour of Germany brought to the general public their first
experience of the new art of eurythmy. Other ventures, such as the
creation of an economic enterprise based on his threefold plan for
social reform, were less successful, but overall these years represent the
height of his activity as a bringer of cultural renewal.
The lectures presented in this book include some of Steiner’s lesser-
known educational presentations, which appear here for the first time
in English translation. In tone they are friendly and warm, salted with
wonderful anecdotes. As introductory lectures to the underlying tenets
of Waldorf education, they serve to inspire and stir the will lives of his
audiences. In fact various individuals have documented how they were
kindled by the contents of these lectures to take up the challenge of
Waldorf education. For example, the lecture of November 4, 1922, given
in the Hague on the subject of religious and ethical education, inspired
quite a few Dutch educators to become Waldorf teachers. Among them
was Jan van Wettum, a math teacher who helped co-found the first
Dutch Waldorf school.
The other lectures Steiner gave during this tour were also well
received, even though they were not all well attended. In Rotterdam,
for instance, the organizing committee failed to advertise the event
adequately, with the result that only a handful of listeners attended.
Steiner treated the mishap with characteristic humor, remarking that
he had lectured before large audiences of several hundred out of which
only one person had “heard” what he was trying to say.
Steiner undertook this lecture tour of the Netherlands at a time
when as yet no Waldorf school existed in that country. Within two years
of his lecture in the Hague, the first Dutch Waldorf school was founded
there in September 1923. The Rotterdam Waldorf School, however, was
founded only after World War II, and the school in Utrecht not until
INTRODUCTION 13
the 1970s. It should be mentioned, though, that the Rotterdam lecture
was attended by leading figures in the shipbuilding industry who, after
Steiner’s visit, became important contributing members to the Waldorf
school movement as well as to the Anthroposophical Society.
By contrast, the Stuttgart lecture printed in this series was given at
the time when the Waldorf school, already three years in existence, was
supported by an active and vibrant anthroposophical life in that city.2
Darmstadt today is known for courses in modern music; influential
composers in of the late twentieth century, such as Karlheinz Stock-
hausen, Luciano Berio, and Olivier Messiaen, studied or worked in
Darmstadt. In Steiner’s time, the city center was noted for its organic
Jugendstil architecture. The Darmstadt lecture included in this book
arose from a discussion with students at the university who had asked
Steiner to tell them about his new ideas on education.
During the 1920s Prague enjoyed a relatively strong anthroposophi-
cal life. Steiner delivered his seminal course on Occult Physiology there
(with Franz Kafka in attendance), but offered only one educational
lecture in that city. All that remains of this engagement is an article
Steiner wrote for the media about the content of his talk.
In this collection of lectures one can hear Steiner describe with
a joyfilled and open tone the healing effects that Waldorf education
can bring to a time of spiritual crisis. In language accessible yet
profound, he paints pictures of human development that can inspire
readers to strive for new levels of excellence in the spirit that both he
and Schweitzer embodied in their life tasks. Like Schweitzer, Steiner
was deeply committed to the renewal of social and cultural life. In
Schweitzer’s words, “What we have in common is that each wishes to
see true culture replace unculture.”3
Douglas Gerwin
David Mitchell
October 2007
Endnotes
1. Albert Schweitzer, “My Meeting with Rudolf Steiner,” reprinted in Journal
for Anthroposophy (Number 75, Fall 2005), p. 28.
2. The background of the Dutch lectures was shared by Christof Wiechert in
an e-mail to David Mitchell on September 24, 2007.
3. Albert Schweitzer, “Letter to Bruno Walter,” 8 November 1960, reprinted
in Journal for Anthroposophy (Number 75, Fall 2005), p. 30.
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I
Education, Teaching, and
Practical Life Questions
From the Point of View of
Anthroposophical Spiritual Science
Utrecht, February 24, 1921
The question I allowed myself to explore last Monday1 was the
question of the way in which an anthroposophically-oriented spiritual
science allows us to find a method, a scientific pathway, to penetrate
the spiritual, supersensible, environment. I called attention to the fact
that we can only penetrate that environment if/when human beings
bring up in their souls capacities and forces actually slumbering in
every soul, and when ordinary knowledge rises to true contemplation, a
contemplation that, for instance, comes to the point of developing full
consciousness of what it means to have a soul-spirit life, independent
of any physicality. We know, after all, precisely through modern science
—and when it comes to daily life, this science of the psyche, psychology,
is completely right—that the soul’s (psyche’s) ordinary life is linked to
the instrument of the body. And only the methods of spiritual-science
can disconnect the spiritual-soul life from the body, and, in so doing,
reach all the way to the essential in the human being which resides in
the spiritual world before uniting—through birth—with one physical
body that later crosses the gate of death, sets aside the human body and
re-enters consciously into the spiritual world.
I also showed last Monday that those who get acquainted with their
own supersensible being, are in a position to perceive—behind all the
things ordinary reason can explore—a supersensible environment, a
surrounding world of spiritual beings. What is thus recognized as the
soul-spirit part of the person, what we recognize as the spirit in the
world we inhabit, is what really enables us to acquire a true knowledge
of the human being.
Over the last three or four centuries, we have acquired a thorough
and perfect natural science. Only we have not been able to gain from
this natural science any knowledge of the human being. According to
the theory of evolution, we start out from the lowest form of life, and we
ascend to the human being, considering it to some extent the final link
of the animal series. In the process we learn what the human being has
in common with others organisms, but we do not learn where the hu-
man being, properly speaking, stands in the world. We only experience
the latter through anthroposophically-oriented spiritual science. What
thus asserts itself in this science ultimately appears also in the feelings
and impulses developed into the social life of modern humanity.
Just think how many people have to some extent evolved into a
new class of men—through modern technology, through the entire
form of science—people who, under the influence of some socialist
theories, actually believe that what lives in humanity as morality, as
science, as religion, as art, does not arise from a primordial spiritual
origin but is only the result of economic, material processes. The theory
to which modern social-democracy adheres, and which has attempted
so destructively to become a reality in Eastern Europe, fundamentally
sees in forces external to humanity the forces that rule human history.
Whatever human beings produce in art, morality, law, religion, and so
forth, appears to them like a kind of fog. People call it a superstructure,
produced by purely economic-material factors. By situating the human
being in the practical world, the truly human is extinguished. If we were
to characterize what modern education and modern social conscious-
ness have brought about, all we can say is this: What was human in the
human being has been extinguished.
What spiritual science can restore to humanity is the knowledge
and the dignity of the human being, and the connection between the
human being as a supersensible being and the supersensible universal
being of the cosmos.
And there at last we stand in the face of real truth. Only now do
we stand on a foundation that leads to really practical life. Today, I
would like to connect this truth with a look at education and matters
pertaining to schools. From the beginning—as originated in the Free
School for Spiritual Science in Dornach—this anthroposophically-
EDUCATION, TEACHING AND PRACTICAL LIFE QUESTIONS 17
oriented spiritual science was never intended to be alien to the world,
remote from the world, but rather to thoroughly conform to reality, to
be practical and so, from the beginning, it had to situate itself in the
social distress and decadence of the modern time, it had to intervene
practically in life. And one of the first practical initiatives took place
in education with the Independent Waldorf School founded by Emil
Molt in Stuttgart,2 for which I personally provide pedagogical and
didactic guidance. In this Independent Waldorf School, impulses of
an anthropology truly cognizant of the human being are elaborated
pedagogically and didactically, flowing from an anthroposophically-
oriented spiritual science.
For a long time now, people have been saying that one should edu-
cate and teach in such a way as to not stuff this or that into the child’s
soul, but rather develop out of the human soul what already resides in
the human being. This is little more than an abstract principle. It is
not a matter of having a rational principle to bring things up out of the
human soul, but rather of truly being able to observe in the child the
developing human soul. And this means first developing a sense for it.
We can only develop such a sense if we are aware that the actual human
individuality, the soul-spiritual being, descends from a spiritual world
in which it has lived for a long time; aware that day by day, week by
week, year by year, in all the developing aspects of the child’s body and
soul, something supersensible is alive; that from a supersensible world,
something is transmitted to us as educators and as teachers, something
which we must decipher. If we can see the child’s physiognomic fea-
tures becoming clearer, day by day, if we can, day by day, decipher a
soul-spiritual reality sent to us from the spiritual world gradually being
unveiled in these physiognomic characteristics, then it is a matter first
and foremost of founding the pedagogical-didactic art on a feeling of
deep reverence for the human being descending toward us from the
spiritual world.
Anthroposophically-oriented spiritual science makes it possible to
really observe the child in its becoming, year by year. Let me begin with
an explanation of the main stages of human development.
It is often said that nature, the world, makes no leaps. Now, this is
the kind of thing people constantly repeat without looking at its actual
meaning. After all, does not nature take a leap when it develops the green
leaf? And later, is there not something leap-like in the development of
the sepals and the colorful flower petals and then again of the stamina?
And it is the same with human life: anyone objectively observing this
evolving human life in the child, out of the suggestions and impulses
provided by anthroposophically-oriented spiritual science, will find first
of all—not on some mystical basis, but based on faithful observation—a
leap in the child’s development around the seventh year, when the
child’s second teeth start developing. Here we notice how our current
psychological science has actually become extraordinarily cliché-ridden.
True; except for diehard materialists, people make a distinction between
body and soul. But everyone speaks in extraordinarily abstract terms
about their relationship. People can not get used to making faithful and
objective observations in this field as they have learned to do in natural
science. For instance, in natural science they learn that if during an
experiment, warmth appears that the experimenter had not introduced,
this warmth must have been present in that body in some other form.
One says that the latent warmth has been liberated. We must permeate
ourselves with this frame of mind provided by natural science and apply
it also to anthropology, which then must be spiritualized compared to
natural science. We must thus carefully observe: What actually changes
in the human being when it crosses the biographical threshold of the
change of teeth?
Now, if we really apply the necessary objectivity to our observa-
tion, we can see that the child only really begins to form distinctly
contoured features when he comes to the seventh year, whereas before
that, he did not have such features. We can see for the first time the
possibility for him to think true thoughts—no matter how childish
they may be. We can see that something emerges from the child’s soul
that was previously concealed in the human organism. If we have a
trained spiritual eye for these things, we can see that the child’s soul
life completely changes with the change of teeth; something is rising
to the surface of the soul from the deepest recesses. Before that, where
was this thing, which now emerges in the form of sharply delineated
thinking, a clear life of representations? It was there all along, as a force
of growth in the human being, permeating the entire organism. It was
alive as the soul-spirit in growth, and it reached its conclusion when,
from the inside, new teeth were pushed out and displaced the earlier
teeth. When this growth spurt ends, what remains in place is the result
of a process for which such intensive forces are no longer needed. We
can see that what is present later in the child as (true) thinking was once
an inner organic force of growth and that this organic force of growth
has metamorphosed into a soul force.
With this kind of observation, we build a science of the soul that
consists in more than empty phrases, that rests fundamentally on the
same methods as natural science—albeit translated into the spiritual.
Just as natural science rests on the faithful observation of the physical
realm, faithful observation is needed in order to understand the human
being, but now it is an observation of the soul-spirit. If we learn to
study the human being in this manner, observation actually turns into
artistic contemplation. Actually, many people nowadays are making
similar statements to what I just said: of course, they say, one should
stick to sober logic; one should use reason to work at abstract formula-
tions of natural laws. This is a natural enough human impulse. It may
well appear as if human beings can catch everything in the wide meshes
of conceptual logic and penetrate behind the appearances. But what if
nature does not operate in this way? What if nature works artistically? We
then need to use our cognitive capacities to follow it on its artistic path.
Anyone looking at nature and the world will perceive that the natural
laws we establish through the use of logic have the same relationship
with full, intensive reality as what I do when I use charcoal strokes to
make a drawing related to, yet not identical with, a full-color image.
Anthroposophically-oriented natural science finds its materials
throughout the entire physical-spiritual reality. In so doing, it transforms
pure logical knowledge into an artistic form. In so doing, we enable
the teacher, the educator, to become a pedagogical/didactic artist, who
acquires a refined perception of the child’s every expression. And it re-
ally is the case that every child has his own repertory of life expressions.
These cannot be regimented by an abstract pedagogical science, but we
can conceive them if we receive—from the whole of humanity—anthro-
posophically-oriented indications, with which to acquire an intuitive
contemplation of the soul-spirit in humanity, which then is at work in
the physical body. For what was roughly active as thinking power before
the change of teeth can be observed later, working in a subtler manner
as the child’s soul-spirit. As teachers, as educators, we must follow this
day by day in an artistic frame of mind, and this will enable us to be
for the child what a true teacher, a true educator, should be.
I would like to characterize in a few strokes the first stage from birth
to the change of teeth and the second stage from the change of teeth
to sexual maturity. In the first stage, from the first to the seventh year,
the human being is essentially an imitative being. But we must give
this understanding its full weight. When the human being enters the
world, it is released completely into its environment. For whatever the
child will manifest later in the form of will and artistic impulses, this
is also being formed when the child imitates everything in its environ-
ment. Language too is learned at first in a manner based on copying,
imitation. Between birth and the seventh year the child is an imitator
through and through. We must take this into account and draw all the
consequences of these things. When I deal with these matters in the
general public, people occasionally come up and ask for advice about
one or another thing. A father once came to me with a complaint about
his five-year-old. What had the five-year-old done? I asked. Sadly, the
father said the boy had stolen. I said, We must first learn what the theft
was actually about. He explained to me that the child had not stolen
out of ill will. He had taken money from his mother’s drawer and
bought some sweets, and then shared these sweets with other children
on the street. So it was not a case of blind egoism. What was it? Day
after day, the child had observed his mother taking money out of the
drawer. The five-year-old is an imitator. The boy did not steal, he had
simply copied what his mother was doing every day, for he considered
spontaneously that everything his mother did was right. This is just one
example of the many subtle things one needs to know when attempting
to delineate an art of education that really corresponds to the essence
of the human being.
But we also know that children are playing that when they copy.
Fundamentally, the playful instinct is not completely original, but an
imitation of the things the child sees in his environment. If we are suf-
ficiently objective, we become aware of the fact that play is completely
rooted in imitation. Yet, each child plays differently. Educators of
children younger than seven must form judgments carefully—and such
judgments require some artistic sense, for each child is different. The
educator must cultivate an artistic eye for the ways children play. Each
child has his own way to play. And howsoever the child plays in the
fourth, fifth or sixth year, all this then sinks as a force into the deeper
layers of the soul. The child becomes older, we do not notice at first
how one or another typical way of playing reappears in the child’s later
character traits. The child develops other forces, other capacities; the
unique quality of his play, as it were, slips into the hidden recesses of
the soul. But it reappears later, and actually reappears in unique ways,
between the ages of twenty-five to thirty, at the time of life when the
person needs to find his/her way in the in the world of external expe-
rience, eternal destinies. One person approaches it nimbly, another
awkwardly. One person tackles the world in such a way as to gain
some satisfaction from dealings with the world; another person doesn’t
manage to find any point at which to engage his own activity and has
a difficult destiny.
We need to acquaint ourselves with the life of the whole person; we
must see how, in hidden ways, the sense of play reappears in the twen-
ties in the form of the sense of life. This way, we will gain an artistically
shaped idea of how to guide and channel the playful instinct so as to
give the person the wherewithal for a later stage in life.
Contemporary pedagogy suffers greatly under abstract principles.
I would like to propose an alternative, an anthroposophically-oriented
pedagogy (which) aims at giving an artistic sense, at working from a
young age in such a way that whatever is being trained will be of support
for one’s entire life. For if we want to teach and educate human beings,
we must learn about the whole of life. Nineteenth century natural sci-
ence, wonderful in many ways, just has not provided for this. Just think
of the social value of really giving the child such an endowment.
Once the child has gone through the change of teeth, the second
epoch of life begins. This is the time for actual schooling to begin, a time
that we must study with particular care if we want to develop pedagogy
from the point of view of a true knowledge of man. Whereas the child
until the seventh year was basically an imitator, now between the seventh
year and sexual maturity, from age seven to thirteen–sixteen (the age
varies), there develops something which discerning minds recognize as
the natural impulse to follow an authority, the authority of a teacher or
educator. It is heartbreaking to hear it said on all sides nowadays that
a kind of democratic spirit ought to reign in the schools, that children
should be practicing a kind of self-management. This sort of thing, and
it comes from various political directions, rests on premises that actu-
ally contradict the needs of human nature. Those who have mastered a
true anthropology know how important it is for the rest of one’s life to
have been able at a young age to look up to authentic authority, when
one could have confidence that something was true which this human
authority had declared to be true, when one experienced as beautiful
something which these human authorities found beautiful, when one
found good something which had been modeled as good by this human
authority. Just as one imitates until the seventh year, one will believe as
true until puberty that which comes from a true authority. This is the
time when we must experience the imponderable effects of things that
come to us through another person’s soul, another’s individuality.
We have founded the Independent Waldorf School in Stuttgart.
Many people say they would like to visit the school to get to know the
method of this school. But imagine an etching of the Sistine Madonna;3
let someone chop off a part of it, to “make in this way a deeper observa-
tion” of the Sistine Madonna. Spending two or three weeks observing
what happens in a Waldorf school would be a similar thing. One might
not see anything in particular. For what happens in the Waldorf school
is the product of anthroposophically-oriented spiritual science. Those
who teach there have gained their artistic pedagogy and didactics from
the impulses of anthroposophical spiritual science. In order to know the
Waldorf school, one must first understand anthroposophically-oriented
spiritual science. But not as one can learn it from the outside, where
it is presented to people as a confounded, nebulous mysticism, some
kind of sectarianism. No, one must learn to know from the inside how
it finds in the whole of humanity what the human being really is as
physical and supersensible being in the world and in time.
Actually, through these things, one comes to understand—one
might say supersensibly—how it is possible to work from such an au-
thoritative individuality. Let me give an example: With children between
the seventh and fourteenth years, but more specifically until the tenth
year, it is preferable to speak to children in images. Let us take an image,
any image, whereby we want to give the child an idea of the immortality
of the soul. I can make up this image. But I can also point the child to
the butterfly’s cocoon, how the butterfly comes out of the cocoon. And
I might tell the child: the human body is like the cocoon. When the
human being dies, the immortal soul emerges from the “cocoon” and
goes over to the spiritual world. Such an image has much to recommend
it. But it would only give the child a true feeling for the immortality of
the soul under very particular conditions. For if I, the teacher, think:
I am smart, the child is foolish and it must become smart, and I make
up such an image to make an idea comprehensible to the child, a little
might be gained, but it is absolutely certain the child will not really
get a feeling for of immortality. For only those things that we ourselves
believe, in which we ourselves stand, will have an effect upon the child.
Anthroposophically-oriented spiritual science allows one to say: I per-
sonally believe in this image; for me, this emergence of the butterfly
from the cocoon is not something I have made up, but what nature itself
presents in a more simple way for the same fact which is represented at
a higher level by the emergence of the immortal soul from the body. If
I myself believe in this image, if I stand within the content/meaning of
this image, then my belief will awaken the child’s belief, representation
and perception. These things are completely amazing.
What happens on the outside is not as important as what takes place
between the teacher’s feelings and the pupil’s feeling. Whether I enter
the school filled with noble ideas or ignoble ideas, or whether I really
believe that what I say is squarely what is at work, there is a significant
difference. There will be a different quality to my voice, which does not
penetrate the soul if I enter the classroom with ignoble thoughts, and
especially if my thoughts do not match the things I say. So much for the
relation between student and teacher in the second stage of life from the
seventh to the fifteenth year. Much more could be said on the subject,
but I want to present only a few elements so that you can become better
acquainted with the spirit-animating pedagogy and didactics flowing
from anthroposophically-oriented spiritual science.
We have also made a beginning at the Waldorf school to really
bring up from the children themselves what they need to learn. For
when we enroll the children in the primary school, we are faced with
remarkable puzzles. We are supposed to teach the child reading and
writing. But compared with what lives in the human being, writing
and printed matter long ago became quite abstract, something that
has assumed a symbolic nature and lost all inner connection with the
full, original elementary life of the soul. Our cultural history gives us
partial knowledge about these things. If we go back in various cultures,
we find pictographic writing, where what was fixed in writing preserved
something of the pictorial nature of what it meant. In ancient cultures,
writing was not quite the abstraction of mere sign, as is the case now. In
actuality when we teach reading and writing in the conventional way,
we bring to the child something completely unrelated to its nature.
Rather, pedagogy and didactics that spring from the full knowledge of
the human being will not teach reading and writing in the usual manner,
but will start from the child’s artistic nature. So we do not start with
reading at all, or even with writing, but rather with a kind of painting
drawing, a drawing painting. We lead the children in such a way that
they are not simply learning to form letters out of their heads, but in-
stead to produce—on paper or on any other kind of surface—colorful
lines drawing on the entire being; these lines and forms flow naturally
from the human organism. Then, we gradually transform what was
brought out of the artistic over into the forms of the letters, through
writing, and from writing we move on to reading. This is our ideal. It is
perhaps difficult to put into practice at the beginning, but it is the ideal
of a true didactic method derived from a full knowledge of the human
being. Similarly, the full knowledge of the human being is at the base
of all education and teaching in a Waldorf school.
(Another stasrting point is the child’s musical-rhythmic capacities,
because these are part of human nature. We know that children who
receive true musical stimulation around the seventh year experience from
this musical introduction a peculiar strengthening of the will.)
Now, one reason we attempt to bring things in pictorial form is so
as to avoid introducing the child too early to an intellectualized life.
We also observe that between the ninth and eleventh years, the child
goes through a veritable turning point, a growth-node. Depending on
the way educators and teachers perceive it, it influences the person’s
destiny in positive or negative ways. Until that point, the child is not
very distinct from his environment (and one must pay attention to
describing a flower differently before the ninth year and later). Before
that point, the child identifies with everything around him; then he
learns to differentiate himself; then only does the first concept of “I”
appear. Previously, the child had only a feeling of being an “I.” We must
observe how the child behaves, how it starts to formulate questions
differently from that point onward. With each child’s individuality, we
must approach in a particular way this important turning point, for it
is distinctive for the rest of life.
For instance, we must know quite clearly that subjects like physics
should be brought to the children from the eleventh or twelfth year since
they are completely external from the human being, and objectivity is
required for comprehension of its laws. On the other hand, from the
beginning of primary school, we teach common foreign languages to our
children in a practical way. We can see how by teaching foreign languages
without translations, by simply allowing the child to feel at home in the
spirit of another language, the entire making of the child’s soul expands.
In this spirit, an artistic method and pedagogy are shaped. I could go
on for an entire week in great detail about the shaping of pedagogy as
an art. But you can see that what originates from anthroposophically-
oriented spiritual science flows practically into education.
And how does that work with each individual teacher? What hap-
pens is that teachers truly receive from this spiritual science something
different than they can receive from the current scientific education.
And here we touch upon one of the most important social questions
of the present time.
The social question is said to be the fundamental question of our
time, but people mostly understand it as an economic question; it is
really not understood in its depth. This depth only appears to our soul
if we pay attention to a word that is constantly repeated in the large
masses of the proletariat: ideology. When today’s proletarians of the
Marxist persuasion speak of an ideology, what do they have in mind?
What they mean is that mental pictures about morality, law, art, religion
are not really concrete; they are mere abstractions, ideas devoid of reality.
All things in this domain are unreal, an ideology. The only realities are
external, material production processes.
This is a massive shift in human evolution regarding worldviews
and the organization of the soul. Think for a moment where ancient
oriental wisdom stands on this. When I spoke here last time, I said
that we should not look back to it for guidance, although much in
it can serve as orientation. In the Ancient East, they spoke of Maia.
What was meant by maia? They were speaking about all the things
that the human being can know in the physical (sensory) world. For
the Oriental, reality was what lived inwardly, what was arising in the
way of morality, religion, art, science. This was true reality: What the
ears heard, what the eyes saw, what was sensed in other ways, all that
was maia. Nowadays, we can find in the Orient only a decadent form
of this point of view. Following the Marxist lead our popular masses
have come full circle. One might say that human evolution has taken
a complete reversal. Only the external, the physical, is real, and what
is formed inside as morality, religion, art, science, all of that is maia. If
we were to translate the word maia, we would translate it as ideology,
and if we wanted to translate into the worldview of the Ancient Orient
what the modern proletarian understands as ideology, one would have
to translate it as maia, the word now being used to convey the opposite
of its original implications.
I am presenting this because I want to show with it what an extraor-
dinary turn has taken place in human evolution, since the Occident
has actually developed to its last consequences a worldview that runs
completely contrary to that which still lives in the Orient, albeit in a
decadent form. If we are able to observe human conflicts at such a depth,
we can understand the conflict between the Orient and the Occident.
Of course, things play out differently at different points in history. Still,
no matter how materialistic the striving of the contemporary Orient
may be, it is to some extent the striving that was already present in
Ancient Buddhism, and which has become decadent. Our Western
culture has completely turned away from that. We have actually come
to the point where large masses of human beings no longer feel fulfilled
by that spiritual reality in them, but feel instead that all the things that
fill their inner beings are merely maia, ideology.
And this is what an anthroposophically-oriented spiritual science
restores to humanity: not just ideas which could be considered ideology,
not just unrealities/fantasies, but rather the fact that the human being is
again filled with the awareness that the spirit lives in my thinking. The
spirit enters me, not a dead, ideological spirit, but a living spirit lives
in me. To lead human beings back to an immediate experience of the
living spirit, this is what anthroposophically-oriented spiritual science
strives to accomplish. This is what is incorporated in anthroposophical
pedagogy and didactic. This is what must live in the relation between
teachers and their pupils.
This is also what stands right at the center of approaches to the
social question. The human beings who speak about ideology today have
gone through our schools. Yet we need a humanity that develops social
impulses from the deepest inwardness. This humanity can only come
from schools different than the present ones. We can see in the present
social chaos what has come out of the schools we so admire. We need
an education that corresponds to a real, comprehensive knowledge of
humanity. This will include what makes the question of education a
universal social question, or else we will be blind to the great social
challenges of the present time.
But we must feel what teachers, what educators need, in order to
practice such an education, in order to allow the knowledge of humanity
to translate into pedagogical-didactic art. We must feel that this is only
possible if teachers and educator are not expected to be accountable to
any other norm than the one living in their own inner being. Educa-
tors must be responsible to the spirit experienced in themselves. This
is only possible in a threefold articulation of the social organism, in a
free spiritual life. As long as spiritual life depends on one side on the
life of the state and on the other hand on economic life, the teachers
will be dependent either on the state or on the economy. If you study
the connections, you will easily discover how the web of restrictions is
constituted.
In truth, we can only create nowadays a substitute for a indepen-
dent school. In Würtemberg before the socialist government imposed
the new school laws,4 it was possible to create the Waldorf school as
an independent school, in which the prescriptions of pedagogical art
were the only rules.
If freedom is to reign, each teacher must participate directly in the
administration of the school; the most important branch of spiritual
life will then be self-administering. We cannot think of a spiritual life
in which such free schools are generalized in any other way. From
the teacher in the lowest grade to the professor at the highest level,
everything is dealt with in committees that are not subject to one or
another governmental or economic authority, that do not take orders
from either side. Administration must be such that every teacher or
educator’s class schedule will leave time to participate in administrative
duties. Administrators will not be people who have retired or who are
no longer involved in actual teaching and educational tasks; instead
those now involved in teaching and educating will also be administra-
tors. It goes without saying that the ability to do the job will determine
authority. The mere attempt at such self-management will reveal that
because we need those who really can do the job; their authority will
be accepted unquestionably. When the spiritual life rules itself, there
will be no need for authority to impose itself from above. Provided we
allow such a free spiritual life to be established, we shall see that when
people need experts, they will find them.
I could only sketch out these matters, but you will have seen why
a free spiritual life is a prerequisite for any real pedagogical art. We can
see the necessity to structure the free spiritual life from the totality of
the social organism.
Whatever Marx or Proudhon5 or other national-economists wanted
to establish in theory, the way they were establishing it does not apply
to matters of life experience, of life praxis. What I said in my book
Kernpunkte der Sozialfrage and in other writings on the threefold social
organism is the product of several decades of life-observation in all di-
rections; it was spoken and written out of life praxis. This is one reason
it is impossible to explain it through flimsy concepts. I know very well
what logical objections can be made to it. But what is derived from
reality is often like reality itself. And just as reality cannot be compre-
hended by fast and ready concepts, so too it is impossible to force such
concepts to match reality. Those who can feel inwardly what it means
to be plunged in the midst of education, of teaching, as demanded by
a true knowledge of the human being and of the child are the people
who find in their feelings, in their entire experience, the full proof that
the spiritual life must be administered freely. And objections cannot
simply be dismissed, they must be countered by reality itself.
Some people will come and say: If the free spiritual life must rest
on free recognition, some people will not send the children to school,
and surely that is not the way to build a free spiritual life. But this is
not the way to approach things if our thinking is true to reality. Any
reality-based thinker feels first and foremost the full necessity to liberate
spiritual life. He says: The spiritual life must be liberated; if many people
will not want to send their children to school, then we must find ways
to get around this. But this cannot be an objection to the liberation of
spiritual life; one must instead create something and then consider how
to remedy the consequences. We will need to learn to think in this way
on many issues that affect the reality of life.
You can sense that precisely in regard to the spiritual life—and at
bottom, public spiritual life is most importantly connected with educa-
tion, with teaching—there must be a complete shift. Those who are used
to working in the present spiritual life will not agree to these things.
I am quite aware of the fact that, when the possibility of switching to
self-management came up in the past, some teachers of higher learning
institutions said: “I would prefer to depend on the Ministry than to be
subordinated to my colleagues; no way! I’d rather deal with the minister
out there than with my colleagues of the faculty right here.”
It is possible that the necessary impulses will not be available. But
just as in other life matters, the consumer, not the producer, plays an
ever more important role. So too as regards education and teaching:
the most important part of spiritual life should consider the consumers
of this education. These are primarily people who have children. We
have experienced the strong positive impressions made upon parents at-
tending the school’s closing ceremony by all the things that the children
had experienced in the Waldorf school during the year. We have had
the experience that, through watching their children at home, parents
become aware that a truly new social spirit is arising, which will be of
enormous importance for the next generation. It goes without saying
that this can only be the case if the Waldorf school does not remain a
small unregistered school in Stuttgart, but if the spirit that reigns there
becomes the spirit animating the widest circles.
But parents are not the only ones interested in what takes place in
schools and educational institutions. Ultimately, every human being
taking human evolution seriously has an interest in it. Everybody must
have a stake in what becomes of the next generation. Those who think
like that and who have a sense of the need for spiritual renewal, as was
described in the last Utrecht lecture, will become interested parties in
the new educational approach to be brought about through the schools,
from the lowest to the highest levels.
In the Dornach Independent University we are attempting to create
a learning institution in the highest sense of the word. Things are still
difficult. We can provide renewal, support for individual specializations;
we can give things like our Fall courses, or the coming Easter course.6 We
can show that, for instance, medicine and all other practical sciences can
receive from anthroposophically-oriented spiritual science something
which the present and the near future demands.
However, all we can provide is a spirit, and people do not value this
very strongly yet. People still value more highly the evidence we cannot
provide yet. We must fight so that what is seen as a necessity in human
evolution for the near future can also become official. This can only
happen if in the widest international circles a mood arises for something
I would like to call a World School Association.7 Such an Association need
not limit itself to the creation of schools and high schools, but it must
contain all the impulses that drive the kind of enterprise attempted in
Dornach. Such a World School Association would include all those with
an interest in forces of ascension being restored to human evolution as
against the frightful forces of decadence now active in humanity. Such
a World School Association would grow out of the present impulses; it
would not attempt to shape the world using the old diplomatic or other
methods. Such a World School Association would attempt to create an
alliance out of the deepest human forces, the holiest human impulses.
Such an alliance would become significant to the extent that it could
really bring about a renewal of the life that has revealed its fragility in
the terrible second decade of the twentieth century (1910–1920).
The human beings that will be educated there will have the right
social impulses and they will be the ones that can also apply the right
force to other areas of social life, in the realms of an autonomous legal
and political life and an autonomous economic life. Similarly the free
spiritual life can be built only upon solid qualifications and expertise,
not upon what comes to the fore in majority opinion. Just so, the eco-
nomic life can be formed in a healthy manner only if humanity is free
of any “majority-minded” thinking, if it is distinct from all other areas
in which people judge simply on the basis of their humanity, not out
of expertise. In the economic life, we need associations in which people
from the realm of consumption, of production and of business will
join together. I have written that the particular size of such an associa-
tion will be determined by its very nature. Such associations can truly
deliver in the economic life something I would like to call a “collective
judgment” (consensus), just as it is true that by contrast, everything
in the spiritual life must come from human individuality. From birth,
we bring our dispositions into the world. Every time a human being
is born, a message from the spiritual world is delivered to the physi-
cal world. We must grasp this message, we must look at the human
individuality; the teacher must consider the human individuality in
the child, the entire social organism must look at the free spiritual life
in which the teacher is standing, in such a way that he can develop his
individuality to the full.
Things that would be profitable to humanity in spiritual life
would work negatively in economic life. We better have no illusion in
this matter. No matter how much we must strive for a comprehensive
harmonious judgment through our individuality, we cannot do so in
economic life. This is the realm where we are in a unique position to
form judgments with others, to form a judgment within associations.
When one has worked at something, one knows some things very well,
but whatever one knows is in all circumstances (at best?) one-sided. A
judgment can only be made insofar as we do not just interact with others
theoretically, but insofar as we are obligated to deliver a particular good,
to satisfy particular needs, to conclude and perform contracts. When
concrete interests are facing off in contracts, then concrete, technical
judgments will result.
Furthermore, the fundamental element in economic life is reached
through what works in the associations: true pricing. You can read more
about this in my books Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage and the Threefold
Social Organism, as well as in periodicals. There is a Dutch publication
about the threefold organism,8 in which you can read how in social life
a collective will or consensus must be sought. Now that we have a world
economy instead of separate national economies, it has become neces-
sary for the articulation of the economic life by free economic points of
view to follow, for economic life to be expressed in associations that are
only concerned with economic matters, but in such a way that techni-
cal qualifications and expertise should have a decisive role, rather than
the law of majority. Those who have experience will occupy the right
place. This will happen spontaneously within associations, for things
will be decided by contractual activity, not by abstract decision. Thus,
if a particular item is produced too abundantly in one territory, we
must direct those workers to other activities; otherwise, the items will
become too cheap and those produced in insufficient quantity become
too expensive. Prices can be set rightly9 only if, through associations,
the appropriate number of people work at a particular area. For this to
happen, an intense interest in the general economic life of humanity is
required. It will be a matter of not just developing external phraseology,
but developing true human brotherhood, and this fraternity becoming
manifest in economic relations.
I can merely sketch things out today. For more details read the
literature on threefold organization. I can indicate here only how the
anthroposophically-oriented spiritual science will also tackle practical
life.
So, we have in the social organism on one hand the free spiritual
life directed at the human individuality, and on the other hand the
economic realm, in which associations work together for a unified world
economy, without any consideration for political boundaries (which
nowadays define contradictory economic interests). All this may be an
uncomfortable thought for us now. But this is what is needed to end
the present chaotic conditions.
Between these two the truly political life will arise, where majority
decisions have their justification, where everything, including human
labor, will be dealt with and for which every adult will be considered
competent. Not every adult is competent in the free spiritual life; there,
majority decisions could only create problems, as they would do also in
the economic realm. In the realm of the “rights sphere,” every human
being is competent, where one person is equal to any other. This is the
legitimate legal and political sector of the state in a threefold social or-
ganism. This is the one in the direction of which we have already now
the clearest indications, but which can also be demanded by the needs
in other sectors of society.
The social organism is a free spiritual life based on the full, free
expression of human individuality; a legal and governmental life that
is truly democratic, where each person stands equal to the others and
where majorities decide, for only in this branch of the social organism
are decisions made for which every adult is competent; an economic
life, built from associations, where decisions are based on expertise and
technical know-how, where human contracts—not law—is the rule.
Some people will say that this switch would destroy the unity of
the social organism. For instance someone raised the objection that
the social organism is a unity and must remain one, or else everything
would fall apart. At the time, all I could come up with in answer to this
objection was the example of a farm family. If we are going to claim that
the state must take economic initiative and administer schools, we could
equally claim that in a farm family, which is a unity consisting of a man,
a woman, a servant girl and a cow, all would have to give milk, not just
the cow. Rather, unity in our case would consist in each member doing
the right thing in its own place. The unity consists precisely in the fact
that the three parts exist. We cannot use a half-baked understanding
to attack a proposal which from an accurate observation of that which
in the current social life is begging for transformation.
Freedom, equality, brotherhood—these are the three great ideals
resounding to us out of the eighteenth century. Which human heart
would not be deeply affected by the subject of these three ideals?
However, there have always been people, in fact very intelligent people,
throughout the nineteenth century who wanted to see a contradiction
between freedom and equality. How could one be free if all human be-
ings must develop their capacities to the same level? And this does not
seem to fit with brotherhood either. Much has been said that was very
clever and very cogent on the contradictions of these three ideals. And
yet, we feel them and we feel their justification. What are we dealing
with here?
Human beings have formed these three ideals from the deepest,
most intense foundations of the soul, and these ideals are as justified as
anything in history ever was justified. Yet people have remained under
the hypnotic power of the unified state. It is true that in the unified
state, these three ideals do contradict each other, and yet, they must
become reality. Their realization will mean the advent of the threefold
social organism. Consider that here we are dealing with something
that could start tomorrow, something formed out of praxis, that, un-
like most social ideals, is not utopian in the least, but is completely
practical. One will then understand that the unified state itself today
is producing the necessity to divide itself in three parts; one will also
understand the historical and human significance of these three ideals
that have been resounding over humanity since the eighteenth century,
moving the hearts, illuminating the minds. Then one will tell oneself:
The threefold social organism reinforces these three ideals, making it
possible for them to come to life at last.
In conclusion allow me to summarize what I have said today about
the practical implementation of anthroposophically-oriented spiritual
science. The threefold social organism must come to humanity: the
autonomous spiritual life, the autonomous economic life, and in the
middle the governmental-legal-political realm, also autonomous. Then
in the true sense will we be able to realize for humanity: freedom in the
spiritual life, equality in the life of the state, and brotherhood in the
economic life organized on an associative basis.
Endnotes
1. Public lecture February 21, 1921, not printed, transcript from stenographic
notes by Hedda Hummel. Original publication in GA 297a, 13–38.
2. Emil Molt (1876–1936), director of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory
in Stuttgart, originally had organized evening classes for his employees.
This led to the idea of creating a school for the workers’ children. He in-
vited Rudolf Steiner to help establish and lead the school, which opened
in September 1919.
3. Sistine Madonna by Raphael (Raffaelo Santi, 1483–1520). At the time of
this lecture it was held in the Dresden Gemäldegallerie.
4. These laws gave the government increased roles in education.
5. Karl Marx (1818–1883), philosopher, economist and revolutionary. He is
best known for his analysis of human history in terms of class struggles.
His intensive studies of history led to his formulation of historical material-
ism, the basic thesis of which is that individual beliefs and actions are the
product of the material conditions determined by production processes.
From 1864 to 1876, he led the International Working Men’s Association.
His main work: Capital: a Critique of Political Economy, was originally
published in Hamburg in 1867.
Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865), French economist and social
philosopher. One of the first systematic anarchist thinkers, he questioned
political institutions of his time and the socialist movement. He envisaged
the state being replaced by voluntary organizations of interest groups and
cooperative associations. He is famous for his call “Property is theft!” in
his pamphlet What Is Property? which attracted Marx’s attention. He par-
ticipated in the 1848 revolution but ultimately felt that political reform
without a parallel reform of the economic systems along “mutualist” lines
was doomed to restore oppression.
6. The courses mentioned were: in the Autumn of 1920, a series on boundar-
ies of scientific knowledge (GA 322) and a medical course on physiology
based on spiritual science (GA 314); and in the Spring of 1921, a series
on the effects of anthroposophy in various scientific fields (GA 76) and
another medical course (GA 313).
7. The first mention of a World School Association came in an opening
speech for the first Waldorf school (August 20, 1919). “The Waldorf school
must be a veritable cultural deed, in order to bring about a renewal of our
contemporary spiritual life. The possibility of the Waldorf school must be
used in order for its reforming, revolutionizing effects on all educational
institutions” (GA 293 Dornach 1992, 13). At that point, Rudolf Steiner
expected that the revolutionary Kulturrat would pick up his program as
the blueprint for educational reform (see GA 300/301). However in the
political context of the time, the idea turned out to be infeasible. At a
teachers’ conference at the Stuttgart Waldorf School in July 1920, the idea
reappeared in a new form. Steiner expressed the hope that a world school
association, to be founded, would collect funds necessary for the founda-
tion and operation of schools. During a Questions and Answers session
on the threefold organism (October 1920), he called out, “What we need
is a world school association in all civilized countries, to gather as quickly
as possible the necessary funds. This would procure the necessary founda-
tion for a free spiritual life” (GA 337b). On October 16, 1920 (see GA
217a), he reiterated his call, emphasizing the seriousness of his call for an
international organization, emphasizing that it should not be seen as an
association of already existing initiatives, but as an initiative body, aimed a
propagating the idea of a free intellectual and spiritual life, and assuming
the creation and financing of schools and other educational institutions
throughout the world. However no concrete steps were taken toward the
idea, much to Steiner’s distress, as expressed at the Members’ Meeting of
the Anthroposophical Society of September 4, 1921: “I had to experience
what I consider the inner opposition that has strongly interfered with the
realization of my intentions, …when I had indicated in the strongest terms
the necessity for the foundation of a World School Association, and repeated
these calls during my lecture series in Holland.” His disappointment at
the failure of this initiative among the members of the anthroposophic
society seems to have been a major source of frustration at the end of his
life. It was to remain a divisive issue until his death and even afterwards,
when it became one point of contention between Ita Wegman and Marie
Steiner and their respective followers, and a source of tension between
German and Dutch anthroposophists. The Wegmanist push for a world
association was felt to threaten a diversion of limited funding resources
away from the building of the Goetheanum and led to accusations that Ita
Wegman was trying to use the idea to create an independent power base
[trans. extended note].
8. Reference to Drieledige Indeelling ven et sociale Organisme, 1920 and 1921.
It was first published by Johanna Maria Tak van Poortvliet (1871–1936)
and later by Pieter de Haan (1891–1968). The periodical was intended to
propagate quickly the idea of the threefold social organism and support
the work of the movement founded in 1919 “Bond vor drieledige indeel-
ing van et sociale Organisme.” When it became clear that the movement
was not being met with the massive support that had been expected, the
journal was replaced by the monthly Anthroposophie. Maandblad voor sociale,
paedagogische en geesteswetenschappelijke Vraagsukken, aimed at preparing
the ground for a fundamental social reform movement,
9. The question of the pricing came up repeatedly in Steiner’s talks between
1919 and 1922. His thoughts on the question were organized in his essay
of the threefold social organism, democracy and socialism (GA 24, 216 ff ),
originally published in the first issue of the Swiss journal Soziale Zukunft
and his book Kernpunkte der Sozialfrage (1919) (GA 23, chapter 3). See
also his comments in the course on national economy (GA 340).
37
II
Questions and Answers at
a Pedagogical Evening in Utrecht
Utrecht, February 24, 1921
Question: How can one distinguish on a scientific basis between human
and animal blood? The ego is expressed in the human blood; is it not
so in animal blood?
Rudolf Steiner: The materialistic form of thinking which has been
building up since the fifteenth century, and has grown especially in the
nineteenth into the twentieth centuries, has allowed the gradual dying
out of the sense that the outer expression [of a thing] is not determining
for its inner architecture nor for the entire context in which it stands.
I would need to draw here on some things that I can’t explain in detail
today, which you will find in the spiritual-scientific literature, but I can
say a few things to this question.
We must distinguish in the human being, first the external physi-
cal body that we see with our eyes and which ordinary science studies
through anatomy and physiology. Then we distinguish the etheric life-
body of which we become aware when we observe something like the
appearance of thinking at the change of teeth; there we can observe the
life of the etheric body. We should not confuse it with the hypothetical
“vital force” of old; it has nothing to do with that. This is the result of
immediate observation, whereby we learn to recognize which part in
the soul controls this etheric body, what we can call the soul-organism,
and the actual ego.
These four parts each have their physical expression. For instance
the etheric body influences particularly the glandular system, the ego,
blood and the circulatory system. Now, we may ask a question like the
one asked here, but we must first become familiar with something I will
clarify with the following comparison. Imagine that someone tells you:
A knife is just a knife; it is used to cut meat. We cannot say that. It is
equally unjustified to say that the human being has red, warm blood,
and animals have red, warm blood, in both cases the expression of the
ego. Let’s assume someone finds a razor and uses it to cut meat, for it is,
after all, a knife. The question is not a thing’s outward appearance, but
how it exists in a wider context. In the animal, red warm blood is the
expression of the soul organism, in human beings the same red blood
is the expression of the ego, just as the razor is a knife used to shave
yourself and the knife on the table is a meat-cutting knife. We should
not ask: What is blood as such? It can mean one thing in one context,
another thing in a different context.
Question: Is it possible to start Waldorf schools in other countries?
Steiner: Whether one can found such schools in other countries depends
on the laws of the countries in question. Before the new democratic
republican school legislation came about in our own country, it was
possible to start the Waldorf school. Developments in recent times are
such that now we must renounce one freedom after another.1 And were
Leninism to win the day in Central Europe, people would learn what the
death of human freedom means. Whether such schools can be founded
all depends on what is allowed by law, on concrete local laws. One can of
course attempt to stretch the boundary as far as possible. For instance I
was recently approached about recruiting teachers for beginning a school
in another place2 and I said we must naturally try and see. I recruited
two very competent teachers for the first class, although they were not
certified, we shall see whether we can gain acceptance for such teaching
personnel. The Waldorf school does not disqualify a teacher who do
not hold a certificate. When asked recently whether it was all right to
hire a certain person despite the lack of an exam, my answer was that
it did not matter, he would take the exam in due time.
Is this not really an issue of working on a large scale for the libera-
tion of the spirit—in this case through the schools? We need something
for this, a kind of world organization. It should be possible for the
question about founding new Waldorf schools to be unnecessary, for
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS – UTRECHT 39
there must arise, through the force of conviction, a sufficiently large
number of people to create this possibility everywhere. What happens
now with education is exactly what has taken place in other areas. Many
people do not agree with allopathic medicine, therefore they turn to
those doctors who want to work outside of allopathic medicine, on a
completely objective basis, not as a kind of quackery. I have even met
a minister in a central European state who championed the monopoly
of allopathic medicine in his country’s parliament, yet later came asking
for help with a personal problem, willing to use an alternative approach.
We should not think of building small unchartered schools, but should
bring about everywhere the possibility of building independent schools
of the kind I have described. Unless we gather our courage, those who
control those things will not allow the foundation of small unregulated
schools or the appointment of teachers for the latter. There should exist
a large movement, to which every person with a concern for the tasks
of our time should belong; the power of such a world movement could
bring about the conditions necessary for the creation of such schools
everywhere.
But before everything else, in the case of such a World School As-
sociation, something must intervene to do away with a certain kind of
idealism evident in saying: “Ah, spiritual matters, anthroposophy… it
is so exalted, material concerns should not touch it; it would disunite
anthroposophists if material matters were of concern.” This kind of
lofty idealism smothers the spiritual under all kinds of phrases and holds
it up to the heavens, into some kind of “cloud-cuckoo-land,”3 all the
while clutching the wallet. This kind of idealism will not allow for the
foundation of a world movement in education and similar initiatives.4
We may need to bring up an idealism that is not good for the wallet
in order to do something for the ideals of humanity. Spiritual science
must think and work its way down to practical life; it cannot have its
head in the clouds, but must reach down to the wallet. There are angles
and corners there, for these are parts of practical life.
Question: Are there contradictions between anthroposophical spiritual
science and evangelical (Protestant) Christianity?
Steiner: We need not make up such contradictions. One should distin-
guish two kinds of things. The mystery of Golgotha is a fact: the fact
that a spiritual entity descended from super earthly realms to unite with
the man Jesus of Nazareth. Every age has understood this spiritual fact
in a differnt way, which gives its meaning to earthly evolution. We can
best understand this fact if we first learn to understand spiritual facts in
general. It would be thinking very poorly of Christianity to believe that
as a result of one or another discovery, whether in the physical or the
spiritual realm, Christianity would be shaken. When the official repre-
sentatives of Christianity, or rather of traditional confessions, behave
in such hostile fashion toward anthroposophy, this only speaks against
those official representatives; they actually do not have in mind true
Christianity, but rather the rule of their own church. True Christianity
has already understood anthroposophical spiritual science—through
supersensible knowledge. On this question, read my Christianity as a
Mystical Fact 5 and other writings.
Question: In the threefold structuring of the social organism, does the
spiritual life have any kind of supremacy over the other two sectors?
Steiner: In my book Die Kernpunkte der Sozialen Frage, I describe how
capital is used in the threefold social organism. It circulates, somewhat
like blood in the human organism, and remains with those who are
best suited to administer it in the sense of the collectivity. But for this
to happen, the spiritual life must constantly be working with the other
sectors. This is the unique thing about such a natural organization of the
social organism as well as of the human organism. The human organism,
as I have established over thirty years of research, is naturally threefold.
First, there is the nerve-sensory organism located primarily in the head;
second the rhythmical system located primarily in the chest, as breathing
and blood circulation; and third, the metabolic system connected with
the limbs. But these three parts work together, so that in some ways
the head has leadership, but in other respects the other parts do. One
cannot say that one or the other is sovereign, but a harmonious totality
arises in the social organism, precisely through the organization of the
three parts according to their essences.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS – UTRECHT 41
Question: Should children from age seven to thirteen believe what the
teacher says or are they taught in freedom?
Steiner: Human nature itself encourages what I have described in my
talk as a certain self-evident authority. This call for a self-evident author-
ity in turn rests upon a particular development of the entire human
life. Certainly no one can have a greater concern for the social reign of
freedom than I do, who wrote the Philosophy of Freedom in 1892, which
was meant to provide the foundation for a free social human life. Still,
if the human being is to relate freely to life, then between the ages of
seven and fifteen a feeling of authority should have developed. Unless we
learn to know other human beings through this self-evident authority,
the later form of freedom will lead to suppression, not true freedom.
Just as human beings cannot learn the true meaning of fraternity unless
they are educated in a certain way, guided rightly through childhood’s
imitative stage, in the same way the feeling of authority is necessary for
humans to become truly free. All that is said nowadays (about running
school communities in republican fashion) is only the result of partisan
considerations. It would actually destroy human nature. I say this based
on a thorough knowledge of human beings. The call for a healthy au-
thoritative teaching between the seventh and the fifteenth year must be
expressed. The only criterion is realism. The decisive factor cannot be
current catch phrases, Precisely those who stand on the soil of liberty
will need to call for an authoritative [not authoritarian] education.
Endnotes
1. In the twenty-first century we have a system in which we must pass “regu-
lations” which are set in place like moats before one reaches the castle of
the law.
2. Presumably the Neuwachtschule in Cologne, founded in April 1921, along
the same lines as the Stuttgart school.
3. “Cloud-cuckoo-land” is a reference to The Birds, a satire of Plato and his
philosophical entourage, written by the Greek playwright Aristophanes.
4. Steiner is alluding to conflicts within the anthroposophical society in respect
to the World School Association. Some members of the Vorstand feared
that fundraising for such large scale effort would be competing with the
financial needs of re-building the Goetheanum.
5. Christianity as Mystical Fact (GA 8), original publication 1902.
43
III
Teaching, Government, and Education
Questions from the Point of View
of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science
Amsterdam, February 28, 1921
In my first lecture in Amsterdam, on February 19th, I attempted
to analyze how anthroposophically-oriented spiritual science finds its
place in the current human civilization.1 In the Free School for Spiritual
Science at the Goetheanum in Dornach this spiritual science already has
an external institution for its cultivation, centered around artistic work.
The goal is to add to the important cognitive results of natural science
—which it fully acknowledges— the supersensible cognitive knowledge
acquired through the use of exact spiritual scientific methods. And in
my previous lecture, I called your attention to the fact that at the present
time, many souls are yearning for a knowledge that is as grounded as
the knowledge prevailing in the natural sciences, but extending to the
parts of the world connected with the eternal in the human soul.
I pointed out that this supersensible knowledge could only be ob-
tained to the extent that people develop specific capacities situated in
the soul. Wide circles of educated people refuse to have anything to do
with these capacities. The catastrophe of our time, which is visible to
everybody, rests precisely on the willful neglect of these capacities.
If we want to get anywhere with what is understood as spiritual
science, we must proceed first from something that I call “intellectual
modesty.” This intellectual modesty will seem paradoxical in a time
when we take such pride in intellectualism. But anyone who wishes
to penetrate into the supersensible worlds—to which the human soul
belongs in its true essence—needs this departure point of intellectual
moderation. I will assume that many of those here today did not attend
my first lecture and so I will repeat the comparison I used then in this
connection.
If we hand a five-year-old a volume of Shakespeare, she will play
with the book, perhaps tear it up or scribble into it, but in any case will
not do with the Shakespeare volume that for which it was designed. But
give this same child another ten or fifteen years, and the capacities that
previously were dormant in the child’s soul will have developed through
education, through schooling, and the child will now read Shakespeare.
After fifteen years, (s)he has reached a higher level of humanity; after
fifteen years, she has become a different being.
If one wishes to penetrate the supersensible world, one must be
able to tell oneself: “Perhaps I, an adult, am in the same relation to
nature with her secrets and deep lawfulness as the five-year-old child is
in relation to Shakespeare, and perhaps forces are dormant in my in-
ner soul which must first be brought to the surface.” If as an adult one
seriously approaches the forces and capacities dormant in the soul with
this intellectual modesty, then one may develop in oneself higher kinds
of cognition than those of daily life and ordinary science.
First we must cultivate the human power that is commonly known
as the power of memory. Through memory, we bring context to our
life. Through memory, images of things we experienced at a very early
age are conjured up before our soul. This power of memory makes last-
ing that which would otherwise pass us by as fleeting representations.
If only we could give ourselves to the outer world, if only we could
surrender ourselves to representations of these fleeting circumstances
and experiences, our entire soul life would be different. If as adults we
develop further the enduring representations present in the memory,
we can come to a completely different cognitive capacity. And this
can be developed through methods I have described in Knowledge of
the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, in my Occult Science2 and other
writings. It can be developed through the use of specific meditation and
concentration exercises, settling earnestly upon specific, easily surveyed
representations that are not simple reminiscences, nor ones that rest
upon any kind of autosuggestion; they must be easily visible.
We should focus on such representations with the entire architec-
ture/texture of our soul. The true spiritual investigator’s studies to know
the supersensible worlds are as demanding as the studies conducted in
the clinic, the physicist’s or chemist’s lab, or the observatory, and they
TEACHING, GOVERNMENT, AND EDUCATION 45
take just as long. This meditation, this concentration with the entire
force of the soul upon particular representations, performed consistently
and with patience, must be continued for years. Deep-seated forces
of cognition, of which the person has no inkling otherwise, must be
brought to the surface of the soul. Once these higher forces emerge,
we can perceive what surrounds us through them, we can perceive that
the physical-sensory worlds surrounds us. First we develop an aware-
ness of our own experience, not as an imprecise stream, running almost
from the time of our birth, in which fragments of memories float, but
rather as a unified, accessible, life-panorama, an overview of what we
have experienced in our life since birth. Knowing this, one will realize
what it means to live in one’s soul out-of-the-body. Materialism usu-
ally claims —and at first it certainly seems rightly so—that all ordinary
representations, all ordinary memories, all ordinary feelings and acts
of will are tied to the physical body. But in ordinary life, this feeling,
this willing is interrupted. Every day, sleep interrupts the ordinary soul-
life connected with the body. It is just that people do not feel deeply
enough the important riddle connected with falling sleep, sleeping and
reawakening. The “individuality” must be present when we sleep, oth-
erwise it would have to resurrect every time we wake up. But by doing
the exercises that I have briefly alluded to here, one learns to know in
which form the “individuality” is present in sleep.
If one comes to the point of representing things in one’s soul using
neither external eyes nor any other senses, nor ordinary brain-bound
reasoning, but only the purely soul-spiritual (organs)—and one can do
that when one cultivates the power of memory in the fashion I have
described—there comes a point when one knows that between going
to sleep and awakening, the human being is present, as a soul-spiritual
essence out of the body, and only the desire to return to one’s body is
brought to bear. And this desire clouds the consciousness.
Any time we develop our power of memory as I have described, we
are able to comport ourselves as the sleeper—i.e., not perceive with one’s
senses, not to combine sensations in one’s reasoning—and yet entirely
consciously. One then knows the soul-spiritual reality independently
from the body. Thereby one can also succeed in knowing this soul-spirit
before birth or conception and after death in its true essence and in
connection with other supersensible experiences.
And if, in addition, we cultivate a second soul-force equally pres-
ent in ordinary life—namely the force of love—if the force of life is
transformed into a cognitive force, human beings learn to know also
in their immediacy the images otherwise experienced as a supersensible
panorama. By cultivating the capacity for love, supersensible cognition
can become to some extent perfect. And what we attain in this way is
not just peace of soul, not just something that satisfies our theoretical
needs, but also practical results in essential matters. This is why every-
thing that came out of Dornach from the very beginning was intended
to be implemented in practical life. And we have already had some
successes, precisely for practical life.
I would like to call your attention to a highly practical area of life
that must interest all humans. I would like to show how anthropos-
ophically-oriented spiritual science can fertilize the art of education
and teaching.
What does one attain through this spiritual science, the methods
of which I have only sketched? One attains, first and foremost, a true
knowledge of the human being. Unless we can look at supersensible
reality, it is impossible to truly know the human being. For the human
being is not just the external physical organization about which the
natural scientific world has given us such grand, powerful disclosures,
for which we are most grateful. But the human being is also a soul and
a spirit; the human being harbors an eternal core of being that goes
through birth and death. This core has consciousness after death because
then it no longer desires the body, as it did when we were lying in bed
asleep, and that desire extinguishes consciousness.
When this ordinary physical body is set aside at death, the human
being gains a consciousness all the more lucid, for consciousness is no
longer suppressed by any desires of the body. In all these ways (and in
other ways that I will not describe here but which you can find in my
books), the human being acquires a true knowledge of the human be-
ing. And only a real knowledge of the human being can give rise to a
true art of education and teaching.
We have attempted to deal with this realm of practical life in the
Waldorf school founded by Emil Molt in Stuttgart, which I lead,
and the pedagogy of which is entirely derived from anthroposophi-
cal spiritual science. First of all, the soul disposition of the teaching
staff is such that each new morning, during each session, something
is brought to the class that makes of education and teaching a kind of
religious service/mission. Is there not something quite special in the
teachings from anthroposophical spiritual science that the human be-
ing—revealed as such a marvelous puzzle in the growing child—arose
from the spiritual worlds through conception and birth? If one really
knows this, one faces the growing child, the evolving person with the
sense of a mission assigned to the teacher by the spiritual worlds. We
then see that the eternal being that has descended from the spiritual
worlds develops day after day, week after week, year after year, so that
the child’s initially inchoate physiognomic traits, its flailing movements
are elaborated to ever greater precision. We see the soul-spirit at work
in the development of each human being.
I will refrain from a superficial criticism of all that was contributed
by pedagogical geniuses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Unquestionably many a beautiful pedagogical principle has been for-
mulated. It is right, for instance, to emphasize that “one should not
stuff things into the child; everything we bring to the children should
be grown out of their dispositions and capacities.” This is true indeed,
a remarkable principle—but abstract and theoretical. And by far the
largest part of our life praxis is given us in abstractions, in theoretical
programs. For it takes a real knowledge of human nature, reaching into
all the depths of humanity, to apply the principle of “bringing every-
thing out of the individuality.” Despite its great triumphs, the science
now existing in modern civilization does not and cannot know human
beings in this way.
To show how the spiritual science I have in mind attains true knowl-
edge of the human being, I would like to present a few very concrete
examples. “Nature makes no leaps” is a cheap slogan thoughtlessly re-
peated. In reality, nature is constantly making leaps. Just think of a plant:
It develops green leaves, then there is a “leap” to the calyx, then another
“leap” to the colorful petals, then the stamens, and so forth. And this is
true of all life including human beings. If we look without prejudice,
using the impulses provided by anthroposophically-oriented spiritual
science, we can clearly distinguish different epochs of human life. The
first epoch goes from birth to the change of teeth around the seventh
year, when children start in primary school. If we but have the necessary
insight and objectivity of observation, if we get used to observing life
at a higher level, in the manner in which the natural sciences usually
observe life at the lower levels, we can sharply distinguish between the
first and the second phase of human life. The first phase ends with the
change of teeth; the second phase ends with puberty. The first phase
shows us the child as an imitative being. Even in play, the child is always
imitating. Sure, many people believe that in play, an imaginative being
is developing. Actually, this is the case, and if you study playfulness in
its deepest essence, you will notice imitative moments everywhere in the
child’s play. In connection with this playfulness, it is vitally important to
know the human being as a totality, knowledge crucial for an education
that really affects existence and for a pedagogical art.
For you see, each child plays differently. If we observe objectively,
without prejudice, we can clearly distinguish the way one child plays
and the way another child plays. The differences may be very small. If
one wants to be a pedagogue, one needs to be a psychologist in order
to observe these fine distinctions. If we can do that, different kinds
of play must be correlated to different stages of human life. When it
comes to the observation of the human being, external science tends
to relate things by proximity. But this does not take us very far. What
we can observe in the child’s play does not remain visible in the very
next life stage (from the stage of the second dentition to puberty). For
then, the child is busy with other things. Even though children go on
playing, their playfulness is not as clearly marked in the later stage. The
“playful passions” take a backseat in the recesses of the soul and only
return to light in the second half of the twenties, when human beings
must find their place in practical life. One person will tackle the tasks
of destiny with great deftness, another will become an escapist dreamer,
and between the two there is an infinity of nuances. If we know how
the four-, five-, six-year-old played, we can explain the way in which
the adult approaches practical life in these (later) years.
It is thus of utmost importance for pedagogues to direct the child’s
play, to observe what it is that wants to emerge in the child and to redirect
traits that should not emerge, for they would make the child inept in
later life. For if we guide the children’s play rightly in the earlier years,
we give them something to carry into the praxis of life as they develop
in their twenties. A person’s entire life is of one piece; what is implanted
in the child’s soul will reappear later in life, through many metamor-
phoses. Only through a knowledge of the human being as a totality, the
knowledge practiced by anthroposophically-oriented spiritual science,
can we really understand connections between things that are as far apart
as early childhood and the third decade of life, the playful instincts in
childhood and the practical life in adulthood. Only such a spiritual sci-
ence can look that deeply into life. This will give you some sense of the
sphere of human knowledge from which an anthroposophical spiritual
science approaches the creation of the art of teaching.
The child is an imitative being approximately up to the seventh
year. I use the number seven not out of any mystical inclination but
because the change of teeth is important in the totality of life develop-
ment. Children learn their particular gestures, their language through
imitation; even their form of mind develops in this fashion. The rela-
tionship between children and their environment depends not only on
external factors but on many hidden imponderable elements. Teachers
or educators living in the child’s proximity must be fully aware that
the child adapts to what the adults do, not just outwardly, not just in
what they say, but also what they feel, what they think. A materialistic
approach does not believe that it makes a difference for the children’s
growth whether in their presence we entertain noble or ignoble ideas,
because life context is considered in its material physical entities, not
in how things are related in imponderable ways. We can see this when
we truly observe life in its inner structures.
Here is an example: One day a father came to me (I have many
such examples) complaining bitterly that his child had stolen. He was
greatly distressed by it. I said: Let’s see whether this five-year-old really
stole. I asked for the situation to be described. What had actually hap-
pened? The boy had taken some money from the drawer in which his
mother kept the coins which she used for small daily purchases. He had
taken the money and bought a few sweets, not out of selfishness but to
share the sweets among his friends. I told the father the child had not
stolen; he had considered that what his mother does is always right,
and that, simply, he should also be allowed to do it, for at that age he
is completely an imitative being. We must be fully aware of this: The
way to influence children is not through warnings or prohibitions, but
simply through the things we do in ordinary circumstances.
And we shall only form a healthy judgment about the child’s soul
configuration if we know: This situation will change substantially after
the change of teeth. At that point, instead of simple imitation, there
appears the soul’s stance towards its surroundings as to a self-evident
authority. And during the entire school year we are dealing with this
child’s desire for the self-evident authority of the teacher or educator and
anything else in the child’s environment. We need only remember the
significance for the entire life of having been able, between the seventh
and the fifteenth year, to look up with the greatest respect to those who
had educating authority in the environment. They are the people, whose
relation to us was such that what we held to be true or false proceeded
from the manner in which these educators saw truth and falsehood,
what for these adults was the criterion of truth and falsehood. When
we attempt to distinguish between truth and falsehood at this childish
age, we are dealing with a human, reality, not with an abstraction.
If I tell you that in 1892 I wrote a small piece in which I most
emphatically set out individual human freedom as a fundamental
social principle,3 you will know that I do not represent this need for
self-evident authority out of any predilection for conservative or reac-
tionary ideas. But unless between the seventh and fourteenth years one
knows a self-evident authority nearby, and out of this authority learns
to form the criterion for true and false, good and evil, and later comes
to an autonomous criterion of rational, or otherwise inner, autonomous
judgment, no one can be truly free, no one can freely find the correct
social relation with fellow human beings.
At this second stage, the soul of the child is still so constituted that
it is completely interconnected with the environment. Only toward the
end of this stage of life, somewhere in the twelfth or thirteenth year, do
we see the child clearly distinguishing himself from his environment,
out of the knowledge that “my ego is in me, nature is outside of me.” Of
course, ego-consciousness is present from earliest childhood, but still in
nature of a feeling. If we want to educate rightly, we should know that
an inordinately important point of the child’s development is between
the ninth and the tenth–eleventh year. It is the point when the child
becomes engrossed in himself and inwardly learns to separate himself in
all things from nature and from the outer world in general. Before this
point, because the children are still at one with the inner life, they see
their environment in often symbolic images and think of their environ-
ment in symbolic terms. Afterwards, another stage begins.
It is of utmost importance that the educator assess rightly this stage
of life, the precise timing of which can vary from child to child. For
to the very extent that the teacher and educator behaves in the right
fashion between the ninth and tenth years, leading the child across this
Rubicon in a fatherly, friendly, loving manner, this makes an impact on
a human life of lasting importance for the rest of existence until physical
death. Whether people can have brightness of life at decisive moments,
whether they go disconsolately through life in soul-bleakness, all this
depends to a great extent—although not completely—on the way educa-
tors and teachers treat them between the ninth and the eleventh years.
Sometimes it is simply a matter of finding the right word at the right
moment, say, when a boy or a girl comes to us in the hall and asks us a
question, or of having the right facial expression when one answers. The
art of education cannot be learned or taught abstractly—just as little as
painting or sculpture or any other art can—but it rests on infinite details
arising from soul tactfulness. It is this tactfulness, this delicacy of soul
precisely that can be gained from anthroposophical spiritual science.
Now this also tells us that one must discern what to bring the
children before and after this important turning point. We should note
first of all that something in our present, advanced, civilization has be-
come very external, abstract, and symbolic. If you look back to ancient
civilizations and take any pictographic writing, you will see that some
essence of the meaning was still captured in the words. This essence was
converted into an image to which the human being felt connected, with
which the person lived in feelings and sensibility. Nowadays, all this
has been reduced to mere signs. Now, we should not bring reading and
writing to the child as something alien, because before the ninth year,
he wants to be at one with his environment. We should not teach out
of abstraction, as is often the case nowadays. At the Waldorf school, all
teaching starts out in the artistic mode, insofar as we first draw forms
in color for the child, forms gathered from human experience. Then we
allow the children to make these forms themselves; we have the children
paint them, and they walk them on the floor. And as we guide them
further in this painting-moving fashion, we develop, out of this draw-
ing, the forms of the letters, writing proper. We start out from art; we
bring writing out of the artistic, and then in the same manner, reading.
In this fashion, we match what really resides in the child.
It is not a matter of the pedagogue saying abstractly, “We just need
to bring out what lies in the child.” We must know how to start out in
practice so that we really meet human nature. Anthroposophical spiritual
science is never just theory, but should always be true praxis. This is
what will allow the teacher to develop the art of education.
What I said about authority can also connect us with something
else that may seem paradoxical. Much is made in our current materi-
alistic age of the so-called “object lesson.” Those who understand the
child’s true nature will find it terrifying to see the abstract calculating
machines and all the stuff which the children often have to negotiate.
It is expected nowadays that children will understand and should know
everything right away. One attempts to so organize the teaching that
nothing should reach beyond the understanding of the eight- or nine-
year-old. On the surface, this seems remarkably scientific. Believe me,
dear listeners, even an anthroposophically-trained person can see the
reasoning behind such a rule, just as well as those who defend these rules
as self-evident. But what is self-evident is that for children between the
ages of seven and fourteen, memory and the sense of authority should
be trained in a healthy fashion as I described above.
Those who demand “concreteness and only concreteness”4 at all
times, and concreteness “adapted to the child’s understanding,” do not
know what it could mean for the entire rest of the child’s life if, be-
tween the eighth–ninth year up to the fifteenth year, the child accepts
something based on the teacher’s authority, that because it is said by an
authoritative individual, the child holds it for true. It still lies over the
horizon, but the child absorbs it. One may not bring it up again until
the age of thirty-five or forty. Something which one only had memorized
can now be understood with the ripened force. This consciousness of
maturity, this capacity to draw something up from one’s own being,
freshens and invigorates the soul force in a way which is not appreciated
in ordinary life, whereas it depletes the soul if between the ages of eight
to twelve everything was cut down to the size of the child. This needs
to be said, because out of a materialistic intelligence, human beings are
no longer able to see what is natural, right, essential in this domain.
And from the deep layers of human nature, from those aspects
that want to be formed, to develop week by week, year by year—this is
where the Waldorf school curriculum finds its materials. This curriculum
is entirely the product of a knowledge of human nature. It is not an
abstract curriculum, but something that underlies the pedagogy of this
school, just as knowing how to paint or how to sculpt is the foundation
for those who want to be active as painters or sculptors.
I have described to you from the domain of education and teaching
how anthroposophical spiritual science affects life praxis. But consider
how spiritual life must be constituted if such an educational and teaching
praxis is to really come into its own! We are used to seeing this intel-
lectual/spiritual life as merely an appendage of the state, or perhaps an
appendage of economic life. We are used to allowing the state to prescribe
the most important part of the spiritual life, which is precisely education
and schooling. What anthroposophical spiritual science must bring into
effect for modern civilization, out of a truly penetrating understanding
of educational and teaching methods—derived from a true knowledge
of man—is that the spiritual life, education and teaching should be
allowed to administer itself freely. To speak quite concretely: Teachers
and educators should not just teach and educate, they also must take in
hand the entire administration of schooling and education, freely and
independently from the state and from economic life. From the earliest
grades to the highest learning institutions, each teacher and educator
should spend as much time teaching as will still leave time free to also
be an administrator. And only those people should be the administrators
of the schools who are still actively involved in teaching and education,
the actual teachers and educators in every field, not people who have
become state functionaries and have left teaching behind. The only
intervention that should be allowed in education is what comes from
knowledge and art and religious worldview. People do not want to accept
that what was necessary, perhaps even very good, at one historical stage
is not necessarily valid at another time in history. With the centralized
government in our modern age, it was a good, self-evident, move for
schools to be removed from the control of the churches. At that point,
it benefited humanity. But we have come to a point where this can no
longer be the case. Whatever the state could do to benefit schooling has
been exhausted and the free spiritual life truly originating in spiritual
wellsprings demands the administrative autonomy of education.
Here the “school question,” the “education question,” touches di-
rectly on the social question, in every essential respect. When it comes
to the “social question,” many people think that the most important
consideration is that of external arrangements, that one needs merely to
consider these external arrangements to understand the social question,
that one should work on these externals to deal with the social ques-
tion. If one really understands life, this is impossible to think. I have
become acquainted with the thinking of the proletarians, not only in
my own youth, but for many years as a teacher of various subjects at
a Workers’ School.5 I have seen what really lives in the widest strata of
the proletariat, which has actually developed into class only as a result
of modern technology.
Not in external circumstances, not even in the “question of bread,”
does the real social question arise. There is a soul disposition connected
with this problem, the kind of spiritual life that has developed in the
ruling class over the last three or four centuries and passed down to the
proletarian masses as a kind of religion. I saw this worldview grow out
of the materialist foundations among people who deserve to be taken
seriously, among profound souls belonging to the bourgeoisie, belonging
to the ruling classes, and this is what I experienced. These soulful indi-
viduals told themselves: “Let us take seriously the scientific worldview.
Let us see how the world evolved from some kind of nebulous state to
its present condition and how various forms of life gradually co-evolved
all the way up to the human being. And there will come a time when
the earth will either freeze up or die of heat—either way one imagines
it—then the earth will become one great cemetery. What then will have
become of all the things that human beings see as the noblest in human
nature, what arises within them as moral ideals, religion impulses, art,
science?”
I have known individuals who considered these questions seriously,
unlike the greater part of modern humanity, which thoughtlessly juxta-
poses these two worlds, the world of external natural necessity and the
world of the genuine human-values, moral ideals, religious convictions,
science, artistic creation. And these serious souls tell themselves: “Of
course human beings are aware of what streams out of the soul. But it
is an illusion, it is like fog rising from physical conditions. And at some
point there will be a great cemetery and what we call great ideals will
be swallowed up, gone entirely.” I have learned to know the pessimism
and the tragic mood of these deep-thinking persons. But I have also
experienced how this worldview has penetrated into the proletarian soul
and how there one word came up to meet it with tremendous effective-
ness, a very eloquent word: “ideology.” If we understand that it lives in
the proletarians’ soul, we shall know much about the background of
the present civilization and the social question. What these proletarian
souls know as spiritual life, as morality, law, science, art and religion,
they think of as a superstructure separate and above the production
process, the material world, which for them is the only real concrete
reality. This is the inheritance of the tragic worldview that I described,
and which has laid waste to the proletarians’ souls.
It is possible nowadays to pass for an idealist when one seeks the
“proletarian question” in what is expressed by the restrictive word “ideol-
ogy.” But these idealists will be right and those who believe that they have
sold the large masses of humanity on human wisdom and life routine,
they will see that history tramples them on its way.6 This “ideology”
signifies that the souls of these human masses remain a desolate desert,
that they have no connection with the living spirit—just as little as do
the ruling classes that transmitted this science to the proletariat.
And here I offer you the essence of the mission and tasks of the
Dornach Goetheanum for this stage of civilization. Many people see that
culturally-enlightened science must be brought to the wide masses now.
People are creating libraries, universities, and everything conceivable
to “bring to the people” the science being taught in our high schools
and universities. The Goethanum cannot be a part of that. What the
Goethanum wants to offer is what was presented in the course we orga-
nized in the autumn of 1920, and which we repeated on a smaller scale
at Easter in 1924. It was a matter of fertilizing the individual traditional
sciences with the inspiration of spiritual science. Thirty teachers came
to this autumn course from all fields of science, and also from industry,
business and the arts. The lectures showed how all branches of science,
art and life could be stimulated by spiritual science. It is a question of
the renewal of science. It is a matter of bringing the spirit into the sci-
ences, so that we will have not just a head-culture, but one that comes
out of the whole human being.
Thus the purpose of the Goetheanum in Dornach is to bring a new
spirit into the universities; only then can they become truly “popular.”
People want to bring to the masses the spirit of academia. Can they not
see from looking at modern civilization what this spirit lacks for those
who have it? This spirit itself must be renewed. Rather than education
being taken “out of the schools” into the people, first a culture/educa-
tion rooted in the spirit must be brought to the schools. This is the way
in which Dornach must distinguish itself from everything else being
done in this direction nowadays. At this point people imagine that
they are free-spirited, yet they hand themselves over to the frightful
authoritarianism of currently extant science. I say this not to dispar-
age modern scientific thinking but as the result of several decades of
serious work with various branches of this very thinking. We need to
work in the present for the liberation of intellectual/spiritual life, and
thereby the liberation of education, just as in the past the government
found it necessary to take over schooling and education from religious
domination.
I know what the arguments are against this idea of creating the free
spiritual life as the first step of the threefold social organism. But when
people express their fear that everyone may then decide to not send their
children to these schools, they are looking at things from the wrong end.
The question is not whether people will voluntarily send their children
to school, but rather that a free education and schooling life is (free
schools are) a necessity for humankind, and that we must see to it that
children go to these schools anyway. It cannot be an objection against
the free spiritual life, but it must an occasion to ponder how despite a
free spiritual life, the children of neglectful or conscience-less parents
will be brought to this school. This is the first part of the impulse for
the threefold structure of the social organism proposed by the anthro-
posophical worldview as the progressive movement toward a possible
solution of the social question: the free spiritual life, administered by
spiritually active persons.
There are all kinds of reasons to defend the necessity of freedom of
spiritual life, as well as to attack it, or to cancel it. They are not relevant.
For anthroposophy always comes out of life praxis and life observation.
Those who know what a true spiritual science will mean for humanity
also know how necessary the liberation of spiritual life is. We speak of
ideology, because spiritual life consists in abstractions, because one does
not have any concept of the facts (1) that the representation living in
the soul is not the same as a copy of something or other because one
no longer knows what the old religions procured to humanity, (2) that
the living spirit lives in each individual, and (3) that the human beings
with their eternal part belong to the living spirit rather than insub-
stantial abstract images living in their soul. The living spiritual world,
filling us inwardly, is not an ideology. The rise of ideology is what has
brought about the catastrophes of our age. But a school and educational
institution aiming to restore the living spirit to humanity must be free.
This free educational system appears to me in the most eminent sense a
necessity of modern humanity—insofar as we are serious about human
salvation and human progress.
Therefore—and I say this with no intention to agitate/create a
stir—I consider it absolutely indispensable that there should arise on
an international, broad-based foundation, a World School Association,
in order to remove the forces of decadence present in our modern
civilization and resurrect forces of renewal. This World School Associa-
tion should be aware that it has to create a free spiritual life. It is not
enough for people to think that our Stuttgart Waldorf school deserves
observation for only a few hours or a few weeks. To observe something
that proceeds from an entire spiritual life is tantamount to cutting out
a piece of the Sistine Madonna in order to get an impression of the
whole picture. Auditioning at the Waldorf school will not allow us to
experience the spirit of the Waldorf school, insofar as one needs to know
anthroposophy, anthroposophical spiritual science living in each teacher,
in each lesson, in the children, and living also in the reports.
Let me briefly characterize how in the Waldorf school gradually,
little by little, the teachers learn to know each child’s individuality
despite the fact that we have large classes. We do not give grades that
say “very good,” “not good enough”—that is all nonsense. This is not
the way to evaluate the children or their work. We give each child a
real description of his/her character, presenting them with a mirror of
the entire year, and a verse chosen from the depth of the soul. It is our
experience that pupils attach enormous importance to these reports.
Thus we have experienced the quality of the anthroposophical spirit
that moves in the Waldorf school.
But it is not the goal simply to create as quickly as possible many
schools based on the model of the Waldorf school. What we really want
is that on an international scale this level of insight should grow in
very large circles. We must fight the traditionalists who want to build
schools on only a state-foundation. One must strive to ensure that the
free spiritual life will create its own fully legitimate free schools. We are
not interested in the government graciously allowing us to have small
unchartered schools; we will not hold out our hand for that. Rather,
what is necessary is an agreement to have a popular alliance of the type
that one would have in a world school association. This would bring
people together over the entire globe for a great, a gigantic, task.
This is as much as I wanted to say about the first part of the threefold
social organism. I can only touch lightly upon the other parts, since they
are part of life praxis in other realms. Over a period of five centuries, the
unified State has been created in what is now the civilized world. On one
hand it has absorbed all spiritual life, through education and schooling;
it has also to a great extent, if not entirely, absorbed economic life. And
Social democracy aspires to use the entire state, the state framework, to
institute what ultimately would be a militarized economy, destroying
all economic freedom and individuality, as we can see in Trotskyism,
in Leninism, precisely what happened there and so frightfully gripped
Eastern Europe, all the way to Asia. What we need is to learn that today
some things are necessary to humanity.
The economic life has its own particular requirements just as the
spiritual life does. Anyone who has, as I did, spent thirty years (half of
my life) in Austria, which was already a “laboratory” for the workings
of socially destructive forces7 —which is why Austria became the first
victim of the world cataclysm—anyone living in that Austria with his
eyes open could already have seen in the 1870s how things were com-
ing to a precipitous end. Here is an example of the way (in Austria as a
whole) the downfall was brought about. In the 1870s, people wanted
to have a democratic parliament. How did they go about it? They es-
tablished kinds of “Kurien”: the Curia of great landowners, the Curia
of merchants, the Curia of trading and industrial cities, the Curia of
landholdings. All kinds of purely economic interests were pulled into
the Parliament. These representatives of blatant economic interests were
expected to make political decisions. In this manner neither legitimate
State interests nor economic interests were given their proper value.
I could give hundreds of reasons to show you that just as on one
hand spiritual life must be separated from the actual state life, on the
other hand the economic life must similarly be separated too. Just as
the spiritual life must be built upon the completely free human being
and the administration of free human beings, so too the economic life
must be established around the associative principle.
What do I mean by associative principle? We already have a trend
toward the establishment of consumers’ association (cooperatives). The
consumers join forces. And we have a movement in which producers
from the most varied circles join forces. But all we have had until now
is a substitute cobbled together from consumers and producers. Only
when production is organized—not according to the barometer of profit,
but according to needs (demand)—only when we allow those people
who are real experts, knowledgeable in the various economic branches,
to guide the relationships between producers and consumers, only when
we take seriously that, in the spiritual life, we work out of the total-
ity/whole, but in economic life, where one is connected with people in
other branches, this can never be the case—once we take this seriously,
the associative principle will be incorporated in economic life.
Association is not organization. Having spent a part of my life in
Germany, I have noticed that the word “organization” has something
terrifying about it. It is in Germany that I learned what it means to
want to organize every possible thing, and the results of organizing
everything out of a centralized place are terrifying. But association is
not the same as organization. In association, individuals retain their
particular effectiveness, they associate so that out of their cooperation
a collective judgment (a consensus) can arise. For details, you can read
my Kern der Sozialen Frage and Threefold Social Organism, a collection
of articles that appeared in the Stuttgart periodical Die Dreigliederung,
published by the Bund fur Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus.
In these articles I describe how associations can be created out of
truly practical economic life, and that these associations will lead to
true and sustainable pricing of goods. Nowadays, all this is merely ac-
cidental; but pricing can be the product of the associative cooperation of
consumers and producers. For the question of pricing is the pivot of all
economic life. If we cannot understand that prices must be set through
living cooperation in associations and not by statistics or such, then we
will not be able to know what it is all about. We need not bureaucratize
bureaucracy; it cannot be worse than it is today. But insofar as the same
people who are involved practically in economic life also are its leaders,
the whole thing is greatly simplified. We shall ensure that all persons,
no matter what they produce, receive enough to support themselves
and their families, to acquire the things they need in order produce a
comparable product. In other words, if I were to make a pair of boots,
I must receive as much as I need in order to be able to produce another
pair of boots. However, this cannot be decided on any kind of utopian
basis, but will result from the working of associations as I described in
my book Kernpunkte. This is the essential thing in this impulse of the
threefold organization, that it should not be utopian, but should be born
entirely out of life praxis and out of the demands of the time. Expertise
and competency must direct spiritual life; expertise and competency
must lead the economic life within associations, which then join forces in
a great world economic association independent of state boundaries.
In the spiritual life and in the economic life, decisions made by
majority are monstrous; rather, in these domains, everything must
derive from competency. Majority decisions, true democracy, are only
effective in those affairs where every person is competent. Between
a free spiritual life and an economic life established according to the
associative principle, there is a wide range of political and legal affairs
to be decided. In parliamentary life every adult is equal to every other
adult and all will decide those questions which naturally remain free
from economic life and spiritual life.
Experts have made the remarkable objections that, while they
understand that in the threefold social organism there must be a free
spiritual life and associative economic life, then there would be nothing
left for political life. This is symptomatic, for the modern life of the
state has so strongly, powerfully absorbed the economic and spiritual
life. Even in people’s minds/ideas, the modern state has so thoroughly
interconnected the economic life and the intellectual/spiritual life that
it has become ineffective; it has failed to develop the most important
aspects. Experts now within the political life have no concept of what
the particular duties of the political state life ought to be.
What I have presented today is merely a sketch. I pursue these
topics in greater detail in the books I have mentioned. But they are
fundamentally connected with the most urgent historical necessity.
Shining out of the eighteenth century are three great human ideas:
freedom, equality, brotherhood. How could we fail to sense what po-
tential lies in these great human impulses! And yet, some very smart
people in the nineteenth century have shown that, in the unified state,
freedom, equality and brotherhood cannot coexist. So on one hand
our hearts beat faster when we hear mention of these three human
ideas, but on the other hand, the clever statesman—and I am not be-
ing sarcastic—demonstrates that these three ideals are incompatible.
Why is this? What is happening? In the eighteenth century, people
felt the irresistible human ideas and impulses of freedom, equality, and
brotherhood. But they were hypnotized by the thought that the unified
state must do everything. For the threefold social organism, in which
freedom, equality and brotherhood will at last become realities, we must
go beyond that. In a free spiritual life, which I hope can be brought to
the light of day by a World School Association,8 true human freedom
will reign. In the life of the state, standing between spiritual life and
economic life, everything will be built upon equality. Only those things
will be its purview in which truly all human beings can stand with each
other as equals. In the economic life, consumers and producers will
cooperate/come together/unite, find the equilibrium that can reach its
zenith in a truly human pricing system.
We have the potential to incarnate the three great human ideals of
human evolution when we free ourselves from the hypnotic suggestion of
the unified state, when we aim for freedom in the spiritual life, equality
in the political and legal life—the second branch of the threefold social
organism—and brotherhood in an economic life organized based on
the principle of associations which arise out of the reality of production
and consumption. Freedom in spiritual life, equality in the life of the
state, fraternity in economic life; at last we will find the true meaning
of these great social ideals of humanity.
Endnotes
1. Transcription of stenographic notes by Hedda Hummel.
2. Public lecture, stenographic notes originally published in Die Menschen-
schule N. 12/1959 (no GA publication).
3. Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, 1904–1905 (GA 10),
and Occult Science, 1910 (GA 13).
4. The Philosophy of Freedom appeared in the Fall of 1893, with a printing
date of 1894. See GA 4 and GA 4a, documents relating to the Philosophy
of Freedom.
5. Anschaulichkeit could also be translated as graphic quality.
6. Between January 1899 and December 1904, Rudolf Steiner taught several
nights a week, with great success, at the Berlin Workers’ School, a night
school founded by Wilhelm Liebknecht, and between 1902 and 1904 at a
similar school in Spandau. See chapter XXVIII of the Autobiography (GA
28); supporting documentation in Beiträge zur Rudolf Steiner Gesamtaus-
gabe, 111/1993. Also, vivid memoirs by two former students were published
in 1979 (Johanna Mücke and Alwin Alfred Rudolph, Memories of Rudolf
Steiner and His Work at the Berlin Workers’ School, 1899–1904, transl. 2004,
by Mado Spiegler, available from the Rudolf Steiner Library).
7. Steiner is presumably referring to the fact that that the “bourgeois” (or
as he also called it “philistine”) project of popularizing sentimental yet
materialistic intellectual and scientific ideals is ultimately doomed to fail.
This was a view Steiner shared with his anarchist and socialist friends and
collaborators.
8. See the young Rudolf Steiner’s article on this subject in the Vienna news-
paper Deutsche Wochenschrift in the collected essays on culture and history
1887–1901 (GA 31).
9. See the relevant note to the Utrecht Lecture (GA 297a, 38).
63
IV
Educational Conversation
Darmstadt, July 28, 1922
Question: In the modern age we have resurrected the principle of obser-
vation in teaching. It now seems that when children leave school, they
are helpless in the face of life. As a result of nothing but observation,
they remain stuck with the image.
Rudolf Steiner: This question, the question of concreteness/pictorial
quality, specifically the exclusive focus on pictorial quality in teaching,
is a very important pedagogical question for the present time. Now,
in order to treat it thoroughly, this question should not be treated in
isolation but rather in the context of a comprehensive pedagogical
thinking. Here I would first like to state that teaching at the Waldorf
school is built upon our knowledge of the human being’s development.
The Waldorf school is definitely not the school of one particular world-
view. But rather, we must put to use in the praxis of the Waldorf school
whatever inspiration /support the anthroposophical soul-disposition
can provide towards pedagogical deftness, method, and management
of things. Indeed, the Waldorf school is intended to come into its own
when integrated into practical life. For example, in a practical connec-
tion, there is the very important observation that in the child until the
six-seventh year we are dealing with an imitative being. Until that time,
children are imitators. This is so much the case during the kindergarten
age that little can be learned in the conventional sense, but the teacher
needs to rely on the child’s imitative capacity. People come and ask me
all kinds of questions. A father came to me one day, quite distressed:
“What shall we do? Our boy, who always was such a good boy, has sto-
len.” “How old is the boy?” I asked. “Five years old.” Then, I answered,
“We need to investigate whether he really stole.” Investigation revealed
that the boy had not stolen at all, despite the fact that he had actuually
taken money out of a drawer. Rather, he had observed how every day
his mother would give deliverymen some money out of her drawer, and
he thought to himself, “My mother does it, so it must be right.” And
he simply took the money out of the drawer. He bought sweets, not to
eat by himself, but to share with his friends. What he did was simply
imitation, as fitted his age. It is very important for children of that age
that the adults are careful to not do anything that children would not
be allowed to copy.
Then comes the age that starts with the change of teeth and ends
at puberty, the age during which children go to primary school. This
age demands simply—and this is something that various parties insist
should not be obvious—that the child refer to an authority and learn
to act accordingly. It is of the utmost importance for later stages of life,
specifically in educating capacities for difficult developmental times to
come and for all conceivable things in the course of a lifetime, that at
this age, from the seventh to fourteenth year, children accept things
based on authority. This relationship with the self-evident authority of
a teacher and educator is irreplaceable. We can easily find confirma-
tions of the things people cannot have later in life if they were unlucky
enough to not have near them a self-evident authority.
This is where this question of the object lesson for this age comes in.
The current object lesson has grown out of materialism and has been
pushed to the extreme. People just have to see everything with their
own eyes. They do not believe in anything unless it is right before them;
and so they believe that everything must be presented to children in
this manner. The problems parents evoke are not the only ones; others
arise from the teacher’s side. Take the Teachers’ Guides with instruc-
tions for the object lesson. The banalities and trivialities they dish out
are downright monstrous. There is always a reflexive urge to reduce
everything to the lowest possible level. These are the object lessons in
which the teacher is never supposed to bring the child anything more
than what the child already knows. This is the worst possible teaching.
That teaching is the best that not only provides for the child’s present
age, but also for the entire human lifetime. If the course of life does
not make it possible to have, at the age of forty or fifty, something left
from the time of sitting on school benches, then the teaching was bad.
EDUCATIONAL CONVERSATION – DARMSTADT 65
One’s retrospective view should contains living forces. After all, to grow
means that our limbs become bigger, but other things are transformed
too, everything in us is growing. If we bring the child static concepts,
representations and observations that do not grow, that remain as they
are, if emphasis is put to their staying the same, then we are sinning
against the principle of growth. We must bring to the child things that
become part of the living growth process. We cannot do that with the
platitudes of the object lesson, but only when we truly encounter the
child, Then imponderable elements come into consideration.
I often use an example like the following: Let us assume we want
to teach the child the concept of immortality. It can be symbolized
by natural processes, for instance with the image of the butterfly and
the cocoon. I can say: The immortal soul within the person is like the
butterfly in the cocoon; it develops into a spiritual world, just like the
butterfly develops out of the cocoon. This is one image, but I can pres-
ent it to the children in two different ways. The first way would be for
me to think: I am the teacher; I am extraordinarily smart; the child is
young and frightfully stupid. I will therefore present this concept to the
child as a symbol. I am way beyond these things, but the child needs to
understand in this way the concept of immortality of the soul. So I will
explain in an intellectual manner. This practically guarantees that the
child will not learn anything, not because what was brought was false as
such, but because that is not the right way to teach children anything.
If I fully familiarize myself with anthroposophical spiritual science, it
will not be just an image that makes me feel smarter than the child, but
it will be a truth. Nature itself offers us at one level the butterfly that
evolves out of the cocoon, and at a higher level the passage through the
gate of death. If I bring the child something that is truly alive in me,
the child will get something from it.
We cannot state flatly that we must do things in such or such a way,
for it boils down to imponderable elements, a certain soul disposition
that I have as the teacher and that is the most important thing. One
also needs to consider other difficulties resulting from remaining mired
in banal object lessons, which become ever more impersonal: At the
very age when teachers should be playing the important role of moral
authority, they take themselves out of the picture. Certain things should
absolutely be taught to children from a place of authority. It is impossible
to transmit everything by way of an object lesson, for instance moral
concepts. One cannot proceed from object lessons, nor can one proceed
from rules/laws; they can only be transmitted by way of a self-evident
moral authority. And it is one of the most significant experiences for later
in life to have accepted something when one was eight, nine or twelve
years old because a respected individual considered it right. This relation-
ship to the respected individual is one of the imponderables of education.
And when we turn thirty, a particular experience brings back from the
deep recesses of human consciousness something one had learned long
ago; I can comprehend now what I had simply accepted twenty-five
years ago. This is tremendously important.It is actually the experience
of something growing towards me which I had accepted in childhood.
As a result, all theoretical discussions about more or less “observation”
are futile. Things must come from the objects themselves.
Similarly discussions about thinking are also not very important or
appropriate. The important thing is that teachers should be assigned to
the right place, that human beings assembled in a school organization
should be brought together in the right way. This should be our true
goal. Curricula and anything else that can be reduced to paragraphs are
useless in real life—and education is real life. For if you put together in a
room three, or six, or twelve people independently of their pedecessors,
social origin, or prior education, they will be able to design on paper
an ideally beautiful curriculum. Whenever we think up a curriculum
this way, paragraph-by-paragraph, it can turn out inordinately beautiful
and grand; it can contain the most wonderful things. Yet this is not the
issue. The issue is that within the school, which has a certain number of
teachers, life should be really alive; each of these teachers has particular
capacities, and this is the concrete reality with which one must work.
What good is it for a teacher to look and decide: such and such is my
“teaching goal”? That is a pure abstraction. The real issue is what the
teacher can be for the children as an individual with a particular stance
in the world.
The “school-problem” in our time is primarily a “teacher-problem”
and all questions about details, for instance, the question about the
object lesson should be treated from this point of view. To put it bluntly,
can one teach children through object lessons? I must say I feel a sense
of silent dread when I see the tortures (children are subjected to) with
calculators in a classroom, or when I see material being made into object
lessons, material which really should be approached quite differently. If
one simply keeps doing nothing but object lessons, one ends up with
awkward children, and I say this based on observation. It has nothing to
do with phenomenology or phenomenalism; if we truly want to teach
phenomenalism we first need to know how to think. Schools are about
pedagogical methods, not about scientific method. But we need to know
how close the relationship is between sound thinking and not just the
brain and the person’s head, but also the whole person. How a person
learned to think has a lot to do with that person’s manual skills. For we
really do think with our entire body. Nowadays people believe that we
think with the nervous system, when in fact we think with the entire
organism. And the reverse is also true. If one is able to give a child, in a
natural way, quick and ready thinking and to some extent presence of
mind, one is supporting (working for) physical agility, and if one drives
this thought-nimbleness into the body, the children’s physical agility is
in turn strengthened.
What we are doing now in the Waldorf school is much more im-
portant than simply the lesson. For example, children receive handwork
lessons whereby they get to feel the artistic form on the outside to help
them form themselves on the inside? This in turn leads to an under-
standing of geometrical forms in later studies. This way of familiarizing
oneself with things, not just through simple thought-directed object
lessons, but through the teaching of symbiosis with the entire world and
considering the whole person, this is where we must focus our work. I
merely wanted to call your attention to the fact that these things must
be considered as parts of the totality of pedagogical thinking and that
nowadays there is much too much discussion of details.
We must stick with what was said earlier and repeatedly emphasize:
the Waldorf school does not want to teach a worldview as such. The fact
that anthroposophical understanding of the soul constitution lies at its
foundation is only real to the extent that it can be translated and applied
into pedagogical praxis. So, regarding plans for the Waldorf school, it is a
matter of developing what can be attained in purely pedagogical fashion
out of the anthroposophical movement. The Waldorf school cannot be
and does not want to be the school of a worldview in any direction.
This is why until now the Waldorf school never intended to provide the
children religious education. Ultimately what worldview one or another
anthroposophist believes should play no role, but anthroposophy can
only play a role if translated into pedagogical praxis. This is the reason
why, when the school was founded, the religious instruction of Catho-
lic children was handed over to Catholic priests and the instruction of
Protestant children to a protestant minister. It turned out that, simply
as a reflection of the times, there were a great many children from dis-
similar backgrounds who had grown up without any religion at all.
Religious instruction will now be available for them, but it is not, as
such, part of the school curriculum, but is on a level with the Catholic
and Protestant instruction as “free religious instruction.” It means that
children who otherwise would have had no religious instruction at all
can grow with a religious life. It is a free religious class, which can be
taught by anyone who understands what it is about and feels a calling
to do it, just as others give Catholic or Protestant instruction. But it
must be absolutely clear that the curriculum or agenda of the Waldorf
school is in no way a philosophical dogma or doctrine. It cannot turn
into an anthroposophical training ground; anthroposophy applies only
to the teacher’s striving and deepening.
This should close the question concerning this matter; further ques-
tions are redundant. At first is was an issue of finding a relevant approach
to some practical issues. We have practical views about the way to teach
a seven-, eight-, nine-year-old. We felt we had to solve these problems
on a strictly practical basis. The Waldorf school of course cannot be an
institution for hermits or sectarians; it must be an institution that wants
to be in the midst of life, that educates competent human beings for
the present and future, for a completely practical life. It thus becomes
a matter of organizing teaching in such a way that the Waldorf school
is not some kind of institution for eccentrics. I have worked things out
in such a way that, from the beginning of school to the end of the third
year, the teacher has absolute freedom, but by the end of the third grade,
the children must have come far enough to attend any other school.
From the ninth to the twelfth year, teachers again have complete free-
dom, but by the end of this period, the child must be ready to transfer
to any other school, and similarly with final graduation. We add one
class every year; we will have to study what happens after that.
As you see, the issue is not to impose a partisan view or philosophy,
and so forth, but purely and simply to translate anthroposophy into a
working pedagogy. The ideal would be for children to not know at all
that there is such a thing as anthroposophy—because anthroposophy
is meant for adults. We have no children’s catechism and we are in no
position to even wish to have one. The lessons should be completely
objective and thoroughly a part of life. These things cannot be attained
ideally. No matter how much teachers strive to remain objective, it still
is a fact that one child lives in one circle of parents and the next child
with different parents; and then there are anthroposophical fanatics and
their children, and just as children bring everything else to school, these
children bring all kinds of inappropriate anthroposophical arrogance,
for that does exist. We must be absolutely firm about a Waldorf school
never being allowed to be in any way a school for the teaching of a
particular worldview. This is not in anyway what the Waldorf school
is about. We want to help children grow into what they need to be to
become competent human beings in the immediate present, in the life
in which we have been placed, within the state and everything else that
it involves. We want them to stand in the midst of it all as competent
beings. It goes without saying that the Waldorf school should not bring
threefolding-ideas into the elementary school curriculum. Waldorf
pedagogy does not allow for that. Partisanship cannot be introduced
into the Waldorf school coming from the anthroposophical side.
Question: Is not the method adopted by the (Catholic) priest contradic-
tory to the rest of the teaching? Isn’t there some kind of discrepancy?
Steiner: Nothing can be perfect in life. It would be very nice if we could
have not just a Catholic priest or a Protestant minster, but also a clergy-
man teaching with our methods. As I said already, our school wants to
implement only a pedagogical practice, not a philosophy. The rest can
go hand in hand with it. It goes without saying that the “free religious
classes”—since there have been requests for such a class to be taught
strictly by anthroposophists—should use our methods. It would of
course please us if the Catholic and Protestant classes also were taught
in this way, but so far we have not been able to make it happen.
Question: How is the content of classes for anthroposophists’ children
determined?
Steiner: The materials are chosen in such a way as to take into account
the children’s age. This is always the psychological foundation. It is the
case that materials are always most effectively brought to the children if
one hits precisely the developmental age at which they should be given,
the time when the children’s inner beings resonate most with a subject.
In practice, it means that in the seventh–eighth year, something can
be achieved with objective gospel or Bible stories, but nothing could
be gained at all from catechism. Children could not take up the latter
at all. On the other hand, children at that age are open to everything
religious that can develop ethical and religious concepts out of a certain
presentation of natural processes. First and foremost, we can lead chil-
dren to religious feeling through the use of natural images.
It is then possible to lead children to Christian sensibility proper
after the eighth year, or even later, in the ninth year. That is the point
when they can first understand what, for instance, lies behind the figure
of Christ Jesus. Only then do children begin to grow into the concepts
they need in order to understand the Gospels’ meaning. It is good if
the child has first a foundation of awe and reverance and is introduced
later to the meaning of the Gospels and then gradually into the deeper
mysteries of Christianity. I should emphasize that this free religious
teaching is, in the truest sense, Christian and that children from various
confessions participating in the classes are introduced to the real meaning
of Christianity. It is of course the case that being a teacher at the Waldorf
school means having come to a (Christian) conviction, albeit from an
anthroposophical point of view. While a teacher comes to Christianity
from this side, and one might put words differently, the children are
introduced to a real Christianity. Just as we give full freedom to the
Protestant and Catholic teaching, we give full freedom to the teaching
of religion from an anthroposophical point of view. I never intended to
do anything to get children to attend this free religious teaching. They
came in large numbers, but we do not want to hamper or cloud the
school’s reputation or confuse its purpose by making it possible for the
school to be described as a school of a particular philosophy. This is not
what we want to be. Therefore we are careful about the free religious
classes and offer them only because they were requested.
73
V
Anthroposophy
and the Riddles of the Soul
Stuttgart, January 17, 1922
Human beings confront the riddles of existence only once they have
developed a certain level of consciousness about life, when they feel
the urge to formulate representations, sentiments, feelings about their
relationship with the world. But once we get there, these riddles truly
represent what one might call a vital question, for they are not just the
expression of theoretical longings, purely external cultural questions.
Indeed, they affect a person’s entire stance in the world, the manner in
which that person finds his way in life, the level of inner security and
steadiness with which he goes through life. Everything depends on the
solution to these riddles.
Furthermore, there are substantial differences among the various
kinds of existential riddles. When human beings face nature, they need
to form representations and feelings about their relationship with nature.
To make a comparison: When people attain consciousness in the fashion
I have described, unless they can familiarize themselves with particular
phenomena presenting them with mysteries of nature, their existence
feels like a night of the spirit; they feel adrift in a dark world with no
way to orient themselves. At the same time, this relationship with the
cosmic secrets of natural existence remains, to some extent, external; it
concerns their external relationship with existence.
We feel very differently about these riddles when they are the
riddles of our own soul. We live in these riddles; they constitute what
may be the immediate source of the soul’s health or illness, and can
become the source of physical health or illness. For the soul life is ex-
tremely complex, no matter how simple it may at first appear. Science
has accepted without question that what inhabits our consciousness
throughout our waking days, from morning to night, is only one part of
our soul life. A major part of our soul life lies dormant in unconscious
(or, I might also say, subconscious) layers; it rises from the depths in the
form of vague sensations, ill-defined moods and other soul-contents,
forming what is an incomplete impression in our soul. The perceived
happiness or unhappiness of our life is related to what is thus sunk
in the obscure underground of our soul life. And those who attempt,
through the anthroposophical path, to fathom the life of the soul will
soon learn that everything which thus dimly emerges from the depths
of the soul is connected with the physical body. We realize the extent
to which, silently at first, then more and more strongly, our entire state
of health, what makes us competent or ill-fitted for life, can depend on
these subconscious soul moods.
I do not intend to speak to you today in the way people frequently
speak about this unconscious state of soul in, which everything that
glimmers obscurely in the consciousness gets stuffed into the large
vessel of this unconscious and people form more or less vague notions
about the way this unconscious or this subconscious works. I have been
speaking for many years about matters of anthroposophical research and
will not start out from the most elementary aspects of this research, but
rather will examine how in their primordial sense, these matters of the
soul life are connected with happiness or unhappiness. In this respect,
I would like to consider today many things that affect the human soul,
flooded as it is by all kinds of initially unknown forces, with appeasing
or disquieting effects, causing us happiness or suffering.
Even a superficial consideration of our soul life shows us two clearly
distinguishable poles: on one side, the life of representations, with
everything that plays out clearly, luminously, in our consciousness; on
the other side, our will life that to some extent rises up from the soul’s
dark and obscure underlayers.
As I have told you often, in the ordinary course of human life we
distinguish two conditions of consciousness: the waking state and the
sleeping state, of which only one is an articulate conscious state. In the
sleeping state, the conscious life of representations stops, the entire soul
life sinks into more or less opaque darkness. But if we are completely
objective about our waking soul life, we are bound to say that we are
only really awake when we are thinking in representations. When awake,
ANTHROPOSOPHY AND RIDDLES OF THE SOUL 75
to the extent that our consciousness is full of clear representations and
luminous thoughts, we are more or less in charge. Our will impulses,
our actions, are also accompanied by thoughts. But even when dealing
with the simplest bodily movements, we are completely in the dark
about the manner in which conscious thinking is connected with what
actually takes place within a will impulse, an activity. I know very little,
I am really groping in the dark about what actually happens inside my
limb when I as much as raise my arm, or when the thought aimed at
raising my arm wants to realize itself, shoots in, as it were, and willfully
sets the arm in motion!
What takes place in my physical organism is just as remote from
wakeful daytime consciousness as what takes place in the human soul
between falling asleep and waking. We really must state quite unambigu-
ously: When it comes to the human soul life, the sleeping state is ever
pervasive; even in our physical waking state, we experience the impact
of sleep. And only in our representations, only in the experience of clear,
light-filled thoughts, are we ever fully awake. Between these two states,
the fully wakeful state of representations and the life of the will sunk in
shadows, there lies, partaking of both, the life of feelings and moods.
Our feelings permeate our representations. Out of our feelings, we bring
particular sympathies and antipathies to the life of representations, and
thereby connect or separate our representations. Our feeling life flows
back and forth between our representations and our will life. Whatever
flows into our will impulses is accompanied by emotional judgments,
for instance, when we perceive some activities as dutiful and others as
lapses in our duty, to the extent that we experience a certain feeling of
satisfaction about our “dutiful” activities and a sense of dissatisfaction
about deeds that are unsuccessful or in some other way misguided.
But actual soul riddles do not arise for the dull/insensitive person
who surrenders at one moment to representations and at another to
feelings and the will. These riddles appear to a person as he becomes
increasingly conscious. Yet even then, the riddles never fully rise to the
conscious level but belong to a domain of more or less subconscious
experiences. We are never entirely clear just how deeply our day-to-day
happiness or sadness is affected by our moods, the composition of our
soul-life. We still need to investigate and clearly express what lives dimly
in our consciousness. And please remember the following as you listen to
the explanations that follow: I will put into clearly defined terms things
that are never that clearcut in our consciousness, yet are present in the
soul, things we sense, things we feel, without being able to bring them
up to consciousness, things that contribute to our good or ill health.
Soul-riddles are never purely theoretical, which is precisely why they
are truly existential.
When we surrender to our representations—again I am spelling out
what we really feel, something that is never completely conscious—we
experience something like the vanity of our existence. The life of rep-
resentations is a life in images. During our waking hours, this life is
filled with impressions and perceptions received from the outer world.
Experiences in nature create the content of our representations, they
live within us; these we draw upon as our memories. Yet we are always
aware of the fact that we are active, to the extent that we process these
representations. When we separate and connect them, we are inwardly
active, but the activity is never completely present in our mind. What is
present is to some extent a mirroring of the external world, and we know
that, for our representations, we are dependent on the outer world, that
what we have is merely an image of this outer world. Insofar as we live
in representations, we live in images; in our representation-life, we do
not experience any full-fledged content. No matter how paradoxical it
may seem, this feeling is expressed subconsciously. And no matter how
dim its presence in our consciousness, it lives in the subconscious and
expresses itself in fearful, anxious feelings about our representations.
Paradoxical as it may seem, this subterranean stream of the human
soul life is real. Most people do not know anything about it, yet most
people—all people, actually—are constantly under its influence. And
this stream is a fearful, anxious one. It feels as if we could lose ourselves
in the world, as if we were standing on the edge of a precipice, because
our world of representations is a world of mere images. And the vague
longing then arises in the soul: Where, in this barren world of images,
shall I find existence?
It is possible to compare this unconscious feeling in the subterra-
nean stream of the soul with the feeling we experience in the physical
realm when we run out of air, when we experience air-deprivation and
conscious feelings of anxiety or panic. Actually, the life of representa-
tions is always accompanied by perceptions akin to those experienced
consciously as a result of this physical condition. And thus, one way to
look at the riddles of the soul is to picture, rising from the abysses of
the soul, something germinating or slumbering in the soul rather than
engaging in theoretical considerations.
On the other hand, when we surrender to the will element, we ex-
perience the opposite condition. There is another subconscious stream
in the soul. Here people feel exposed to their desires, their emotions,
their instincts; they experience that something nature-like plays into
the human soul, something that does not lead to clear thinking. It is
to some extent plunged in a reality, a concrete reality, that we cannot
permeate with light, something that creates darkness in ourselves. And
when we direct our observation to the subterranean streams of the soul,
we must again admit: Attempting to characterize what lives in the soul’s
depths always means dealing in contradictions—we must admit that
what lives there is felt unconsciously. One can characterize it by saying:
In our consciousness, we experience anger in the same way we feel the
inability to breathe out, for instance when the circulation of the blood
is disturbed so that the air we breathe is not properly transformed in
the body, leading to a kind of asphyxia. Something like an angry mood
always results from such absorption in the will element of the human
soul.
These are forces deep in the human unconscious whose surges
constitute the really puzzling element in human soul life. If we merely
take the pictorial quality of representations, or the will in its compel-
ling force, as they present themselves to the consciousness, we merely
experience these riddles of the soul as imprecise, vague moods, yet gain
no clarity about the soul’s riddles. At bottom we do not know what
this unclear working is in us, what has such a deep influence over our
feeling of happiness or unhappiness in life.
We must always repeat: The riddles of the soul differ from the riddles
of nature in that they are experienced inwardly, they flood over from the
deep subterranean streams of the soul and must first be articulated. This
is why no scientist can get much of a handle on the soul’s riddles.There
is nothing wrong with science in its right place, as I have often reiter-
ated. The whole of modern scientific thinking shows us how helpless
science—which in other domains has celebrated such triumphs—can
be when it encounters the existential riddles connected with the soul
life. I have two examples that to my mind are deeply significant of the
problem there, and of what is necessary in order to penetrate scientifi-
cally into the realm of soul riddles.
Almost half a century ago, speaking in Leipzig at the forty-fifth
congress of natural science physiologist Emil DuBois-Reymond1 said
something that bears repeating; although it created a big stir at the time,
it is forgotten today and has vanished from discussion. His talk dealt
with “the limits of our knowledge of nature,” and he rightly mentioned
on one hand that the material world is in its very essence one bound-
ary of our knowledge of nature. He said, “The human mind cannot
penetrate where matter intervenes. Although the external observation of
sense phenomena discloses the existence of matter, it must tell us what
matter really is.” This is one boundary. The other boundary is that of
human consciousness. According to DuBois-Reymond, even the most
perfect cognition still will not allow us to gain any knowledge of how
even the simplest representation comes about. Even if we knew how
atoms of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen move about in the
human brain, clear insights about these movements would never allow
us to establish how even the simplest sensations (“I see red” or “I smell
the fragrance of a rose”) occur, in other words, how the primary ele-
ments of the soul life materialize.
And of course he was absolutely right on this point. There is a sec-
ond boundary for external natural science, but here Dubois-Reymond’s
conviction is precisely the one which anthroposophic research intends
to counter. He felt that the boundaries of our knowledge of nature are
those of the scientific method in its entirety. Therefore he said: If we
want to penetrate this domain of the soul-spiritual, we must use ways
other than those of science, for where supernaturalism begins, i.e., when
we enter the realm of the soul-spirit, there science must stop. This is
precisely what anthroposophic research wants to establish for the world:
that science need not exhaust itself in external-natural existence, but
rather, can develop the means to penetrate into the spirit-soul.
The other example is that of an outstanding individual, Franz Bren-
tano, who wanted to found a psychology according to the methods of
modern natural science. That was his ideal. I have explained in detail
the state of affairs underpinning Brentano’s research in part three of
my book Riddles of the Soul and will repeat here only the main points.
In the early 1870s, Brentano attempted to write a science of the soul,
Psychology. The first volume appeared in the spring of 1874, the second
volume was promised for the autumn, but was never published. The
work was supposed to have four volumes in all, but, aside from the first
volume, only isolated essays appeared, and they remain fragmentary.2
The entire work remains incomplete. I have analyzed why this must be so
in my book. Brentano wanted to investigate the life of the soul, holding
closely to the model of the natural sciences, and he made a remarkable
confession: Natural scientific research allows one to find one’s way into
the details of the soul life; we can show how representations link up
with each other, how they diverge, how particular feelings are connected
with particular representations, how will impulses relate to representa-
tions, how memory works, and so forth. But if we had to stop there, if
we could study only the details, if in the interest of scientific method
we had to sacrifice the knowledge of the most important questions of
human existence, where would that leave us? Brentano found justified
the longing we find in Ancient Greece, in Plato and Aristotle’s wish for
the detailed investigation of the human soul leading to the great ques-
tions of birth and immortality. Brentano found it sad if, in the effort
to investigate the soul life scientifically, one were to renounce knowing
anything about the fate after death of the better part of the human be-
ing, when the physical body is surrendered to the earth.
And we can see from Brentano’s achievement in the first volume
of his Psychology that his entire scientific program was to take ques-
tions which the public at large was happy to leave to the scholars, and
paved a wide road to the great questions of human immortality and
the divine-spiritual meaning of the world as it is reflected in the soul.
Brentano however never found a suitable method to do so based on his
scientific frame of mind, and since he was an honorable researcher by
nature, he stopped writing.
This scientist’s destiny shows tragically that what is often recognized
today as the only valid scientific approach must be paralyzed when it
touches the great riddles of the human soul. And it is this—let me say
it again—which anthroposophy wants to defend to the world: The
path Brentano was unable to find coming out of natural science, this
path can be found! And it can be found, if one does not get stuck with
the ordinary capacities of the soul, as observed in external life, and as
ordinary science uses them.
I have often said that there are in each human soul dormant (or to
use the scientific expression, latent) cognitive capacities, which must first
be drawn out, just as other capacities are drawn out of the child through
education. Those who have developed their ordinary cognitive capacities
must school themselves in fervent inner soul exercises in order to form
those soul capacities that will allow them to shed light and clarity upon
the two areas of mysterious human soul-experience—the experience
of representations and the experience of will impulses—so as to bring
some transparency to the human soul process, to make understandable
what is actually taking place in human representation and in human
will. For unless one understands these elementary riddles of the soul,
one cannot find the way, either to the more challenging questions of
immortal human existence or to the divine-spiritual content of the
world in which the human soul originates.
I have often explained that the human being needs to do inner
exercises, purely soul-spiritual exercises, in order to awaken into exis-
tence otherwise dormant cognitive capacities that can really help further
cognition. I have indicated that it is possible to strengthen the life of
representations. As we can strengthen a muscle by working it continu-
ously, similarly we can strengthen the life of representations if we give it
clear direction, by moving to the center of consciousness easily graspable
representations and, in this fashion, devoting ourselves consistently to
a work of mental picturing, which we are not in the habit of perform-
ing. This inner work is described in detail in Knowledge of the Higher
Worlds and Its Attainment, and in part two of my Occult Science3 there is
specific information about the way such meditation and concentration
exercises completely change a person’s life of representations. Essentially,
without any outlandish undertaking, but simply through the further
development of a person’s ordinary thinking and representations, it is
possible to produce a stronger, more vigorous life of representations.
And by producing this more vigorous life of representations, by raising
ourselves through meditation and concentration above things that in
our ordinary mental picturing are merely insubstantial images, we arrive
at something that I call imaginative representation.
This imaginative representation is alive in ordinary thinking with
a vividness that one normally associates only with external physical
sensations. Gradually, one comes to a point where the representations
are no longer merely abstract, merely imaginary. Rather, through purely
inner investigation, conducted as earnestly as any scientific research,
one discovers that the soul which otherwise would get filled only with
the data of external impressions, is filled by forces that to some extent
“shoot” into the soul. When developed/trained through meditation and
concentration, mental pictures/representations lose their fleeting qual-
ity and are, instead, shot through with forces that I would like to call
formative forces, forces that constitute an inner spiritual plastic element.
And after a certain time, one discovers that, through this development
of the forces of representation, the human body’s own imaging force
coalesces, and after a certain point, one discovers that the thought life
is nothing more than “diluted” forces of human growth. Our life of
representations in ordinary consciousness is a diluted form of what
forms us in the physical body from birth to death.
Consider the newborn child. We know that in this infant—starting
with the brain—plastic, formative forces are at work, shaping the body.
We follow the child’s growth, we note how it radiates from the activity
of the brain, and we follow it up to a certain point in human life, the
change of teeth, around the seventh year. We perceive this life of forces,
at first undefined, pulsating in the human being, sculpturally active. On
the other hand, by developing our representations through meditation,
through concentration, we are unconsciously led to the same element of
plasticity that has been working within us since early childhood. And
this is an important discovery of our inner life, that we can in this way
strengthen the life of representations, make it so intense that one feels as
if enclosed within the human formative forces, the formative metabolic
forces of human growth. No matter how odd it may sound for current
research, it is really possible, through a strengthening of the soul, to grow
into something that then enfolds us, to develop formative forces that
sculpturally mold our physical body. Through the life of representations
we grow into reality, we enter a formative element.
And in this fashion, one learns what lies behind the simple thought
process, how a spiritual being with which one is now united works
from birth to death in the human organism. The life of representa-
tions becomes fully real. No longer a simple life-in-images, represen-
tations become a life-of-forces (Kraftleben), standing at the center of
existence. And only when we know this can consciousness overcome
the undercurrents of fearfulness, of anguish in the human soul, so that
anthroposophy effectively points not at a theoretical solution of the
soul’s riddles, but rather to a completely practical inner solution, to be
experienced vitally.
Anthroposophical investigations make it possible for something to
enter human consciousness and to be understood, something that lives
in the human being, something so “diluted” that it appears to be little
more than our ordinary life of representations, although it is truly the
sphere in which our existence is growing inwardly. And to the extent that
human beings lose gravity/grounding (Schwergewicht), as it were, and
run into an undercurrent of fear in the soul life, they can invigorate their
representations by having recourse to the findings of spiritual scientific
anthroposophy regarding representations and thus. Anthroposophy
does not solve the soul’s riddles by providing theory; instead, it gives
the person answers accessible to healthy human understanding, which
then—as if providing the necessary center of gravity—become available
for consciousness, for the soul’s life, so that anthroposophy can flow into
the soul’s mood, the soul’s constitution, resolving the riddles.
One recognizes, on one hand, that the human being is a formed/
constructed being, that the human being appears as the representative
form of a totality, that individual organs are formed out of the spirit
and that we—in order to be free, to not be compelled to act by this
inner force—can give ourselves over to free mirror-images, develop our
merely pictorial representations into something plastic and formed. In
Philosophy of Freedom,4 published in the early 1890s, I developed this
question and showed that human beings are free to the extent that
they can live in pure thoughts—fully conscious yet disconnected from any
external reality; that in these pure thoughts, moral impulses can be
shaped; that one needs to do something personally in order for the
mirror images to change; mirror images do not determine us in a causal
manner. Humans would never be free, if they were determined by a
reality in their ordinary consciousness. In our habitual consciousness,
representations are mere images that cannot determine us, any more
than reflected images can determine us. Human beings are free. In order
to be free, they must raise their life out of the growth force, the growth
body, the image-formative body, which they traverse. But the price of
human freedom is an undercurrent of fear in the soul life. Therefore
human beings must learn to experience the feeling of freedom, in their
ordinary consciousness, yet also be able to establish as a polarity to this
experience of freedom what anthroposophy can offer to fortify the life
of representation.
By continuing along this path, we come from this very diluted,
merely pictorial representation-life to concrete reality, living and
forming the human being. This is not the physical body, the physical
organs; it is a supersensible body of forces, fully there. We grasp/take
a hold of something that lies outside of the physical body, and simply
by examining the soul’s riddles we enter a realm that has supersensible
reality, independent of the human physical body. One advances to
something that was prepared, through birth or conception, as a physi-
cal body dependent on simple hereditary relationships, and modeled
after external natural facts. We learn how traits inherited from parents
and grandparents are bound with the whole body’s being formed in the
mother’s organism, bound with something that comes from the spiri-
tual world, something that is returning from a former life. One arrives
at one aspect of the question of immortality. One looks at something
immortal, something eternal in human nature because, coming from
the spiritual world, it penetrates the human body through conception
or birth and because it continues to work throughout the earthly life
as an inner plastic/formative force, with which we must unite in order
to strengthen our thought life.
Thus, anthroposophy provides the perspective that Brentano was
seeking. Brentano too began with an investigation of thinking, but he
limited himself to registering what is present in ordinary consciousness.
Only the strengthening of thought life through meditation and con-
centration directs this thought life to the plastic/formative inner force
and leads to the path that starts with the understanding of simple daily
thinking and ends with the soul-spiritual element in the human being,
that lived in the soul-spiritual world before birth, before conception,
and attached itself to the forces of inheritance, with the physical forces
of the human body. There is no other solution to the soul’s riddles than
finding this path from the simplest phenomena of day-to-day life to the
bigger mysteries of existence.
I have described what the human being can attain in regard to this
thought life. There [in the thought life], something can be attained
that to some extent drives the human being to spatial exteriorization,
something that penetrates and forms the space-bound physicality of
the human being, something that expresses itself in form, that descends
from the spiritual world and flows into the external form of the human
being (which includes the inner organs). But this is only one side of
human life; the soul partakes also of the other side. Whereas we can
creatively form our thought life through meditation and concentration,
we cannot similarly form the will life in such a way that one could actu-
ally call it strengthened, although we can make it more generous, more
self-sacrificing, more spiritualized.
We can, to some extent, separate the will life from of the daily grind.
I have outlined many individual exercises and they need to be practiced
for years—spiritual science is no easier than stargazing or clinical obser-
vation. But let me clarify a few essentials. This detachment can take place
if, in thinking, we separate the will element from its ordinary course,
where it cleaves to physical facts. The ordinary path of the will element
holds fast to physical facts, and one can detach them, for instance by
thinking of events in reverse chronological order. For instance, plays
are usually performed from Act I to Act V; let us imagine a play going
from the end to the beginning. Likewise, one might, in the evening,
relive one’s usual daily routine in reverse order, dividing it in the small-
est possible parts, from evening to morning, just as one can imagine
ascending a staircase by visualizing oneself descending backwards, from
the top to the bottom step.
We are used to dealing with our thoughts in the same way we deal
with external facts, which gives thinking a passive role compared to the
will that unfolds in it. When we exercise “backward-representation” and
actually pull thinking away from the course of external facts, making it
self-referential, then thinking becomes inwardly active, suffused with
inner initiative. Through serious and vigorous exercises in self-obser-
vation, we strengthen this capacity by observing what we are doing as
Willensmensch, as if we were standing next to ourselves and observing
ourselves step by step, as the will is deployed. Or when we start an
activity, we can do an exercise that specifically consists in planning the
action and then performing it precisely, with determination, so that we
live entirely in the will element. I only want to mention some basics
about these exercises that separate the will not only from external facts,
but also from its connections with the will itself; these exercises make the
will autonomous, spiritualize it. We then truly reach a development of
the will, so that in the soul life now developing the will, we experience
ourselves “out of the body.” It is a remarkable experience; only thusly
can we understand the nature of the will. In ordinary life, the will is tied
to the physical body. We see it at work whenever we move our limbs.
It takes our thought life for us to observe the processes of the will, its
workings. Having detached it from physicality, we experience it as such,
feel totally at one with it. It is then suffused by an enhancement of the
force that is otherwise tied to our physical organism, the force of love.
And this devoted element in the soul develops into a transparent, lu-
minous clarity, love, that we recognize, although somewhat obscurely,
as an emotional will-life.
I know how little appreciation we have in the present time for love
as a cognitive force. Indeed, it is not one in ordinary life. But when love
is so developed that the will is no longer rooted in instincts, desires and
emotions, but rather in the pure soul, independent of physicality, only
then will love be known in its essence, and it will then become clear
how completely different from the thinking element it is. We have seen
the thinking element as a formative, constructive element, something
that allows organs to come out of organs, ultimately resulting in human
reproduction. The thought element unfolds as a plastic process, working
into human physicality out of the soul. The will element unfolds out
of the body so that—when we know it apart from the body, we can
observe how it works upon the body—only now, the body is no longer
being sculpted. Instead, what had been molded is now taken apart,
dissolved, turned to dust, floats away. The will element—and try not
to misunderstand me—is that which constantly burns up the form ele-
ment of the human being, turns it to flame, spiritually speaking. This
is a metaphor, but it stands for something important.
Human life, pouring out of the soul into the body, can only be
truly understood if we grasp it, on one hand, as a plastic/formative
element, and on the other hand as the dissolution of this very plastic
element, so-to-say as that which allows the plastic element to fuse with
what has been reduced to dust, liquefied. And insofar as human will
always has that dissolving, pulverizing, liquefying quality, we now see
that this willful element is that which shows us the other side of human
life, the gate of death.
As the formative quality of thinking enables us to know the spiri-
tually maleable element in the human soul, which enters the physical
body through birth or conception, we also learn how the will element
dissolves the human body. But in this dissolution—let me repeat, I am
speaking metaphorically—pure spirituality arises from the flame. We
encounter the soul’s departure from life. We learn to understand death
as the “liquefaction” of the will element. We learn what it is that takes
place at death, by understanding what takes place in the human being’s
daily acts of volition. Daily acts of will produce in the physical body a
kind of combustive process, but out of this combustion, our inner soul
life proceeds. What we feel inwardly as being our soul life could not
exist if we were always pure body, if we were not maleable. The solid,
formed element must be dismantled, dissolved, and from the dissolu-
tion of the solid form, from the ongoing destruction of the body, the
soul element comes to life. We understand about the exit of the human
soul from the physical body at death, which is merely the instantaneous
summarizing of the continuous unfolding of will into the spirituality
of the soul. Just as I, at this moment, experience my will as a kind of
combustion process, a dissolving process in my own body, I can also
learn that the destruction of the body at death is really nothing more
than the last ripple of the will hidden in the body, as the spirit returns
to the spiritual world.
This, then, takes us from anthroposophy to the soul’s riddles. An-
throposophy does not mean to be a theory; certainly, it wants to impart
knowledge, but not theoretical knowledge, for it wants to be food for
the soul. And in this way, it can display to our eyes the individual soul’s
daily experiences, and from these individual experiences, it can proceed
to the answers to the great questions of the soul life.
Allow me to mention one item in particular, which will suggest
the basis on which anthroposophy will guide us to the answers to the
riddle of humanity, as I give some details about human memory. If we
succeed in strengthening our life of representations as described above,
and if we learn that the maleable element is constantly undermined
by the will element, we shall see inner soul processes in transparent
clarity. We shall be able to see how human beings stand in relation to
the outer world, how from this outer world they receive impressions
that are transformed into representations (and into thoughts about
these impressions) and how these representations are brought up over
time from the subsoil of the soul in the form of memories, or else how
spontaneous, “free-rising” memory-representations come to the surface.
Anyone looking objectively at human soul life will—from the emergence
of memory representations—become aware of important soul riddles;
indeed, people have said very curious things about the nature of memory.
People have imagined, and still imagine now, that through sensations, we
form impressions, which are taken up by the senses and stored through
the nervous system, whereupon the person transforms them through
representation. These representations then sink into particular recesses
of the soul life and come back to the surface when we call them. No one
who is objective at all can claim to have any clear idea of the way these
representations are supposedly wandering through unknown basements
of the soul, only to reappear spontaneously, either when they happen
to be needed or when they are triggered by something, which in turn
appears as a new perception, a new impression from the outer world.
This is where anthroposophy proceeds to genuine, truthful ob-
servation of the human soul life. To the extent that it is aware of both
the invigorated life of representations and the spiritualized will-life, it
goes to the heart of the entire process leading from the perception of
external objects, through the making of representation, the formation
of memories and the emergence of remembered representations. Insofar
as anthroposophical research through this organization of the life of
representations and of the will-life forges ahead to the cognitive forces
I have described, the soul processes and physical processes as well as the
manner in which they interact are so transformed that—if you allow
the comparison—something quite dark and opaque is illuminated and
suddenly becomes transparent. Through this strengthened life of rep-
resentations and spiritualized will-life, the entire soul process becomes
transparent.
So, what are we looking at? We see that external impressions upon
the senses range very far, that the entire process is prolonged and that
what I described as a formative, plastic element in the strengthened
thought-life ordinarily operates as simply the prolongation of the per-
ceptual process. I perceive outwardly, yet what works in me is not just
the abstract thoughts of my ordinary consciousness, but also things that
only spiritual science can fathom. And this is an ongoing process; the
sculptural/plastic quality of the representations works its way into the
depths of the soul and body. And once this has occurred, after thinking
has done its formative work in the soul’s subsoil and physical under-lay-
ers, the human being goes on. There, the will—a decisive will—is active,
but it is a spiritualized will. This will develops in the human in the outer
brain, by dissolving for ordinary consciousness in the formative parts
of the brain, that which was built up by impressions, so that, to put it
roughly, we have spread over the underground an external brain-surface,
in which the formative forces continue their work.
Let us assume that I choose to recall something, and I initiate this
decision through a particular series of representations. This unfolding
of the will is connected in turn with a destructive process, during which
no external impressions are penetrating; and the destructive quality
of the developing will ensures that such external impressions will not
penetrate. In the case of voluntary recollection, this destruction allows
things lying in the underground to rise as formative forces in the human
being. If representations come up spontaneously, it is the opposite. In
this case, one or another impression is present and turns into a thought.
The thought has a plastic effect. It becomes imprinted on the brain.
These formative forces are similar to the plasticity that once helped
form what can live in the underground in a particular form. This lives
in the formative cells now shaped by the thought.
In this manner, the soul life becomes transparent. One learns to see
its interactions with the life-body in the cooperation between the spirit,
physicality and the soul. One learns to recognize it in its inner plastic
construction, in its continuous extinction, as it is burnt, consumed by
the will-element. Once we have learned to understand each individual
moment of life, we learn to grasp in these streams of life the nature of the
great life-questions. We learn to recognize out of thinking, what came
into physical earthly life at birth, and to recognize out of the will, what
at death returns to the spiritual world. Thus anthroposophical research
findings appear as something, which, out of the details of life, leads to
the comprehensive understanding of the riddles of human existence.
In this manner, whenever we recognize, already in ordinary memory,
the plastic nature of thinking, similar to the formative processes in the
physical body, we also experience that what is not yet in the body, but
unites with the body at conception and birth, has a “sculpting” effect
in life. We recognize the human life element in this plasticity, for we
learn to know the only plastic element, which already appears in the
forming of the memory.
Anthroposophy wants to consider the soul riddles in a living fash-
ion! Indeed, the most important thing we need to understand about
anthroposophic research is its complete commitment to the scientific
conscientiousness to which we have been drawn by the tremendous
progress made in the natural sciences. Yet together with this consci-
entiousness, we make the effort to reach beyond what mere external
observation, mere external experiments, can offer, so that our effort
should progress beyond the capacities whose presence in the human
soul make human beings such a riddle to themselves, and we have an
intention to further train these capacities towards the theoretical (and
especially the practical) solution of these riddles.
We need not fear that those who are about to find a so-called solu-
tion of the soul’s riddles will one day propose perfect knowledge, as a
done deed, which could then lead to the soul’s decadence in laziness,
neglect of its own life. At every moment, the soul brings up these riddles,
which I have described as the living, experienced riddles of the soul.
And at every moment we need anew the results of spiritual research,
working to balance out what so puzzlingly rises from the dark depths
of the soul. What I called the fearful, angry subterranean streams of
human soul life is nothing other than the human soul’s inner demand
not to treat anything as if it were self-evident, but rather to constantly
take things up as experiences. For the human soul is always a riddle for
itself, and it constantly needs solutions. What anthroposophical research
wishes to offer is precisely such ongoing solutions to the riddles, tying
in with the reality of existence, so that one can say: Just as the human
being as physical being constantly needs to absorb nourishment and
cannot simply be fed once and for all, because food connects it with the
life process, so too is what anthroposophy offers us as the solution of
the soul’s riddles. Its intensive inner reality escapes us unless we keep it
constantly in our field of vision, constantly progressing. We are dealing
with a reality, not with a theory to be learned and memorized once and
for all. Just as with the reality of physical nourishment, we are dealing
with something that must be part of the ongoing stream of life.
It is when they busy themselves with the results of anthroposophy
regarding the soul’s riddles that human beings become aware of the
following (truth): to learn—it may sound strange, yet it is a truth that
anyone working with anthroposophy can experience—that ultimately,
we cannot learn anthroposophy; we can allow its results to touch us;
we can read books, listen to lectures; but unless we constantly experi-
ence what we have received in this manner, unless we participate in the
ongoing process—just as we constantly connect the substances of the
external world with the physical bodily processes through eating and
metabolism—so too, what anthroposophy has to offer loses its signifi-
cance for the human soul unless it is constantly introduced into this
soul process, just as the physical substance will lose its meaning for the
physical body if it is not continuously reintroduced into the physicality.
And just as the absence of physical nourishment results in hunger and
thirst, so too, out of the depths of the soul, fearful and angry beings
arise, expressing what needs to be influenced by a real knowledge of
the spiritual significance of the life of representation and the will-life.
And if human beings in their consciousness can manage to treat the
results of anthroposophical research as food for the soul, they will find
the balance their soul needs, something to be experienced as the eternal,
living solution to the eternal living soul’s riddles.
One thing must be reiterated: Although it is possible to embark
on the path of autonomous anthroposophical research, anthroposo-
phy is not taught in order to make everybody capable of testing what
anthroposophy is offering. Even when one does not do this (thorough
testing), healthy human reasoning allows one to decide whether the
findings of anthroposophy are reasonable or unreasonable. A person
can follow the claims of anthroposophical research, simply using
healthy reasoning. But people have something beyond this capacity.
Unless they are knowledgeable in physiology or biology, people (lay-
men) will not be able to test the chemical composition of their food;
but they can test what for human beings are foods for truth, merely in
the process of enjoying them, of setting them in contact with the forces
of the life process. Thus they can unite their souls with the findings
of anthroposophy, its indications of the way it solves the soul’s riddles,
and they will find in them much satisfaction. And what ultimately are
the soul’s riddles for you all gathered here? Soul’s riddles understood in
their living quality are nothing more than the expression of a spiritual
hunger and a spiritual thirst. And the solution of the riddles is nothing
more than the acceptance of truly spiritual contents, truly spiritual be-
ings that unite with the human spirit and the human soul life. And so,
I might say, the solution of the soul’s riddles lies in spiritual satiation
constantly to be found. The more alive the process is for me, the more
I can see that anthroposophy is meant to intervene in practical life at
each moment, as it attempts to take root in daily life and reach to the
great riddles of existence, leading human beings to the divine spiritual
sources of existence, leading them to their immortal part, all the more
for being clear that anthroposophy cannot be theory, but something
that can be fully experienced.
From this point of view, anthroposophy intends to affect the most
varied domains of practical life. This is the point of view from which it
endeavored to give form to the Waldorf school founded by Emil Molt,
which I have described here repeatedly as something that is being done
in the practical social realm.
As you can see, anthroposophy aims toward solving the soul’s riddles
by turning to the whole living person, body, soul and spirit. Thereby it
overcomes the partial quality of this knowledge and soul life that was
necessarily bound to arise with the recognized results of modern science
(which anthroposophy recognizes as the triumph it is).
But one should pay attention to something—and it would have
been noticed easily, were anthroposophy not so misunderstood—which
was contributed, for instance, last summer in Stuttgart, at the anthro-
posophical congress, where Dr. von Heydebrand lectured on the bias
of experimental psychology,5 not because of any systematic opposition
to this experimental psychology (it can be given due respect in its own
domain if one is able to study from a soul-spiritual point of view, through
anthroposophy, what it investigates from an external point of view). For
anthroposophy allows us to understand the spiritual and soul forces that
work into the physical body of humanity. In this way, we can infuse life
into all research, pedagogy can be brought to life—as I have shown in
earlier lectures—and social life too can be invigorated.
Here again, I would like to point out a beautiful example from Emil
Leinhas’ lecture6 at the same congress, in which he applied strictly the
methods copied from the natural sciences, to present the limitations
of economics. Here the first step was taken towards a real healing of
social life, proceeding from the soul-spirit. What does it come down
to ultimately?
Anthroposophy allows us to understand the formative role of think-
ing. As soul-spirit, it works formatively in the human body; it also has
a formative effect when we can introduce it in the right way as a social
ideal in human social life; and will, when we got into its heart, also
works in the right fashion in social life. As we know, human physical-
ity is loosened by the will, and subjected to a kind of purification, an
energizing by fire. In the same way, the will-element properly understood
and applied to social life will recognize, at the right moment, that an
institution has outlived itself and needs to disappear, to allow its fruit
to live in a new form. Just as the soul-spirit arises out of the destruc-
tion of physicality, similarly the higher forms of social life can arise,
insofar as particular external institutions that have outlived themselves
disappear, and that this disappearance works together with a formative
construction. Whatever can be penetrated in a correct anthroposophical
understanding of the soul’s riddles can flow into social life, and help
resolve the problems of the social riddles.
As a result, and in conclusion, human beings come to the point
where they understand themselves, they fill themselves with inner force,
with the true force of the real “I,” living in human feelings, in human
sensibility. Between the mental pictures and the life of the will, there
always lives human feeling life, intangible, incomprehensible, yet just as
available to experience. And in this feeling life, going through repeated
earthly lives, the eternal “I” is revealed to those who can look at life
in the fashion I have described today in respect to the riddles of the
soul. One then is able to embrace in the same gaze a fully developed
formative life of representations, and a spiritualized will-life, which
dissolves/destroys.
One thus comes to understand, from observing human life, what
it was that entered human beings through birth or conception, so that
it can refer to former lives, all the way back to the primeval condition,
where external cosmic life was completely united with the inner human
life and there were no repeated earthly lives, but instead a continuously
progressing, life of soul-spirit nature, required to produce progress. One
learns to look at repeated lives, to the spiritual life lying between them;
one learns to look at the future, up to a condition where human beings
will again be so connected with the spirit that repeated earth lives will
become meaningless—insofar as human being will raise themselves to
a spiritualized existence, ascending in an experience that takes them
from death (non-living) to their spirit-nature.
The solution of the soul’s riddles leads to the true solution of the
world’s riddles; one ascends to the human soul, to the cosmos. In the
process, one obtains fully living knowing, living cognition, which is
spiritual food. Thereby the wisdom offered by anthroposophy will
become true inner content of the soul in the very element where our
life vacillates. To the extent that we seek the spiritual nourishment of
anthroposophy, we can find life security, steadfastness, a sense of direc-
tion. Anthroposophy will restore to us that which gives us secret joy,
yet in which we could lose ourselves, having transformed it into inner
steadiness, made it the inner center of gravity of our human balance.
And at the difficult points of life, when we are about to sink in unhap-
piness, we will be able to procure for ourselves a mood of soul carried
by the full awareness of the spirit’s filling the human being. We can
become fully conscious that the thought life is not futile, that it can find
reality in the plastic soul-forces and cosmic forces, and that the will is
that which always returns to the spirit these plastic formations of the
soul-force. This gives us pause in the difficult passages of life, sets life
on solid ground, leads in the right way to the end of life.
And so, we are reminded of the statement of the wise Ancient Greek,
who, out of primordial intuitive knowledge spoke the weighty words:
“When the human soul, liberated from life, rises into the free ether, it
is an immortal spirit liberated from death.”7
Through true science, we can solve the riddle of life. We can become
certain of this, whenever we apply true spiritual observation to the solu-
tion of the riddles presented by daily life. We can see in the ordinary
events of life the cognitive reflected splendor of immortality. And those
who can judge rightly the development of individual thoughts, indi-
vidual feelings and individual will, see the immortal reality contained
in the latter and then see, through it, a greater/wider immortality, a true
understanding of the eternal in human nature, rooted in the eternal
ground of cosmic being and human evolution.
Endnotes
1. Emil DuBois-Reymond (1818–1896), physician and physiologist, professor
in Berlin and from 1867 Secretary of the Berlin Academy of the Sciences.
Steiner’s references are taken from DuBois-Reymond’s lecture at the 1872
Congress of the German Scientists and Doctors Über die Grenzen des Na-
turerkennens, Leipzig, 1872, p. 15, ff, 18, 24 and 39. DuBois-Reymond’s
original focus was comparative anatomy. He later became the founder of
animal electricity, inventing and improving methods and apparatus for the
study of electrical phenomena. His idea of “electric molecules” led to the
study of blood electrolytes. He is known for his formula Ignorabimus (“We
shall never know”). Originally an acknowledgment of the fact that there
appeared to be something in the phenomena of living beings which cannot
be explained by ordinary mechanical, physical or chemical laws, no matter
how refined and powerful the observations and experiments, it came to be
interpreted as a statement of radical skepticism.
2. Franz Brentano (1838–1917), nephew of Clemens Brentano. Catholic
theologian and Professor of Philosophy and Psychology in Würzburg. Au-
thor of Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, Leipzig, 1874. (A “Volume
2,” consisting of a collection of the essays and drafts mentioned by Steiner,
was edited by Oskar Kraus in 1925.) In 1873, Brentano left the Catholic
Church in protest against the dogma of papal infallibility. Steiner wrote his
obituary, and it was published in Riddles of the Soul, GA 21, his book on
German and Austrian intellectual life. Steiner had also written articles on
Brentano’s work in the Magazin für Literatur (see GA 30, and his lecture
of 1911, Anthroposophy, Psychosophy and Pneumatosophy, GA 115).
3. Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attanment (about Initiation), 1910,
GA 13.
4. The Philosophy of Freedom, 1894, GA 4.
5. Open Congress: Kulturausblicke der Anthroposophischen Bewegung (Cultural
Outlook of the Anthroposophical Movement), Stuttgart, August 28–Sept 7,
1921. Mornings were devoted to specialized papers on a variety of subjects;
afternoons were devoted to a “Positive Critique of the Times,” and each
day concluded with a lecture by Rudolf Steiner (see GA 8). Approximately
1000 persons attended.
Dr. Caroline von Heydebrand’s paper Gegen Experimentalpsychologie und
pegagogik (Against Experimental Psychology and Pedagogy) was one of the
expert morning lectures. Published by Die Kommende in 1921, translation
available from the Rudolf Steiner Library.
6. Emil Leinhas, Der Bankerott der Nationalökonomie (Bankruptcy of the Na-
tional Economy), Stuttgart, Die Kommende, 1921.
7. Steiner gives a slightly different version of this passage in Christianity as
Mystical Fact (1902), where he credits Empedocles as the author, although
the verse is nowhere to be found in the latter’s Fragments. Vincenz Knauer’s
Hauptprobleme der Philosophie, Wien/Leipzig, 1892, 97, on which Steiner
often drew, attributes this passage to Heraclites without more specific at-
tribution.
97
VI
The Supersensible in Man and the World
Rotterdam, November 1, 1922
First, let me apologize for not being able to give tonight’s lecture in
the language of your land. I beg you to kindly accept it in the language
with which I am familiar.
Anyone with an open mind, anyone who experiences present life
with consciousness, with clear understanding and a warm heart, must
recognize that in our times there are harsh obstacles on the path that
challenges human beings. The times have become difficult indeed.
However, it would be a mistake to look for the causes of the present
difficulties only in the outer world. Insofar as this outer world is made
up of the individual actions of individual people, whatever comes to
meet us from that outer world is ultimately rooted deep in the human
soul. However, one sees that human beings can hold onto strength,
confidence, ability and especially the larger perspective on life if they
are unable to create for themselves—from the soul-spiritual layers of
their being—a concept of life that will in itself be a source of such in-
ner strength.
People wll not always see this clearly because they do not remem-
ber that even the physical forces of the human being, which we apply
to the outer world, intimately depend on all that streams and trickles
through the human being by way of the soul life. Therefore anyone
who thinks it important that in the wide span of our current civiliza-
tion there should come a renewal of joy in human hearts, anyone with
such hopes will find it necessary to search the human heart, to ask how
forces for work, forces for life-vision, forces in general can grow in the
human heart from the inner depths, making it possible to walk in a
fitting manner on the path of life.
And if we want to look straight at what is actually for many individu-
als an unconscious conflict, this conflict is evident in the contradictory
ways our head and heart perceive the knowledge and the impressions we
have gained over several centuries of the traditional scientific worldview.
This scientific worldview has celebrated triumph after triumph; it has
transformed all of modern life. Everything coming at us from the out-
side world today, especially if we live in cities, is, after all, the product
of contemporary scientific thinking as it has evolved.
But there is another scientific thinking, namely the moral and re-
ligious conception of the world arising out of the needs of the human
heart, of the entire human being. Even a cursory look at the development
of humanity forces us to reflect that, the further back we go in human
evolution, the more we find that in ancient and ever more ancient times
human beings derived everything they knew from a moral, a religious
worldview. When they looked out at nature, they thought they saw be-
hind all natural phenomena the guiding and governing hand of spiritual
beings. And when they directed their gaze upward, they believed they
saw the movement of the stars and the forms of the constellations led
and guided by divine beings. And when they looked into their own souls,
this divine spiritual guidance and direction continued, and they assumed
that the divine guides were actually at work within them whenever they
raised their arm, or took any action in ordinary life.
Ancient humanity actually did not have anything like the compre-
hensive view of nature available to us today in all its greatness. We can
see this in a myriad of powerful, vivid examples. For instance, think of
the close connection that the Ancients used to make between illness,
death and what they called sin. They believed that human beings could
only sicken for moral reasons. One believed that death was inflicted
upon the human race as the punishment for sin. Wherever they looked
they saw, not natural phenomena as we now understand them, but the
activity and influence of divine powers, whose responsibility in the hu-
man race was morality, and to whom the heart, the soul would turn if
one wanted to feel enclosed in a spiritual-eternal core of being, in the
“lap of the divine.”
There was no separate view of nature alongside this moral religious
worldview. In the present time, humanity has in its moral and religious
philosophies the mere shreds, the remnants of this unified moral-
religious worldview, without a separate philosophy of nature.
THE SUPERSENSIBLE IN MAN AND THE WORLD 99
Nowadays, we are looking at a magnificently developed philosophy
of nature, incorporating the human being; for in the nineteenth century
we learned to ponder the fact that human beings arise out of natural
lower strata, that they have gradually evolved from lower animal forms.
In the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century,
we have learned to think that whatever we carry in our anatomy, our
vitality, is the natural consequence of heredity. The human being is part
of the natural order. We look at natural laws everywhere, but can no
longer imagine their being connected with any kind of morality.
The way in which plants grow, the role of electricity and magnetism
in natural processes, the evolution of animals, the physical development
of the human being—all these, to which natural science has brought so
much clarity, are initially exclusive of any moral thoughts. And while
the human being can derive from nature some inner joy, some deep
comfort, and some measure of aesthetic devotion, there can be no sense
of submission to the cosmic order, and, in particular, no sense of submis-
sion/devotion to nature as science presents it to our eyes.
And thus, modern human beings have come to see nature as the only
being, the only true reality. Yet in their heart of hearts, the yearning for
a moral world order struggles to appear, as does the inner compulsion
to be linked with something like a supersensible reality, facing sensible
nature, the urge to experience religious feeling towards powers that
cannot speak to humanity out of natural laws. And modern humanity
is ever more confused, trying to preserve old traditions out of a moral-
istic, religious worldview yet ever more aware of the contradictions of
modern science. Thus contemporary humanity stands divided, looking
to a world completely woven by nature’s laws, originating in natural
laws, yet also a world, which, according to their hypotheses, is doomed
to disappear according to those same laws of nature.
And upon this rests what we think makes us truly human; upon
this rests the moral sentiment, and upon this, religious devotion. There
we stand, with frightening existential puzzles: Can I grant reality to that
which I produce out of my sense of morality, considering that nature
does not attribute it any reality? Am I capable of turning my religious
sense toward something which I can struggle for in truth and honesty,
since I cannot turn this sense toward something recognized as a law of
nature? And thus it appears increasingly as if a person’s moral ideals, a
person’s religious feelings are turning into abstractions hanging in “soul-
ful” air, as if they are doomed to be buried and forgotten along with the
merely natural universe, when the earth comes to a burning end.
Thus contemporary humans are deeply conflicted, and the con-
tradiction is not always obvious. Rather, something else is present in
consciousness. It is the sense that they cannot find their way in the
world, that they lack strength and joy to work in the world. And often,
so as to have at least some moral and religious stability, they reach back
to all kinds of old philosophies, old mysticism or, as they are called
today, cults. Since they cannot find in their immediate surroundings
any knowledge of the supersensible realm in the human being and the
world, they “warm up” these old philosophies. And yet, it is possible to
find this supersensible reality in mankind and the world. How to find
it will be the subject of tonight’s talk.
Between what is purely moral and religious and what is natural
and material, people have always experienced something in the middle,
which one encounters in the person’s own self while the person is alive.
In the olden days it was seen when one looked at the world from a
religious point of view; nowadays one sees it differently. Still and all,
even today, it is possible to situate what belongs to humanity into the
natural order.
I choose three phenomena in human nature, which as it were, go
back and forth, oscillating between what is perceived as supersensible
reality, and what is merely natural. Yet you will see these are precisely
the things whose transformations, whose metamorphoses lead us up to
a contemplation of supersensible cognition and worldviews.
The first thing that appears to us in the human being, which he
experiences as a very small child, are his struggles with the environment.
Purely out of his own being, which has not yet been given its place in
the world, he wins his own position: upright walking, standing.
The second thing, to which human beings make their own way,
is the learning of speech. Only out of speech—as anyone knows who
observes children objectively—comes the third thing, the capacity for
thinking. Unlike animals looking down upon the ground, mankind
looks freely into space up to the stars. To be able to transport one’s
own inner being to other human beings in speech, to receive the world
into one’s soul in the form of thoughts—ancient philosophy perceived
all these as supersensible endowments granted to the sensible realm of
humankind from the supersensible realm. The linkage between super-
sensible mankind and supersensible cosmos was perceived insofar as
one considered these three characteristics of human nature. An older
philosophy, which referred to the moral and the religious quality of
the cosmic order, saw them as gifts of divine-spiritual powers working
in human beings, that the latter, out of their very architecture, should
develop upright walking and stargazing and learn to speak and think.
In the antiquity of human evolution, human beings never doubted
that when thoughts appeared in their inner space, angelic beings were
living in these thoughts. Not until the Middle Ages did people begin
to discuss whether their thoughts were purely their own creations, or
whether their thoughts were the effects of divine-spiritual powers ex-
pressing themselves in (the human) life-organization.
Thus in ancient times, people saw these capacities as something that
entered the human being from the supersensible world to reside and live
in the human being. People saw these three gifts as something that came
into mankind from supersensible worlds and that truly existed and lived.
Therefore whenever one wanted to guide the human being—that stands
upon the earth, lives on the earth and on earth must do his work—to
the moral and religious world-order, one did so in conjunction with
these three gifts which were brought to mankind in childhood.
In the East, where there was a mighty striving for the knowledge of
the divine-spiritual, humans wanted at first to cultivate what lay in the
power of orientation, what lies in the forces which drove the child to
become an upright being looking out into world spaces. Consider the
postures that the oriental sage (who knew that as an adult one needs
a different approach to what, in the child, becomes an orientation to
walking and to space) prescribed to his disciples, to enable the work-
ing of the divine-spiritual in one’s own body. When the child learns to
walk from the creeping position, the divine spiritual comes in. When
the disciple of the oriental sage puts his legs one above the other [in a
lotus position] and settles his body upon the crossed legs, he is choosing
another position. And when he then becomes fully conscious of this
position, the spiritual world can work into him, just as it works into
the child, spurring the child on to walk upright. Further, when the
human being, instead of learning to speak in the way that is usual in
the sensible world, turns this speech inward, then this gift from God is
turned into a clairvoyant (hellseherisch) and “clear-feeling” (hellfühlend)
force, thus connecting the person’s own supersensible with the super-
sensible in the world.
A certain discipline of breathing was connected with the recita-
tive-chanting of particular verses called mantras, that were not spoken
to communicate with other human beings but were directed inward,
vibrating through the human organism, so that everything that we
otherwise turn outward in speech was now directed inward, so that
the entire human organism was partaking of the force, the power of
this mantric word. The Eastern master’s disciple directed into his own
body what the child, as a gift of the supersensible realm arising in him
(lit. becoming in him), had poured out into speech to converse with
other human beings, this the disciple poured into speech to converse
with his own body. In him, the words did not just vibrate outward;
with every breath, they vibrated down into the lungs, into the blood,
and from the blood to the brain. And just as the person who hears my
speech can feel in the words the beat of my soul, the feeling evoked by
the words, so too the Eastern sage, out of the vibrations in his body,
could experience the supersensible in the world from the supersensible
experience of mantric words.
And while the child develops the third step of thinking out of
speaking, this Eastern sage also developed the third step, perceiving
the supersensible (world) through the mantric word, and through the
mantra developing a thought that was not just the chanter’s personal
thought. For just as our soul vibrates out to other human beings in
ordinary speech, so too the world was vibrating into the person in
the experienced inner word. And what spoke was not another person,
not human thoughts; what spoke was Cosmic Thought, the Spirit,
the supersensible in the world, pouring into the human organism as a
supersensible reality.
In such a way, ancient humanity attempted to establish the relation-
ship between the supersensible in the person and the supersensible in
the universe. All our religious and moral philosophy, all that has been
handed down to us originates in such a linkage between the supersensible
in ourselves and the supersensible in the world, established by human
beings in the past.
At a particular point in time, humanity stepped out of this sym-
biosis with the divine-spiritual in the world. The teachers who sought
their way into the supersensible part of the world became fewer and
fewer, and the human beings who felt a need for such teachers and who
wanted to hear what the teachers had to say and derive from it food for
the soul, they too became scarcer. For a while, humans went through a
time during which all that needed to develop in them (including what
needed to develop in the soul-spiritual realm) needed to be tightly
bonded with the body, the flesh. Ancient humans were embedded inside
a moral world order; it was not in them, but streamed through/watered
the entire world; they felt completely sheltered in a divine world, which
completely absorbed nature; such humans could never have discovered
freedom, the freedom that becomes conscious of the ego as a solid in-
ner support. They could not have discovered freedom that does not
derive human activity from the divine-spiritual working in the human
being, the freedom that seeks in the person itself the impetus, the will
for all earthly deeds. Humanity had to come, and did come to this ego
consciousness, to this experience of freedom.
But now we stand at an important turning point in human evolu-
tion. We have lost the old connection with the divine. And it cannot
be found again, even by those who try in every possible way to warm
up the old ways, looking to Gnosticism or Eastern occultism for what
they miss in the scientific views of the present. Incidentally, the con-
templation of anthroposophy is often accused of being an attempt to
reconnect with the old Gnosticism or Orientalism. But this is not the
case. This philosophy starts from the thought that we can find the road
to the supersensible using the same, precise, form of thought as in natural
science, strengthened and sharpened in the right way.
Actually, even what I characterized earlier as the trinity of special
qualities in human nature (which antiquity treated as gifts from the
moral-divine world order), is treated as a purely physical endowment
by our contemporaries, influenced by the power and authority of the
scientific worldview. And so it is easy to understand, and completely
justified, that one should derive the different organization of the human
limbs from the particular structure resulting from the human way of
life, which in turn evolved from the animal way of life, thus explain-
ing the upright posture out of strictly natural relationships. One seeks
to understand speech out of natural physical structure and out of the
connection between the child’s natural organization and older people.
And one tries to explain the cultivation of thinking as something that
is connected with human morphology.
And why should we not do that? Has not science shown that human
thoughts are quite dependent on human organs? All it takes is for this
or that part of the brain to be paralyzed and a certain portion of intel-
lectual activity ceases. We see how even the use of poisonous substances
acting on the human body can harm human intellectual activity. The
habit of seeing everything scientifically has placed this trinity—orienta-
tion in the cosmos, speech acquisition and thinking acquisition—in a
physically natural way within a natural physical world order. And from
there, other things yet were referred to such a world order.
Now we may believe that what humans first become on this earth
through birth, or shall we say conception, originates in a purely natural
order, for we can see it expressed outwardly. Looking forward, look-
ing at birth, we see in birth and heredity all that pulsates and streams
through the human being. But if one looks in the other direction, in
the direction of death, then one sees clearly, if one is the least bit open-
minded, that nature does not reabsorb what we are as human beings, but
extinguishes it, like the flame of a candle. So it appears as if the modern
human being were given to itself through embryonic life and heredity.
But it must also appear as if there is continuation at the end of life, as
if nature were unable to take up this human essence, but could only
destroy it. The greatest riddle, therefore, which in olden times when
there still existed a religious and moral philosophy, was the riddle of
birth; for a later humanity and for us is the riddle of death. The riddle
of being born has become the riddle of immortality.
At a time when humans were able to look at the divine-religious
world in a moral and religious context, a time when they could connect
the supersensible in the individual with the supersensible of the world,
the question was: How did humankind descend from spiritual worlds in
which he lived formerly? A natural event, embryonic life and birth, was
seen as the outer expression of this descent from divine-spiritual worlds
into physical earthly existence. Birth was the greatest riddle. What do
humans have to perform here on earth? This was the question. Today
we look to the other side, to the side of death, raising the greatest riddle,
which is that of the true essence of the innermost human seed.
We can consider the contemporary riddle from yet another side. Yes,
one can believe that human moral instincts arise out of natural instincts,
which in blood, in flesh, in the nervous system, in the entire human
organization, are brought to a certain pitch of perfection, and one can
derive religious feelings from the presence of such moral impulses. One
can thus to some extent derive all morality and religious feelings from
the material natural order.
Not that we need to speak of moral or immoral deeds being re-
warded. This leads us too much into an egoistic realm. However, if we
see the material natural order as all-encompassing, one might say that
all our moral deeds disappear without a trace in the world. This leaves
us with the following question: Science tells us that even the smallest
discharge of electrical power has a particular effect in the cosmos; then
does not what comes from us morally have any consequences in the
cosmos?
We can also look at this from another perspective. If need be, we
can think of moral impulses as more highly evolved compulsions and
instincts. But a purely physical/material worldview does not allow us
to understand the meaning of moral impulses for the future.
One part of humanity faces these questions in full consciousness.
Anyone facing them consciously must acknowledge what is being de-
scribed here as anthroposophical spiritual science. A large portion of
humanity faces these questions in a somewhat unconscious, emotional
[sentimental] way. Human beings can no longer follow whatever they
received as the message from old religious traditions, for they feel in-
stinctively that that this information came out of ancient knowledge—it
emerged from mysteries which could mesmerize people! All religious
credos originated in old insights about the connection between the
supersensible in humankind and the supersensible in the cosmos, as I
characterized it earlier. But we can no longer tread these old paths. In the
meantime humanity has had to evolve, failing which it would have been
unable to follow the road, and survive the intermediary stage in which
the feeling of ego-consciousness, the experience of freedom originated.
The human being could not live entirely in the physical human body if
it had not been thoroughly restructured in this intermediary stage.
Nowadays, a person might attempt to seek the link between the
supersensible in his nature and the supersensible in the world. Many do
it and, if I am allowed to say so, to the detriment of true knowledge.This
could be, say, a Buddhist endeavoring, through particular body postures,
the chanting of mantras and similar formulas, to seek cosmic thoughts
revealed in the inner logos and thereby reach the supersensible realm.
Yet as a contemporary human being, whose physical body is constituted
in a completely different way than in ancient humanity, the result in the
absence of guidance from the supersensible realm would be disorder in
the physical body. The former human body, which could be penetrated
through the bodily disciplines I described, did not yet have the density,
the inner consistency out of which a strong earth-ego consciousness, a
strong experience of earthly freedom arises. The human organism has
become more solid. If one were to acknowledge today the more rigorous
physiology proposed by anthroposophical spiritual science, one would
know that in modern humanity the dense constituents, namely the salts,
are more intensely formed than was the case in the bodies of ancient
men, who could perform such exercises to reach higher knowledge.
Today’s humanity must therefore use different methods to establish a
linkage between its own supersensible being and the supersensible being
of the world. The man of today must seek the moral, the religious in
the world order differently than in former times.
The spiritual science of which I speak here seeks therefore to
penetrate the supersensible realm from two sides: first from the side of
thought, and secondly from the side of will. From the side of thought,
the person does not experience as copies of the outer world the thoughts
that have been of such outstanding service in modern scientific observa-
tion and experimentation. Instead one learns to live with these thoughts
in the stillness of the inner soul. Thereby, modern humans can create
a spiritual scientific method just as ancient humanity created one with
their mantras. Mantras were a more material thing, whereas modern
man has something more spiritual in the mere formation of thoughts.
I have described at length in my book Knowledge of the Higher
Worlds and Its Attainment, in part two of Occult Science, and elsewhere
the long road one must walk in order to build in this manner a real
spiritual science and acquire knowledge of the supersensible realms. I
would like to indicate here briefly some essential points on how one
can become a spiritual researcher today, completely in keeping with the
organization of today’s human body.
Not everybody needs to become a spiritual scientist, but some
people aspire to do so. Up to a certain point, everybody can at least
become an experimenter in spiritual science, by taking up the exercises
I have described in my books and lectures. But whoever wants to be-
come a spiritual scientist nowadays must no longer do it through the
physical chanting of mantras, but use instead the purely supersensible
practice of thought.
Now, we have learned to think precise thoughts. If I look at the starry
sky in scientific astronomy, I am dealing with precise thinking in physics
and chemistry. We are striving for the same in biological research, the
exploration of living beings, and we feel especially satisfied if we know
how to investigate the material world in the same manner in which we
train our thoughts to solve mathematical problems. This has even led
to the saying that there is only as much exact natural science as there
is mathematics in the sciences.1 For this reason one speaks of exact
sciences. Everything must be surveyed in observation and experiment,
in the same way we survey the matter when solving a mathematical
problem. This is what “exact science” means.
Anthroposophical spiritual science speaks in the same way about
“exact clairvoyance.” As the contemporary scientist investigates the world
exactly, the person who becomes an anthroposophical researcher does
the same, only in a different field. One discovers gradually that there
are forces hidden in the soul which remain unused in ordinary life and
ordinary science. One discovers, little by little, that the soul, spirit and
physical-sensory are really not yet separated in the very young child,
and that the child to some extent pours into speech, into thinking,
into upright walking, forces that previously existed in supersensible
form. Everything which pours into the blood during the first stage of
life, everything which vibrates in the organs, all this pours itself out to
the extent that the human being is oriented outward; it pours out into
speech, and especially into thought.
But we can turn back the flow. The oriental sage’s disciple attempted
to attain through chanting, meditation, or inner speaking what one
might call the connection between the supersensible in man and the
supersensible in the world. Modern humanity must turn thinking itself
inward. We must be able to tell ourselves in complete earnestness: We
have come a long way with the observation of external nature; we are
looking at the exact thoughts of the star constellations and the planetary
paths; we are looking at the exact thoughts of electricity, magnetism,
warmth, sound and light; we look into the world—exact thoughts re-
create this world within us. As spiritual scientists we must be able to
put ourselves in a situation when we look away from all the thoughts
that lead us outward to the stars, electricity, magnetic and warmth
phenomena. Like the old sage turning his mantras inwardly and thus
allowing the logos to reveal itself to him, we must be able to turn the
power of thinking inwardly. We must learn to soar inwardly in our
thinking with the same energy we apply outwardly through our senses.
The senses are bodily structures that help us, so that we need not use up
our own strength, the strength of soul. Thus our meditative thinking
will become so strong that our thoughts, even while developed in the
inner soul being, become as vivid as sensations.
Just think how alive, how intense everything is when you hear
sounds, when you see colors, when sensations of warmth and cold per-
vade your body. Think how dry and abstract thoughts are, which you
retain from your experience of the outer world. Meditation consists in
so strengthening, so intensifying the thoughts that dawn within us when
we hand ourselves to the impassive observation of our thoughts, that
they become as bright and clear as sensations. In this way, we achieve a
new level of thinking. Ordinary day-by-day thinking is such that one
feels passive, these thoughts are actually devoid of strength, mere images,
copies of the outer world. It is possible, through meditation, to learn to
live in the world of thoughts as one lives in one’s forces of growth, as
one lives in hunger and thirst, as one lives in an inner sense of physical
ease—this is the fruit of meditation. One only needs to learn one thing
in order to experience the thought world in this manner: One must
learn to weave lovingly in thoughts.
Being a spiritual scientist means having to practice this science with
the same devotion as the physicist practicing year-round in his lab. The
astronomer practices all year at his observatory. It is really no easier to be
a spiritual scientist than to be an astronomer or a physicist. Everybody
can verify the spiritual scientist’s claims. All it takes is a little attention,
as I described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its At-
tainment. But just as little as it is necessary to become an astronomer in
order to apply the fruits of astronomy in one’s worldview, just as little
does one need to become a spiritual scientist in order for spiritual science
to become an element of our civilization, of our cultural life. Quite the
contrary, the kind of interpersonal connections which it can bring about,
and which actually must arise in the not too distant future—in order
to stop the decadence—the kind of social cooperation, of community
between human beings that will become necessary and possible, and
which is already needed now, these will be substantially stimulated if
one restores confidence to human social life. Those deserve our trust
who, from the depth of their souls, speak about spiritual supersensible
worlds because as spiritual scientists they arise to them.
Wherever souls can live in intimate closeness, so that the intimacy
of the supersensible world can be shared in the supersensible being of
humanity, in such a social order, forces will be revived that can uniquely
fortify our social life. Therefore it is entirely unfounded and only ego-
tistical to say: I do not value the results of anthroposophical science
research about the supersensible, for I cannot see these things myself.
We all are so constituted that we each have a predisposition for truth,
not for untruth. Not everybody can do research about the supersensible
world, just as not everybody can paint a picture. As everybody can
admire an image that was painted artfully, so anyone can acknowledge
the truth of spiritual science as described here, provided he is fully
human, with a predisposition for truth, not out of blind faith but out
of an inner experience of the truth of spiritual science. This spiritual
science can only be obtained insofar as through meditation, through
(thoughtful) concentration in the thinking life itself, one can progress
from abstract thinking to a concrete pictorial thinking, to a thinking
that is inwardly alive. In this thinking, cosmic thoughts are resurrected.
In this thinking, the person will feel he is on the first step of the path
to the supersensible world.
Ancient humanity proceeded from something more material, from
speech directed inwardly. Modern humanity must start from something
more spiritual, from thought directed inwardly, find a connection with
the supersensible in the world, and regain the ability to speak of this
supersensible realm in the world. If one thus enters the supersensible
world by way of inwardly experienced thinking and the supersensible
in one’s own being partakes of the supersensible in the universe, what
one finds will not remain empty words. In precisely the same way the
material world surrounds us with the multitude of plant forms, animal
forms and the light streaming down from the stars, just so to some
extent the material world will fade before spiritual contemplation is
revealed in pictorial thinking and a spiritual world dawns for us. We
now do not just experience the sun’s physical radiance, we see a world
of spiritual beings, whose physical image is the physical sun. We draw
the physical appearance of the sun into the spiritual being of the sun.
And through the physical appearance of the moon, we penetrate to the
spiritual moon beings. We learn to see that spiritual moon-beings lead
the human soul out of spiritual-soul worlds, through birth, into earthly
life, where the mother and the father receive them into the body. We
learn to know how, in the spiritual sun beings, lie the forces that later
lead the human being through death, and we learn to see the path of
the human soul out of supersensible worlds.
This knowledge is still amplified if instead of training the will by
adopting body postures as the ancient Orientals used to do, one devel-
ops the will in the same way one has developed thinking into a precise
clairvoyance. It was a training of the will, when human beings suppressed
their orientation to the outside world, crossed their legs and sat on them
in order to receive from the supersensible world, through the human
being, perceptions from different streams in the world. Modern humans
cannot do this. Their organism is different, they must work directly
with the will. Whatever the ancient easterner might have developed
in a more physical fashion through body postures (also by turning the
body to the east, the west, the south), all this has become an imposture
for modern people. Modern humans must take their will immediately
in hand. And you will find in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its
Attainment and Occult Science a whole series of exercises for self-control,
self-education, especially cultivation of the will. Here are a few.
A person who is used to following the course of external events from
earliest to latest may change his/her manner of thinking: for instance in
the evening, to visualize the last thing he experienced in the day, then
what was experienced earlier in the day, and so forth until morning. By
visualizing the course of nature in reverse sequence, the person can think
beyond the natural flow of events, the person thinks at cross-stream. This
strengthens the activity of will in thinking. This is particularly the case if
one pays attention to very small details. Say you imagine climbing stair;
instead of picturing yourself climbing the staircase, visualize yourself
standing on the last step, going backward; break loose from the actual
experience and present the ascent as a descent. This also strengthens the
will activity in thinking. I can also fortify this will by undertaking my
self-education by telling myself: I have such and such a habit; I will alter
it; three years from now I must in one particular respect have acquired
a completely different habit. There are hundreds of such exercises, im-
mediate will exercises, aimed directly at transforming the will, so that
it is loosened from the restrictions of mere physicality.
In so doing, modern man performs an exercise similar to the one
practiced in the Eastern sage’s postures. We cannot return to these old
exercises for reasons I have explained. But in this way, modern humans
can achieve an immediate relationship between their own supersensible
being and the supersensible being of the world.
This can be clarified with a metaphor. Take the human eye: what
makes it a seeing organ? Imagine the cataract: it is a hardening of the
lens or the cornea, which shows that if matter be comes dominant in
the eye, the eye can no longer be used to see. In order to serve vision,
the eye must be absolutely transparent in particular parts of its organ.
It must to some extent be “selfless” to serve the human being. Just so
our body, when we fortify it through exercises, becomes a spiritual
sense organ. Our body at particular moments of cognition, not in or-
dinary life, is no longer penetrated by compulsions, instincts, desires.
It becomes purified, as the eye does, in order to become transparent.
And just as one sees the world of color through the transparent eye, so
with a wish- and desire-free body, the body is not always transparent
but it can be made transparent for particular times. It gets trained for
transparency to the spiritual world, the supersensible world to which
one belongs as supersensible essence.
Thus we learn to know what is truly supersensible in man. To see
through what happens with a person who made his body transparent
and lives in the purely supersensible world, means having solved the
riddle of death. In that contemplation, we have life out of the body—we
know how one lives after relinquishing the physical body and crossing
the gate of death. One knows what it means to live in the world without
the body. In this fashion one learns to know one’s own supersensible
being. And insofar as we learn to know it, as we see it crossing the gate
of death while alive, we learn that it can be taken up in a supersensible
world, just as, at conception it was released into earthly life by the
supersensible world. And by learning to know our own human super-
sensible, by learning how in life the soul can cross the gates of death, we
also learn that the soul can be received by a supersensible universe, just
as it was originally released into earthly life by the supersensible world.
We can learn to see now the supersensible realm of the world. In living
thought achieved through meditation, we learn to see behind the sun the
spiritual sun-world, behind the moon the spiritual moon-world, these
spiritual beings that lead man into earthly existence and that lead him
out of earthly existence. And then we know that after death our living
soul is received by the living being of the world, the living being of the
Universe, the supersensible universe. Just as our body is received by the
material world and called to death, so too our human soul is called to
life in the eternal realm by those beings which one sees through in the
supersensible realm of the world.
We can then see the path followed by human civilizations as one
that gives us strength to incorporate morality and religion into the
natural world order, by cultivating the will, a cultivation which can be
effected in very precise exercises, just like mathematics, through thought
exercises that lead to an exact clairvoyance.
This is what we need today. This path of human evolution has been
indicated to us in grandiose fashion in the way in which true spiritual
cognition places the mystery of Golgotha in human evolution.
Allow me to say a few words on this subject in conclusion. What
was the situation immediately after the Golgotha event for those people
who witnessed what was said to have happened on Golgotha? They
saw what Jesus of Nazareth had experienced and they felt that in Jesus
of Nazareth the divine spiritual Christ-Being had been incarnated as
a human being. He had lived in human nature as a man. This is what
they felt, that this divine-spiritual Christ-Being had descended to earth
in order to bring to them something they sorely needed on earth.
What made it possible for the f irst Christians to accept
so unconditiona lly the wisdom of the Golgotha myster y?
W hat made it possible was the fact that there still existed
remnants of the old conceptions, in people who told themselves:
Through birth, the human being descends into earthly existence
from supersensible worlds. In olden times, mankind still knew, out of
instinctive contemplation and out of what initiates and teachers had
told them, that there was a spirit-guide in the spiritual worlds, who
had led them down to physical life on earth. But because they knew
that they, as spirits, had descended to earth, they knew they would also
cross the gates of death. And death had nothing puzzling, it held no
fear for ancient men, just as for animals there are no mysteries of death
and no fear of death. Please do not misunderstand this comparison;
it is not meant to disparage human beings.
Human fear of death came in the course of time. Death only be-
came a riddle when humans no longer perceived the riddle of birth,
when they no longer looked up to the spiritual worlds from which they
had descended, when in human evolution there appeared a tendency
to see everything connected with the birth process as a merely natural
fact. Only then did human beings experience the riddle, the dread, of
death.
Theoretical knowledge could not heal this, but only the fact that
the mystery of Golgotha unfolded on earth. And drawing on the rem-
nants of old wisdom, men knew that the Christ that had appeared on
earth in the form of Jesus of Nazareth was the same being who guided
human souls from spiritual worlds down to this earth. And the first
Christians knew that the Christ descended to earth to give humans on
earth what they needed to be released from the riddle of death. Here
we see the connection established by Paul between the riddle of death
and the Golgotha event. For Paul explained that as human souls they
can only think beyond death when they can look up to the Resurrected,
the Christ who vanquished death.
Drawing on ancient wisdom, the first Christians were still able to
understand Christ as the one who descended to earth, although it was
more a feeling than a clear thought. Modern spiritual science teaches
the human being again know how to contemplate the supersensible
worlds through exact/precise clairvoyance. This anthroposophical
spiritual science, by leading human beings to contemplate, as it were,
out of the body—when this body has become transparent, and the
person experiences him/herself in the world in which he/she must live
after stepping through the gates of death—then the student of spiritual
science will be able to point not only to the man Jesus of Nazareth, but
to the divine-spiritual Christ, descended from supersensible worlds and
infusing with his forces the supersensible in the human being. Out of
this influx of force, out of the forces Christ unfolds in the human being,
according to Paul’s words, “Not I, but the Christ in me,” the human
being on earth can feel the opportunity to go through death as a living
soul, with the Christ, so as not to enter blind the spiritual worlds in
which mankind is received by sun-beings, but with their sight restored
through the light that Christ brought to earth.
Thus an anthroposophic spiritual science can give buoyancy to
the religious-Christian life. Anthroposophic spiritual science quite
specifically will have a deepening effect on Christian religiosity. The last
centuries have given us the magnificence of natural science, which we
see slowly evolving, however in such a manner that we cannot see any
moral world order in this evolving. [In fact nature reveals herself all the
more authentically when we try to moralize less. – ed.] And since we
cannot really feel for natural law the kind of devotion one would direct
to a divinity, having learned the methods of mathematics and science,
we can apply devotion to thinking and heighten thought to a pictorial
quality, to clairvoyance. And insofar as we apply this precise method
to our will, to educate ourselves, we do our most beautiful deeds in the
work of self-education. In this way, we connect, not with some magical
hocus-pocus, but with an inward, idealistic magic whereby morality is
reunited with nature and religion.
What, ultimately, is the aim of the anthroposophy of which I keep
speaking? It wants to fill the deep chasm that exists—at least for modern
man, for all men in this world—between a natural amoral world order
and a religious moral order, so that in the future, human beings will
regain a strong supersensibility in all the things which nature, materiality
gives them through the body, a supersensibility into which can stream
cosmic morality, not simply human morality, and not simply a natural
order, but a divine order.
And when the cosmic-moral impulses become the person’s in-
dividual impulses, with the penetration of divine consciousness by a
spiritually strengthened gaze, human beings will find their way into
the future and solve the important questions and riddles that people
already begin to intuit today. Merely by looking around the world, with
heightened impartiality and dispassionate open-mindedness, the long-
ing, the hope living in the human heart can play an enlivening role in
the evolution of humanity.
Endnote
1. Steiner’s approximate quote from Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Natur-
wissenschaft, Vorrede VIII, in Kant’s Complete Works, Hartenstein edition,
Leipzig 1867, vol IV, p. 360.
117
VII
Religion and Moral Education in the
Light of Spiritual Science
The Hague, November 4, 1922
Anthroposophical spiritual science, about which I spoke here last
Tuesday and last night1 has not only cognitive goals, not only the goal
of leading human beings to a moral and religious deepening, but it also
aims at practical results. And the wish was expressed for me to devote
tonight’s lecture to one such practical goal, the goal of education.
To the extent that this spiritual science is primarily concerned with
attaining a real knowledge of the human being in its fullness—the
human essence in regard to body, soul and spirit—it can also transmit
knowledge of the human being in practical life, and at all ages of life.
And for the art of education, knowledge of the human being as it ap-
plies to the child is, of course, necessary.
When all is said and done, the question of education is essentially a
“teacher question.” A teacher question, since what is at stake is whether
the teacher, the educator can solve the human riddle in practice, in the
child. Perhaps it is in regard to this riddle that one becomes most aware
of the meaning of the old saying which has been a kind of motto about
knowing the human being: The solution of the cosmic riddle resides
in the human being.
Many people feel anxious that if ever one were to solve the cosmic
riddle, there would not be anything left for human knowledge to do.
If, however, one believes that the solution of the countless secrets hid-
den in the universe is to be found in the human being, since the latter
is to some extent the ultimate goal of world evolution, human beings
themselves, if one really wants to know them, will demand endless ef-
forts, immeasurable labors, in order for any true insight to be obtained.
And if one is ready to think that there is, hidden in the human being,
something eternal, then one is led to feel toward the child the reverence
that one needs to have in order to approach this child in the right way
as a teacher and educator.
Concerning the knowledge of the human being, I will try to set
aside my recent discussions about the knowledge of the human spirit
and the cosmic spirit. I will try to present spiritual science in the most
general terms, so those members of the audience who did not attend
the last few days’ sessions can follow my explanations. Here is what it
is basically about: Those whose life-conceptions are heightened by true
knowledge—not abstract knowledge—of the human soul and human
spirit will easily discern general developmental stages in human life; the
totality of a human lifetime is divided into life-stages.2 People do not
always give these life-stages the attention and the deep insightfulness
they deserve, but anyone wanting to relate with children at a deeply
human level, as teacher and educator, must have a thorough, grounded
knowledge of these life-stages.
One such life-stage culminates around the seventh year, when the
child’s second teeth come in. Developmental sociologists observing
the human being consider these second teeth only as the earmark of
an important evolution in the child’s body, soul and spirit. Those who
have a realistic and professional understanding of the art of education
see that the change of teeth also signals a corresponding rearrangement
of the soul’s characteristics and spiritual capacities. We need merely recall
that in the human organism a metabolic conversion process takes place
throughout life, such that over a period of eight or nine years, there is a
turnover in the composition of our tissues, and by the end of that period
all the substances originally contained in our body have been replaced.
If we consider this, we must realize that whatever happens at the age of
seven with the change of teeth represents a mighty development of forces
and, although not repeated in the organism, yet is not a momentary,
isolated event. In fact, if we have any concrete view of the development
of the human organism, we know that over the first seven years things
are being prepared in the most intimate metabolic processes, which are
coming to a closure with the appearance of the second teeth.
In regard to the soul, we see that after the change of teeth, memory
and the process of representation now work quite differently. Formerly,
RELIGION AND MORAL EDUCATION 119
memory worked to a great extent unconsciously, as if rising from the
depths of the child’s physical body, and it now becomes more mental.
These things can only be suggested, for they are hardly accessible to a
cursory observation.
But the most important thing for the educator is that in the early
years up to the change of teeth, the child is a completely imitative being,
completely open to the world. The way the child relates to the outer
world in the first seven years—and I am not saying this to be paradoxical
but to elaborate something quite real—for more or less seven years the
child is almost completely a sense organ, perceiving its environment
not just with her eyes, with her ears, but through her entire organism,
yielding to the world as only the sense organs do. Just as the images of
outer objects and processes are prepared in the sense organs, and then
reproduced in the inner soul, so too the child wants to copy inwardly all
that her senses on the outside. The child wishes to give himself altogether
to the external world, to imitate inwardly everything that is presented
on the outside. The child as a totality is a sense organ. And if one were
able to look into the child’s organism with the clairvoyant sensing I
described in the last few days, we would see that the sense of taste, for
instance, which in the adult is limited to the tongue and palate, goes
far deeper into the child’s organism. One does not overexaggerate when
one says that the nursing child tastes her mother’s milk with her entire
body. These are the kinds of intimate and intricate details of human
physical life that one must observe if one really wishes for the delicate
knowledge required by an art of education.
And if one thinks of the child as an imitator through and through,
one can understand how the child learns to speak. We can follow the
child’s tendency to imitate inwardly, sound by sound, gesture by gesture,
and the child’s attempts to adapt his own inner being to what he senses
from the outside. One can look at all the details of the child and see
everywhere that the child is entirely a sense organ, entirely an imitator,
entirely devoted to taking in the outer world through the senses.
In this manner, one can understand things about the young child
which one should evaluate quite differently than things coming from an
older child or an adult. Let me give you an example. A father came to
me one day: “What shall I do with this boy? He has stolen money from
his mother.” I asked the father how old the child was. The child was not
yet six years old. I told the father that if he could really understand the
child, he could not speak of theft. The child—as I confirmed from talk-
ing further with the father—had watched every day his mother taking
money out of the drawer. As the young child imitates, so this child took
money out of the drawer, as he had seen it being done by his mother.
The entire deed was in this imitation, for this young child attached no
value at all to the money. He bought sweets and distributed them among
the other children. There are hundreds of similar examples.
After the change of teeth, the child’s soul life changes. Not only
do we see the child beginning to follow his sense impressions, to adapt
himself somehow to them and to change himself according to what
he sees on the outside, but he also begins to listen, to pick up on
representations conveyed verbally. But the child still needs for the sur-
rounding world to be conveyed by human personalities. Therefore we
can say: Until the change of teeth, the child is an imitating being; after
the change of teeth, and more or less all the way to puberty, not only
does he imitate, but he starts to prick up his ears to take in the mental
pictures expressed verbally by persons in his environment. Teachers and
educators must see to it that what they tell the children is a guiding line.
After the change of teeth, children go from a life of imitation to a stage
where their natural sense of lawfulness wishes to follow the example of
an unquestionable (self-evident) authority.3
This unquestioned sense of authority will guide all instruction and
all education during this second stage of life, from the change of teeth
to puberty. At this age, the child takes as true what a beloved “author-
ity” individual considers true. The child perceives with sympathy what
is beautiful, what is good, or else he obeys, relying upon the authority
of the beloved educator. And if we want to bring to the child between
seven and fourteen–fifteen something that will bear fruit for the rest of
his life, then everything we bring to the child must be clothed in this
authoritative element.
Dear listeners, it may seem contradictory that someone who wrote
the Philosophy of Freedom relies strongly on the authority principle. But
anyone who loves freedom above all else, anyone who sees in freedom
the self-evident law of social life, must point out what emerges from a
true understanding of the human being, namely that from ages seven to
fourteen, the child thrives in emulating an individual he perceives as an
unquestioned authority. (By the way, none of this should be treated as
absolute.) One might say: In the first seven years, the child is an imita-
tive being; in the second seven years, from change of teeth to puberty,
the child is a being who obeys his human environment, who naturally
and unquestioningly subject to a guiding authority.
If we follow the development of the human being in body, soul
and spirit, as anthroposophy does, we know the profound importance
for later life, perhaps even for a person’s old age, of having been able to
feel at that stage of life this particular respect, even if only for a brief
period of time, to remember the feeling of being eight or nine years old,
often overhearing how people in the family spoke about one particular
highly-respected family member, and to have gained from those conver-
sations a real sense of awed reverence. And then the day came when one
actually got to meet that person. On that day, everything was colored
by awe as one waited for the door to open and to see that person for
the first time. We know how such an encounter can affect the child at
a time when the soul is completely open to that sense of authority in
the outer world, just as in earlier years the entire being lived in sensa-
tion. We know then what a good deed is done to the child during that
stage, if one allows him to really experience this awed reverence toward
a self-evident, unquestioned authority.
These are the things one must consider if one wants to apply
knowledge of the human being to one’s task as educator and teacher.
For then, one will take into consideration the fact that human beings
are not just spatial organisms in which one body-part is related to some
other body-part, but that they are also organisms living in time. We
cannot know the human being unless we are attuned to the human be-
ing as time-body. Take any part of the right hand: it is related to every
other part of the human spatial organism through an inner organiza-
tion. Yet if you consider what the human being is in early childhood,
then in later childhood, in adolescence, in adulthood, in middle age
and in old age—these too are all inwardly interconnected. Educators
or teachers are not doing their job if they only consider the child’s pres-
ent life, the eight- or nine-year-old child. Only if we acknowledge that
whatever we do in the seven- or eight-year-old ripples on through the
time-body, which is a unity of the child, the middle-aged man, and the
elderly person—and that whatever is sparked in the child’s soul goes
on working, yet changes, metamorphoses. Only if we can imagine the
ways in which these things are transformed, can we be educators in the
truest sense of the word.
Let me give an example. Enormous value is attached to the child,
with his budding power of understanding, understanding everything
he is taught. This runs against the principle of self-evident authority.
If we are only going to teach children what they can understand with
their sensitive understanding, we are not taking into consideration the
following: It is very important for the young child to have accepted
as true, as beautiful, as good something which a respected authority
described as being true, beautiful and good even though he did not fully
understand it at the time. Much later, this thing arises from the depths
of the fifty-three-year-old or even older person’s soul. In the meantime,
one has matured. One now understands it more fully, now one can
retrieve it in the light of mature life-experience.
Such a thing—to understand at an older age, out of maturity, some-
thing one had accepted at an early age out of love for the “authoritative”
person, to have such a reminiscence in later life, and to now understand
it—this means kindling new vital forces, a tremendous principle in the
soul, although one of which people are often not aware.
I can clarify what I have in mind in yet another way with my
principle that one should educate so that the thing being taught affects
the whole life. As you know, there are people who can step into any
human situation and affect everybody simply by their mere presence.
They need not work hard giving speeches, but their words are warmed
and animated by something that works like a blessing on other people.
As a rule, these will be people of an advanced age, whose mere presence
has a quality of blessing in a very special way.
To study people, not just in the present moment but for the entirety
of their lifetimes, is difficult. Physiology and anthropology are much
easier since they are studies of the present moment or short time spans.
If we look at purely human life, we know that, as a rule, such a bless-
ing effect in old age is connected with the fact that as children these
people had the chance to revere, to look up to another person. I would
also like to establish as a paradigm that unless one learned to fold one’s
hands in prayer as a child, one cannot truly use one’s hands to bless in
old age. The child’s folded hands hold the soul-seed for the old person’s
blessing hands. Human beings are not just spatial organisms, they are
time-bodies and everything in the course of life is connected, just as in
the spatial organism the individual body parts are interrelated.
If we can fully understand this, we will also avoid teaching the
children concepts they cannot alter in later life. It is very tempting for
the teacher or educator to approach the child with utmost certainty, to
hand out sharply defined concepts and representations. Yet this would
be equivalent to preventing the child’s hands from growing and chang-
ing by encasing them in clamps, whereas these hands need to grow, to
change. Just as the child’s physical organism must grow, so too, what
the teacher, the educator has secretly planted in the soul must contain
forces for growth.4 We only offer this to the child if we form artistically
the education, the teaching during the school age.
As an illustration, I can indicate how this artistic principle has
been incorporated in the teaching at the Waldorf school. For instance,
when teaching reading, we do not introduce the letters of the alphabet
without any intermediary.5 After all, letters are actually quite abstract
to human nature. Just think how in former times a pictorial writing
arose, a pictographic writing that was born by copying the image of
perceived objects. The image was at first quite close to the reality being
perceived, so at that point, letters had an immediacy with the human
being. As civilization evolved, the letters of the alphabet became more
detached and abstract from the human being. In school we need not
study history all the way back in time, so that we can actually revive the
old pictograms. But it is good for teachers to allow their imagination
free play, to allow children to paint first, to have them paint forms that
reproduce what the child experiences, what lives in the child.
So, in the Waldorf school, we do not start by learning to read
or with the usual writing lessons; we start instead from a painting, a
drawing experience. We develop the forms of the letters out of this
drawing quality, and more generally out of an artistic quality. We allow
the children to fiddle with colors—even if it is a little more difficult,
even a bit messy at first. So we start with the artistic activity, out of
it develop writing, and then only, reading. In this manner, an artistic
quality imbues the entire teaching.
This can extend to the learning of arithmetic, if teachers are avail-
able—teachers who have become experts through intense soul work,
so that the guiding lines of true anthroposophical spiritual science have
been absorbed in their disposition, in their knowledge, in their feelings,
in their willing. Whenever spiritual science is taken up as something
living, teachers can transform all teaching into an artistic activity. If,
furthermore, the people who teach that age become really artistic in
their interactions with the children, they no longer affect the children
through what they know as much as through what they are (the quality of
their person-ness). They work through their individuality. The children
then receive in their soul-disposition something that contains forces for
growth, just as the bodily organism contains forces for growth. It will
become possible for the thirty- or forty-year-old to recall concepts they
learned in school, and it will not be a matter of remembering hard and
fast concepts that one memorized, for the concepts will in fact have
grown too, they will have developed. This is the way we as teachers must
operate; this is the way we as educators must approach the children.
Thus, we work as “authorities,” but simultaneously we work for
the child’s freedom, in the truest sense of the word. For we must see
clearly, at every instant, that we are only truly educators if we can also
guide on the path of life those human beings who will some day be more
competent than we are. It could happen that teachers land in a school,
a class, where there are two genius children, and we must be able to
educate these children in such a way that we do not hinder the devel-
opment of their particular genius. Whenever we educate in the sense
and out of the mood I have just described, bringing what the children
need in an artistic way, out of our individuality—just as earlier, children
needed to imitate what the senses perceived, they now imitate what we
are as individuals. We will then present the smallest possible obstacle to
forces we do not have in ourselves (which could easily happen), just as a
mother would not be an obstacle to a child’s genius if she is not herself
a genius. We become caretakers of the qualities of childhood and will
not be tempted to force upon the child something that belongs really
only to us. For the worst principle of education is to attempt to make
children into copies of ourselves. This temptation is countered when
we acquire a knowledge of the human being in a spiritual sense and if
at every age we see the child as a riddle to be solved.
I regret that we cannot yet have a kindergarten,6 which would allow
younger children to be educated according to these principles—this
is [currently] impossible for financial reasons. Those who teach at the
Stuttgart Waldorf School feel that what is revealed as soul-spiritual real-
ity in the human physical organism—in the gaze, in the physiognomy,
in speech, in every other bodily expression—the body is not neglected
in this education—has come down from divine spiritual heights and
united in this being at conception or birth with what was given by fa-
ther and mother out of the stream of heredity. Whenever we approach
a child saying: “This child has descended to me from spiritual heights;
here is a riddle for me to solve, day by day, hour by hour,” whenever
we thus approach the child, we will have in our soul-disposition the
loving devotion to the child’s development neccessary to guide this
child through all the imponderables on the path of life. Education and
teaching are often matters of imponderable factors, the things that can-
not be grasped in simple representations. Despite what a system-bound
scientific education would have us believe, teaching is truly more than
whatever happens between educator and child.
I would like to illustrate what I am saying with another example.
Let us assume a teacher must teach a child about the immortality of the
human soul in a form that is child-appropriate and simple. For a child
between second dentition and puberty, this should be done preferably
in images—not abstract concepts yet—and it must be presented by a
self-evident authority.
There are two possible ways to present these images to the child.
One can say: “I, the teacher, am frightfully intelligent. The child is still
terribly foolish. I need to teach it about the immortality of the soul. I
shall use an image. I will tell the child: Look at the butterfly chrysalis;
a butterfly will emerge from it, as a visible being. Just as the butterfly
emerges visibly from the butterfly chrysalis, so too at death the soul de-
taches itself from the physical body and flies into the spiritual world.”
I am obviously not saying this is a philosophical proof. It most
certainly is not that. I could give the child a concrete illustration, and I
can do it in the way I just described, saying I know everything for I am
smart and the child is stupid. This, then, is what I communicate to the
child: This is a stupid comparison but you should believe it.
Now, my dear listeners, we will not get anywhere by approaching
the child in this manner. The child may well remember what was said,
but the aim should be to uplift the soul, filling the soul with a content
full of life and strength instead. Rather, consider—forgive me if this
sounds paradoxical to you—that the child, in the subconscious layers
of his soul, is perhaps much smarter than I am. Perhaps I am the stu-
pid one and the child the smarter one. In some respects this is correct,
for who knows how the still unformed inner organs, the brain, will be
formed by the child’s still unconscious soul, the dreaming soul, just as
an exceptionally important wisdom was actively forming the child’s body
in the earliest years? If we appreciate these things, unless we are pedants
lacking appreciation for these things, we will say: All the wisdom we
acquire in life, no matter how beautiful the machines we manufacture,
has not come as far as the child’s unconscious wisdom.
A teacher standing on anthroposophical ground will take seriously
the butterfly’s emergence from the chrysalis and will think to herself: I
am not the one making the comparison; nature itself makes the com-
parison. The eternal soul’s release from the body at a higher level was
prefigured by the divine in nature in the butterfly’s crawling out of the
cocoon. If I penetrate with my own feeling the image I present to the
child, I give the child what is right; I give it vital strength, a life-force.
Unless we ourselves believe in a thing with all our might, it will never
have the right effect upon the child. These are the imponderable factors
operating between teacher and child, the unspoken (realm) that only
exists in the exchange of feeling, the supersensible element in teaching.
If that is lacking, then only the crudest elements will be at work, not
the imponderables; and human beings will not be given the right thing
on the path of life.
An artistic element, I might call it a mood of piety toward the human
essence, belongs in education, in teaching. This is particularly the case
if we direct our gaze at the religious and moral education we want to
bestow on the child. And here anthroposophical spiritual science shows
us that, especially when it comes to the religious and moral element,
there is something in the human time-body that is of great significance
for his whole life span on earth. If one can recognize the young child’s
mood as that of an essentially imitative being imitating the outer world,
and if we can put ourselves in this mood, the only way to characterize
it is this—the young child is completely open to the outer world; he
gets lost in the outer world. Just as the eye loses itself in the outer world
of color, the outer world of light, so too the child loses himself in the
outer world. The inner world dawns in the child only gradually. Specific
mental representations emerge little by little out of dreams, which still
completely live and weave in the outer world.
Now, dear listeners, do you know what it means to revere this mood
in the child? It is in truth the pious mood, the religious mood lying in
the middle of the sense/physical world. No matter how wild a child may
be, when it comes to his relationship with the sense world, his devo-
tion to the world of the senses, the child longs to identify completely
with the things he sees in his surroundings. This childlike mood is a
religious one, albeit not yet religion proper. But this mood, so present
in the small child before the change of teeth, gradually begins to fade
away; it disappears altogether with the shift from imitation to devotion
and a trust in authority. Yet, for the insightful teacher, this mood reap-
pears in a remarkable way. The insightful teacher and educator faces
perhaps his greatest task at the transition between the ninth and tenth
year. Teachers will notice then that most of the children in their care
come to them and need them quite specially. They come with ques-
tions—not always expressly formulated, often unspoken, merely living
in feelings. What matters now is much less that one give the children a
particular answer; we may answer in one or another way; the content
does not matter all that much. What greatly matters is that the teacher
is able to meet the child with the right feeling at the right moment, to
release in the child the right kind of trust, and these moments always
occur around the ninth and tenth years.
I can characterize this moment in a variety of ways. Before this point
the child does not fully distinguish himself from his surroundings; he
does not yet experience himself as an ego, even though he has long
been referring to himself as “I.” At this point in life, the child learns
to feel distinct from his environment. We now can no longer expect to
act upon the children purely through fairy tales, or through all kinds
of pedagogical stories in which we animate the outer physical world.
So let us begin with the observation that the child distinguishes himself
from the outer world as an “I.”
But something else plays an essential role, something which is con-
nected deeply with moral development. The following happens: At the
beginning of the stage during which the child completely trusts author-
ity, he accepts this authoritative individual as is. Between the ninth and
tenth year, something happens—it does not have to be conscious, it
may happen deep in the realm of feeling, we might say in the subcon-
scious realm, but it is unquestionably there—the developing child finds
himself, so to say, looking through the authoritative person to what it is
that that person represents. The authoritative person says: This is true,
this is good, this is beautiful. And now, the child would like to sense the
source for this in the authority, that which gives this person knowledge
of the true, the good, the beautiful; and where the will resides for the
true, the good, and the beautiful. This is due to the fact that something
which during the change of teeth, and still afterwards, was resting—I
like to say—in the underground of the soul, something still inside the
young child—if I may use this unusual term—a physical, “sensually-
pious” [sinnlich-frommes] devotion to the outer world. This something
now seems to emerge from the depths of the human entity. Something
that in the nursing child and up to the change of teeth was physical, a
physical element that constitutes the core of all later religious feeling
toward the world, now rises to the surface between the ninth and tenth
year as a psychological need.
To know this, to count on the fact that just as one lovingly nurtures
the seed in order for it to become a plant, so in the same way some-
thing—a physical seed—that at one time was being prepared in the
child now stands before us, demanding to be nurtured psychologically,
knowing this makes for a special relationship to the child. And, in this
way, one plants the seed of religion in the child.
By the same token, educators will note that among adolescents,
around their seventeenth or eighteenth year, something that had taken
the form of a soul disposition, a religious feeling, in the elementary
school child now appears in the spirit, the intellect, and pours into
the will, so that young adults at this age can structure their religious
ideals.
You see, if one wants to educate in a meaningful, truthful, and real-
istic way, it is of the utmost importance to penetrate these fundamental
issues. Nature, after all, has taken care of the human physical organism,
or else we would never be sure—especially when dealing with modern,
futuristic painters—whether people might not have a sudden impulse
to stick the ear in the wrong place. These kinds of thing would happen
if nature had not provided for the organization of the human body. In
the same way, educators must take care of the time-body. We should
not attempt to cultivate the child’s religious sense before the moment
I just described; at best we should simply prepare for it. We must hold
the time-body of the child with a sure hand. We must tell ourselves:
Whatever we gave the child earlier in the way of religious feelings and
concepts, it has remained external, taken on authority. But between the
ninth and the tenth year, something awakens in the child. If we guide
these feelings that wish to spring almost of themselves from the soul in a
religious sense, then we make of the child a religious true person. There
is so little psychology of time nowadays, hence the false or inappropri-
ate religious perceptions and feelings we find in contemporary society,
including the belief that one can develop all manner of things at each
and every age, thus ignoring what precisely must be drawn out of the
child’s soul specifically between the ninth and the tenth year.
If we arrange all instruction in such a way that, by the twelfth year,
the child has learned enough science—in complete agreement with
the current prescriptions of elementary school education—to survey
many physical facts, many botanical concepts, and so forth, not yet in
a scientific sense but in a child’s sense, then around the twelfth year,
we can observe and attend to the conflict that arises when one looks
up, on one hand, to divine world guidance (to which the child could
be directed between the ninth and tenth year) and, on the other, to the
consequences of learning about the natural phenomena revealed to us in
external ways—unrelated to the unfolding of moral or divine-spiritual
forces. After all, these natural phenomena appear to us without giving
the impression that moral principles brought them about, and without
our perceiving in them the immanent presence of the divine.
It is precisely this that has created for modern humanity the conflict
that leads our sensibility to the religious wellsprings of existence on one
hand and to natural science on the other. Real knowledge of the human
being allows us to note that we can quietly touch upon these conflicts
with the maturing child around the twelfth year, but also that we are
in the position—because religious feelings are still so strong, so fresh,
so lively, so youthful, as they can only be in the twelve-year-old—to
guide the child in the right manner so that later in life he will not need
to see nature emptied of the divine, but will be able instead to find the
harmony between nature and the divine-spiritual Cosmic Being.
In the end it means allowing the conflict to come out into the
open, always considering the right development of the human time-
body, because this conflict is most effectively bridged by the very forces
already resident in the human soul. To those who are able to observe
contemporary social life with empathy, with a true psychology, such
an art of education offers the realization that many human beings
never get past the conflict I just mentioned because they were not, at
the right age, led to experience the conflict and to be taken beyond it.
The main thing is that teacher and educator should know human life
as a whole, so that they can recognize the right thing at the right time
as they encounter it, in each child, each young person, and find their
bearings at the right time.
Religious experience also resides in the human being. It cannot be
stuffed into the soul. Rather, we must draw it out of the soul. Just as
we cannot eat with our nose but must use our mouth, so too we must
know that we cannot teach religion at just any old time, but only at the
appropriate age. True spiritual knowledge is the primary way we learn
to bring the right thing to the child at the right age. For the child can
take in whatever matches his capacities.
And if we look at the child’s development and know for truth that
between the change of teeth and puberty everything is determined by
the personal relationship between teacher and child, and that there
must be something fully artistic in this personal interrelationship, then
the child’s relationship to the self-evident authority develops out of
imponderable elements, involving pleasure and displeasure, sympathy
and antipathy.
Teachers speak to children in stories, in parables, in hundreds of
possible ways, about what is morally good, what they find morally bad.
If a teacher is able to develop an artistic education, then the artistic
element between educator and child results in the child’s learning to
consider the Good with sympathy, Evil with antipathy, so that out of
pleasure and displeasure, moral feeling and ethical sensibility develop
in the child between the ages of seven and fourteen.
It is false to give children commands during these years. Either we
enslave them or else we make them mean, obstinate, rebellious without
reason. They do not understand why they should obey commands. But
what a self-evident authority finds to be right or not-right, good or evil,
this the children learn to follow with sympathy or antipathy. And this
sympathy and antipathy become self-evident content of the soul.
Whatever develops through schooling at that age, whatever moral
feeling was established between the seventh and fourteenth years, takes
the form of will impulses in the seventeenth–eighteenth year, provided
there has been present in the child’s life an individual whose own
enthusiasm for moral ideals, for beautiful human ideals, served as a
guiding light. Just as the seed is not yet the plant and yet must be there
for the plant to appear, so the moral will can become the ripe, healthy
fruit of morality in the human being at the age of sixteen or seventeen
if moral feeling develops between the seventh and fourteenth years out
of emulation of a self-evident authority.
What is the surest way to develop this moral feeling? To guide the
entire instruction, the entire education, that the child learns one feel-
ing above all. Perhaps the young child’s education can already ensure
it long before the change of teeth, if we guide the child to experience a
sense of gratitude toward all that he receives from life. People nowadays
underestimate the feeling of gratitude. This feeling of gratitude links
a person with the world, allows a person to know himself or herself
as a part of the world. If the child is guided to develop a feeling of
gratitude toward even the smallest things, the child does not isolate
himself in egoism; rather the child becomes altruistic and connected
with his surroundings. Then, also, with school-age children, teaching
can be organized so that, little by little, the child learns to perceive that
he owes his physical existence, his soul existence, his mental existence
to the spiritual powers of the world, the physical, the soul, the spiritual
powers of the world. This gratitude expands to a sense of thankfulness
toward the whole world from whose womb he was born. Thus a sense
of gratitude to parents and educators, to all his surroundings, can guide
the child to an expansive feeling of thankfulness to the divine rulers
of the world.
This gratitude must always precede knowledge, which can only
be acquired. Any knowledge, no matter how logically justified, which
does not open to a feeling of gratitude toward the world, serves only to
hamper the person’s development, to cripple soul and spirit.
Spiritual science—as I have presented here over the past few days—
shows that all knowledge, no matter how exalted, even the most exact,
can lead to feelings, first and foremost feelings of gratitude. And if one
has implanted gratitude in the child, one will see that one has prepared
the soil for ethical education. For if we cultivate this gratitude, and if
this feeling of thankfulness is compatible with all knowledge, then the
child’s feeling easily turns into a flooding of universal love through his
entire being, love for all other humans and ultimately for all creatures.
The best way to cultivate love is out of a sense of gratitude.
In particular, it will become possible to let authority gradually be-
come an authority completely permeated with love. The teacher’s entire
behavior must be so directed that this authority, which at first was, so to
say, neutral toward love, which inspired self-evident following, unques-
tioning obedience, now in the child of nine or ten inspires free obedience.
The child’s soul now follows the self-evident authority in a love which
it has awakened unto itself, a love that it already understands.
If one has thus developed in the soul the right kind of gratitude
and love, it will be possible later to guide the child or young person’s
moral feeling so that he or she can recognize in moral life that upon
which human dignity is founded in the highest measure: I can now see
what raises me above the mere sense-world, above the merely physical
world, what transports me to truly spiritual existence.
I have attempted to describe the spiritual world out of supersensible
knowledge. The spiritual researcher can acquire knowledge of this spiri-
tual world. But if we can perceive morality with the necessary strength,
with the necessary purity, we shall find that in our inner moral life, even
in our ordinary life, we stand within a spiritual life. We achieve this if
we bring to the child a particular knowledge of the human being. And
actually we should never graduate any child from school—the general
school of life—without some knowledge of the human being. We should
release children from school only when to some extent they are imbued
with a sense of the saying: “Know thyself.”
Naturally the mandate to “know thyself ” can be brought to an ever
higher level with all manner of knowledge and wisdom. But every el-
ementary school should release the child with some measure of acquired
self-knowledge. Up to a certain point, human beings need to know
themselves as body, soul, and spirit. This knowledge—following as it
does from real spiritual knowledge—posits a true connection between
the human being and goodness.
Why is it that what is acknowledged today as modern science
does not come to recognize this connection? Because it does not fully
comprehend the human being. But just as a person would not be fully
human if one organ were not irrigated by blood (the organ would atro-
phy without blood circulation), so one learns when one really sees the
full human being in body, soul, and spirit, that the Good is what first
makes the human being fully human, and Evil is something that arises
from a human being who has remained incomplete.
A child who is thoroughly familiar with gratitude, with love, will
also learn to understand that human beings are complete only when
they see themselves as executants of the divine world order, of the good
in the world, the good in earthly existence. If moral education is rooted
in gratitude and egotism is overcome—not through mystical moralistic
or sentimental harangues—if healthy gratitude leads to unsentimental
love, it will be possible to convince the young world-loving person that
the not-good person who fails to be the bearer of the Good is crippled in
body, soul, and spirit just as a person is crippled who is missing a leg. In
our imagination, in etheric spiritual knowledge, we learn to recognize
the Good as the fully human person.
Whenever we take a cursory look at a drawing of the nervous system
or the circulatory system, we can see what looks like the shadow of a full
human beings. So too, for imaginative knowledge, imagining the Good
is like catching a glimpse of the exemplar of a whole human being.
But here moral education unites with religious education. For only
now does it make sense to think of God as the wellspring of the Good
and of the human being as made in God’s image. Religious and moral
education lead to the person’s feeling that we are only truly human
when we are moral human beings, that those who do not choose to
live morally are not complete human beings. Only if we learn to edu-
cate human beings so that they truly and honestly feel robbed of their
humanity when they do not act ethically, will they have received the
right religious and moral education.
Let no one say that talk is easy and that this must remain purely
an ideal, for nothing in this world can ever be perfect. Anyone speak-
ing out of spiritual science knows full well that the outer world cannot
be perfect. But one conviction can permeate us when we teach and
educate; this conviction can fill us with ever-fresh enthusiasm and will
be accompanied by the sense that the child’s soul can understand us
in a sensitive way, and we shall find our way to the child’s will. This
conviction is rooted in a true knowledge of the human being: Only the
morally good person is a true and complete human being, and religious
impulses permeate the morally good human being.
Thus all education can culminate in religious and moral educa-
tion. But we must also know that human beings carry in themselves
a time-body and that a spiritually-informed knowledge of the human
being involves learning to observe this time-body at every hour, every
week, every year of our teaching, and lovingly understanding it in all
its details.
And so also the fruitfulness of these religious and moral impulses
in education become evident in the education of the physical body,
guided from the spiritual side of the soul in, for instance, the applica-
tion of eurythmy in a school. I mention this only because it has been
shown that the children find themselves as spontaneously in the art of
eurythmy as, at an earlier age, they found their way into the speaking
of sounds. I also want to emphasize to you that anyone who wants to
see religious and moral feelings cultivated in the way I have explained
today should not neglect physical education. Quite the contrary, those
who behold the child’s life with reverence and spirit-filled activity cannot
neglect physical education, for they know that the soul and spirit express
themselves in the body, right down to the individual blood vessels, and
that to neglect them means to some extent to push the spirit back, out
of the sense-world in which it wants to reveal itself.
This is what is attempted at the Stuttgart Waldorf School. To a
certain degree already, in respect to what I have described to you as
one aspect of education, it has proven practically effective. However
we must always say one thing regarding this realm and other realms of
life—it is not difficult to see it for social life as a whole, which has hit
so many blind-alleys, and especially for education—social conditions
can only be improved in the desirable fashion if we give human beings
their proper place in social life. Merely changing external institutions
will not suffice. If one considers all this, one really sees the importance
of a true, realistic art of education, and such a realistic art of education
is what Waldorf school pedagogy, Waldorf school didactics want to
present to the world as a wholesome example.
Waldorf education has already found many followers, and those
who are enthusiastic about a realistic art of education resting on actual
scientific foundations would naturally like for it to find many more.
For it is built on an archetypal truth. We must consider the educational
institution as a part of the social interactions of human beings. For this
social cohabitation is not just of same-age people, it is a community
of old and young. After all, one part of social life is the shared life of
teachers and children. Children will be educated in the right fashion
when the teacher can already see in the child the whole person, and
in some sense prophetically, clairvoyantly, can see ahead to what will
become of every educational deed on which the fortune and destiny of
an entire life depends. For all life, including education, that plays itself
out between human beings must rest on the principle that everything
that takes place between human beings can happen rightly only if one
fully human being can devote himself or herself to another fully human
being, in true love.
This must become manifest in the entire realm of education. In
the future therefore, the art of education will be placed on a secure,
realistic foundation, when the teacher can apply his/her best human side
to the best human side of the child, when, in the relationship between
teacher and child, there develops in the most beautiful sense the free
relationship of human being to human being, but also one given by
world necessity.
Endnotes
1. Two public lectures Die Erkenntnis des geistigen Wesens des Menschen (Octo-
ber 31, 1922) and Die Erkenntnis des geistigen Wesens der Welt (November
3, 1922). Both lectures published in GA 80; originally published in Das
Goetheanum, #35–39 and 40–48, 1941.
2. For explanations on this point see Die Erziehung des Kindes vom Gesicht-
spunkte der Geisteswissenschaft (1907, in-Lucifer-Gnosis, GA 34); also the
lectures in GA 301 (Die Erneuerung der pädagogisch-didaktischen Kunst durch
Geisteswissenschaft); GA 303 (Die gesunde Entwickelung des Menschenwesens);
GA 304 (Erziehungs und Unterrichtsmethoden auf anthroposophischen Grun-
dlage); and GA 308 (Die Methodik des Lehrens und die Lebensbedingungen
des Erziehens).
3. Steiner uses the word selbstverständlich, which is translated in various fashions
here: self-evident, unquestioned, unquestionable. I also use the expression
“authoritative person.” The idea is to emphasize the quality of the author-
ity Steiner has in mind here: this authority “goes without saying” for the
child; however, it is unquestionable and unquestioned only to the extent
that, and for as long as, the teacher has “moral authority.” If the teacher’s
integrity is doubtful, that authority becomes “authoritarian” instead of being
“authoritative” and no longer deserves obedience.
4. Hineingeheimnissen: Steiner’s coinage in this sense.
5. For detailed descriptions of the teaching of writing and reading, see lectures of
August 21, 1919, GA 294 (Erziehungskunde, Methodisch-didaktisches); April
18, 1923, GA 306 (Die pädagogische Praxis vom Gesichtspunkte geisteswis-
senschaftlicher Menschenerkenntnis); August 1, 1923, GA 307 (Gegenwärtiges
Geistesleben und Erziehung); April 15, 1924, GA 308 (Die Methodik des
Lehrens und die Lebensbedingungen des Erziehens); and August 30, 1924,
GA 304a (Anthroposophische Menschenkunde und Pädagogik).
6. Elizabeth von Grunelius (1895–1989) was originally hired by the “Uhrleh-
rerkollegium” of the Waldorf school in order to set up a kindergarten. The
attempt to have the kindergarten in one room of the school had to be given
up since the fast-growing school needed the space. Only after Steiner’s death
in 1925 was a small barrack erected at Herbert Hahn’s initiative on a corner of
the sport-grounds, thus making it possible to open the first kindergarten.
7. Steiner refers here, as he does elsewhere, to that age bracket as volksschul-
pflichtiges Alter: the years of compulsory public education. This refers to a
time when public education in European countries and North America was
compulsory from ages seven to thirteen.
137
VIII
Education and Teaching
as the Basis of a True Knowledge
of the Human Being
Prague, April 4, 19241
I would like to speak of a way of educating and teaching that aims
at educating the whole person according to body, soul and spirit in a
balanced way. Such an education can only be carried out if the educator
is aware how in evolution the physical is formed out of the soul and
spirit. For one can only participate in the education of a human being
if one understands the laws of the human being.
Anthroposophy leads to such a knowing of the human being. It
does not take a one-sided view of the physical body as happens in the
scientific view of the world. It arises from spiritual vision and thus
considers at each age of life the manner in which the spirit is active in
the body and how the soul lives in the body.
From this point of view, there are clearly differentiated stages in the
growing human being. A first stage runs from birth to the change of
teeth around the seventh year. The appearance of the second teeth is
not simply a localized process in the human organism. When the first
teeth fall and the second teeth appear, something is taking place in the
entire organism. Until that point, the soul and spirit are still very much
a unity, actively involved in the formation of the body.
As a result, the entire human being is like a comprehending sense
organ. What later becomes concentrated in the particular senses is still,
at this point, active in the entire human being. The human being is
like a sense organ, completely focused on everything being done in its
surroundings. It is most decidedly an imitative being. The will works
like a reflection of all happenings in the environment.
Thus, it is only possible to educate children at that age if the educa-
tor behaves in such a way that the child can copy everything one does.
This must be understood in the widest possible sense. Imponderable
factors are at work between the educator and the child. The child gets
impressions, not just of what it perceives with his outer senses, but also
what he senses in people’s behavior: their disposition, their character,
their good or bad will. Therefore, the educator active near the child
must focus on purity of life, down to his very thoughts and feelings, so
that the child can legitimately become like the educator.
But one should also be conscious that one’s conduct affects the body,
not just the soul. Whatever the child takes in and reflexively allows to
stream into his willing goes on reverberating in his bodily organization.
For example, an irascible educator’s effect on the child will be to make
the child’s bodily organization brittle, more sensitive to morbid influ-
ences later in life. How one educates in this direction will appear later
in the health of the grown man.
If the anthroposophical art of education is concerned with the
soul-spiritual element in education, it is not due to a desire to develop
that side alone, but because we know that the physical body can only
develop rightly if the spiritual element in the body is developing in the
right way.
With the change of teeth, a complete metamorphosis is taking place.
What was previously deep in the bodily organization and active there
becomes autonomous soul being and the physical body is left more
on its own. Therefore, from the age when children first go to school,
one must deal with their soul in such a way that one meets forces that
previously were creative forces of the body. Education and meaning-
ful instruction are possible only if the teacher keeps this in sight. The
child at that age does not have an abstract understanding of things; he
wishes to experience images in the same way he had worked previously
on his own body out of images. This takes place only if educators and
teachers relate artistically to the child through the senses. They cannot
count on the child understanding intellectually what is being taught.
They should work in such a way that images which unfold in an artistic
fashion are allowed to resonate in the child’s soul. The educator should
be a self-evident authority for the child. If children take up the true,
EDUCATION AND TRUE KNOWLEDGE OF THE HUMAN BEING 139
the good and the beautiful, it is not out of intellectual understanding,
but because the beloved educator presents to the child the images of
these qualities.
Everything in education must be brought with a pictorial quality. All
instruction must be artistically formed. We cannot begin with reading
and we cannot begin with the writing of letters, whose present form is
foreign to the human being’s inner nature. One must begin with a kind
of painterly drawing. The child must paint forms that are similar in their
process to the signs in the pictographic writing of earlier humanity. Im-
ages must be the first thing that the child experiences from the world’s
objects and processes. From the image, one can then transition to the
forming of letters, in the same way as hieroglyphic writing evolved into
abstract symbolic-writing.
Only after the child has passed in this way from painterly symbols
to writing, should one move on to reading. For in reading, only one
part of the human being is active: understanding, which is linked to the
head organization. In the painterly drawing and writing, more of the
human organization is involved. Thus one educates the whole person,
not just the head-system.
All education should be carried with this approach until the second
radical juncture, the beginning of puberty. There again, the entire hu-
man being goes through metamorphosis, not just a localized part of the
human organism. While previously, everything needs to be offered in
pictorial form, in which one depends on the child’s love for the image,
at this point the child’s relationship to the environment develops with
more abstract conceptualization. Only from this point onward can we
count upon free rational understanding in the growing human being.
This educational approach takes into account the entirety of a hu-
man life, not just childhood. It is something else altogether to engage
the child in images so that later he can understand what lies behind
them than to teach a so-called “object-lesson,” which is no observation
at all, because it lacks the artistic element and develops prematurely the
head system alone. The groundwork laid in childhood has its effects
in later life. A child who has been exposed to images at the appropri-
ate age grows into a person who in old age remains fresh and actively
involved in life. A child who has been brought too early to abstract
understanding, which many people mistakenly think is appropriate in
childhood, becomes prematurely old, susceptible to illness and morbid
life-circumstances.
Endnote
1. Original source Rudolf Steiner Notebook Archiv-Nr. 336, 200–201.The
author’s review published here was apparently written for a press represen-
tative to facilitate his reviewing of the lecture. Steiner added the following
note: “This is only a sketch of what I will have to say; it is not an abstract/
summary, since spiritual scientists work from the spirit, not from memory
and it would be a mistake to write one’s lecture ahead of time. I trust you
will excuse me.”

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