Social Archetype (eBook)

Chapter 1

RUDOLF STEINER’S SOCIAL IMPULSE

Society On The Edge

It can scarcely be doubted that the coronavirus has unleashed a social crisis of a magnitude comparable to the world wars of the previous century. Connected more or less closely with this crisis are other immense challenges facing humanity today. New nanotechnology and genetic engineering techniques are irreversibly transforming nature and human life. Digital identity and surveillance technologies are creating intractable dilemmas in relation to human freedoms and rights; this goes together with the transhumanist agenda of marrying artificial intelligence with the human brain in the name of progress. Immense disparities of wealth are leading to rapidly growing social instability. Political structures of leadership the world over are fraught; autocratic regimes with reduced press and Internet freedom are prevalent and growing. In comparison to the power of today’s political-economic alliance the hegemonies of any previous time in human history seem extremely limited.

The situation we experience today is really only a heightening of the conditions and tendencies which Rudolf Steiner saw in his contemporary world. For Steiner, the conclusion of the First World War with the Treaty of Versailles, far from resolving the social situation of Europe, cast its future into a perilous uncertainly. Into the difficult social situation he saw around him Steiner presented a vision of social renewal which he wanted to have more than just theoretical value; he wished the ideas to have an awakening power, an actual force of transformation. In this he was inspired by the German philosopher Johann Fichte whose biography he knew intimately through his doctoral studies. This is how Steiner described Fichte’s work as a university teacher:

[Fichte’s] purpose was to awaken spiritual activity and spiritual being. From the souls of his hearers, as they hung upon his words, he sought to call forth a self-renewing spiritual activity. He did not merely communicate ideas.9

As Steiner saw it, only through an enlightened art of teaching and by means of a new art of education could a power of dynamic, self-renewing thought germinate and take root in modern humanity. During the years 1917 to 1924 when his focus was very much on ‘the social question’, he set about creating the kind of educational institutions in which such enlivened thinking could be cultivated in young people. He perceived conventional education to be deeply and fixedly intellectual in nature, shaped by a very old ideal of learning—the doctoral ideal—which had its origin in the medieval universities and which, according to Steiner, is unable to serve contemporary and future social needs.10

The schooling movement initiated by Steiner is far better known than his thoughts on world economy, work and capital, human rights and democracy, but it is insufficiently appreciated that the schools are immediate fruits of his social vision. In historical fact, this movement sprang—like an offshoot of a river—from his broad and original vision of social renewal. Everything carried out in these schools—not just in terms of pedagogical method but in their entire artistic mood and gesture—is a picture of how renewal could take place in broader social spheres. The schools are the embodiment of this social impulse. The aim of this method of schooling is to educate the child toward freedom—and freedom is the ideal behind what he called the cultural-spiritual sphere of the threefold social organism. Steiner sought an education through which every child could go forth from school in freedom so that their individual capacities could be made fruitful in social life.

One of the charges Steiner faced even in his own time in relation to his social thinking was its supposed utopianism. This was levelled at his radical views on work and human rights, on money and true price, on educational and religious renewal—indeed, his social picture was thought to be utopian as a whole and in its each and every aspect. A century later we should be very cautious about making such a claim. Let us consider what, in the early 1920s, was Steiner’s ‘merely utopian’ view on the education of the child: ‘The spiritual-psychic individuality of the child is something most sacred . . . the teacher must remove whatever might hinder the development of [the individuality of the child], and shield it with the utmost reverence.’11 This proclamation of an education for human freedom was made at a time when school education worldwide was carried out in the traditional doctoral manner, through rote learning of a certain intellectual content primarily in order to prepare young people for a role in society (a methodology which usually included corporal punishment, something still prevalent in schools even in the 1970s). The world is evidently beginning to catch up with the respectful, reverential character of Steiner’s approach because education today is by and large more child-centred and more focused on the needs of the human individual. The truth is that Steiner’s pedagogy is not utopian at all but is groundbreaking, based as it is on a perception of the soul-spiritual nature and individual requirements of the developing human being. And it is equally true that his broader picture of social renewal is not ‘merely utopian’; everything pertaining to it flows from a perception of the needs of the modern age and all indications for renewal are made in such a way that will allow new ways of thinking and conducting social life to become realities in our time and into the future.

In certain circles of social life Steiner’s educational ideas made rapid progress and the schooling movement quickly spread to many countries. Today it is one of the fastest growing educational movements in the world. The same thing cannot be said of the broader panoramas of social renewal which Steiner entered into, such as world economy, social governance, work relations and taxation—but then, it is obvious why it is not so easy to bring about change on this level. There is always an immediate need for children to be educated and parents and teachers to take up the task of creating schools on a grassroots level. With economics, for example, with questions Steiner raised concerning capital, true price and the meaning of work, we are really dealing with the broadest possible social relations and quickly come up against deeply entrenched and powerfully resistant economic and political structures. Groundbreaking though such social ideas may be, relevant as they are to our contemporary social malaise, no one person or group in isolation will ever be able to effect significant social transformation through them. This question must then arise: How do such far-reaching ideas achieve efficacy in the world today, disinclined as we are to take up violent revolutionary causes? People nevertheless are seeking social renewal at a time when faith in the value of the conventional political process has become utterly eroded.

Steiner’s far-reaching ideas will never become efficacious unless they are properly—that is, artistically—understood. However, such understanding does not come easily in the intellectual climate of our schools and universities, and the very notion of a threefold social organism can cause resistance because it is taken to be merely an alternative ‘social system’. Steiner himself was aware that his only written work on the subject of the threefold social order had been ‘fundamentally misunderstood on all sides’.12 We need not assume that the difficulty of Steiner’s social thinking lies in its intellectual obscurity; for abstruseness we already have the example of the social philosophies of Kant and Hegel. The real difficulty lies in another direction altogether, in the fact that he sought to understand human society as a soul-spiritual being, as something alive in a certain sense. As with Goethe’s way of science from which he drew, he did not wish to impose mechanistic procedures on the living body of society. The living, dynamic body of human society requires a living, creative thinking in order to be understood—this is one of his key insights.

The way forward for the healthy development of society springs from a living, imaginative form of knowledge. This is a thinking which is concrete, practical, non-abstract and non-theoretical; it is a truly living social thinking because these ideas are not merely mental constructs but are ‘saturated with the forces of reality’ and ‘possess the strength to take hold of the will and to live on in action’, as Steiner expresses it.13 This is a great challenge to the cultural and spiritual life of our time: the development of our thinking such that ideas themselves become suffused with will forces. We can gain a sense of what he means if we consider the ideals of justice and freedom which still to a degree carry within them a sense of imperative and an impulse to action. We can imagine all social scientific ideas having this living, dynamic quality because society itself is something living and dynamic and can only be properly understood through a thinking imbued with feeling and will.

We may come to value such a living form of social thinking more highly when we realize the cultural depths from which it has emerged. If we consider what are sometimes disparagingly called the ‘Romantic thinkers’—Kant, Fichte, Schiller, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Goethe, to name only some of the more prominent—we find in all...