The Threefold Commonwealth

by Rudolf Steiner

Now this occurred just at a time, when the leading classes of mankind were working towards a scientific mode of thought, which in itself no longer possessed the spiritual energy to content man’s consciousness in every aspect and guide it along all the directions of its wants. The old views of the universe gave man his place as a soul in the spiritual complex of existence. Modern science views him as a natural object amidst a purely natural order of things. This science is not felt as a stream flowing from a spiritual world into the soul of man, and on which man as a soul is buoyed and upborne. Whatever one’s opinion may be as to the relation of the religious impulses, and kindred things, to the scientific mode of thought of recent times, yet one must admit, if one considers historic evolution impartially, that the scientific conception has developed out of the religious one. But the old conceptions of the universe, that rested deep down on religious foundations, lacked power to impart their soul-bearing force to the newer form of scientific conception. They withdrew beyond its range, and lived on, contenting their consciousness with things in which the souls of the workers could find no resource. For the leading classes, this inner world of consciousness might still have a certain value. In some form or other it was bound up with their own position in life. They sought for no new substance for their consciousness, because they were able to keep a hold on the old one, that had been handed down to them through actual life. But the modern worker was torn out of all his old setting in life. He was the man whose life had been put on a totally new basis. For him, when the old bases of life were withdrawn, there disappeared at the same time all possibility of drawing from the old spiritual springs. These lay far off in regions to which he was now become a stranger. Contemporaneous with modern technical science and modern capitalism,—in such a sense as one can speak of great worldstreams of history as contemporaneous,—there grew up the modern scientific conception of the world. To this the trust, the faith, of the modern worker turned. It was here he sought the new substance that he needed to content his inner consciousness. But the working-class and the leading classes were differently situated with regard to their scientific outlook. The leading classes felt no necessity for making the scientific mode of conception into a gospel of life, for the support of their souls. No matter how thoroughly they might have permeated themselves with the scientific conception of a natural order of things, in which a direct chain of causality leads up from the lowest animals to man, this mode of conception remained nevertheless a merely theoretic persuasion. It never stirred their feelings, and impelled them to take life through and through in a way befitting such a persuasion. Take naturalists such as Vogt and the popular writer, Buechner; they were unquestionably permeated with the scientific mode of conception; but, alongside this, there was something else at work in their souls which kept their lives interwoven with a whole complex of circumstances, such as can those whose only intelligible justification can be the belief in a spiritual order of the world. Putting aside all prejudice, let us just imagine, how differently the scientific outlook affects a man whose personal existence is anchored in such a complex, from the modern artisan, who, in the few evening hours that he has free from work, hears the labour leader get up and address him in this fashion: “Science in our time has cured men of believing that they have their origin in a spiritual world. They have learnt better, and know now, that in the far ages, long ago, they climbed about on trees like any vulgar monkey. Science has taught them too, that they were all alike in their origin, and that it was a purely natural one.” It was a science that turned on such thoughts as these, which met the worker when he was looking for a substance to fill his soul and give him a sense of his own place as man in the life of the universe. He took the scientific outlook on the world in thorough earnest, and drew from it his own practical conclusions for life. The technical, capitalistic age laid hold of him differently from a member of the leading classes. The latter had his place in an order of life, which still bore the shape once given it by soul-sustaining forces; it was all to his interest to fit the acquisitions of the new age into this setting. But the worker, in his soul, was torn loose from this order of life. It was not capable of giving him one emotion that could illumine and fill his own life with anything of human worth. There was one thing only, which could give the worker any sense of what a “man” is, one thing only that seemed to have emerged from the old order of life endowed with the power that awakens faith, and that was—scientific thought. It may arouse a smile in some of those who read this, to be told of the “scientific” character of the worker’s conceptions. Let them smile, who can only think of the scientific habit of mind as something that is acquired by many years of application on the benches of “educational institutes,” and then contrast this sort of “science” with what fills the mind of the worker who has “never learnt anything.” What is for him a smiling matter, are facts of modern life on which the fate of the future turns. And these facts shew, that many a very learned man lives unscientifically, whereas the unlearned worker brings his whole view of life into line with that scientific learning, of which very likely nothing has fallen to his share. The educated man has made a place for science,—it has a pigeon-hole of its own in the recesses of his soul. But he himself has his place in a network of circumstances in actual life, and it is these which give the direction to his feelings. His feeling is not directed by his science. The worker, through the very conditions of his life, is led to bring his conception of existence into unison with the general tone of this science. He may be very far from what the other classes call “scientific,” yet his life’s course is charted by the scientific lines of conception. For the other classes, some religious or aesthetic, some general spiritual principle is the determining basis;—for him, Science is turned into the creed of life,—even though often it may be science filtered away to its last little shallows and driblets of thought. Many a member of the “foremost” classes feels himself to be “enlightened” in religion, a “free-thinker.” No doubt his scientific convictions influence his conceptions; but in his feelings still throb the forgotten remnants of a traditional creed of life. What the scientific type of thought has not brought down from the old order, is the consciousness of being, as a spiritual type, rooted in a spiritual world. This was a peculiarity of the modern scientific outlook, which presented no difficulty to a member of the leading classes. Life to him was filled by old traditions. For the worker it was otherwise; his new situation in life drove the old traditions from his soul. He took over from the ruling classes as heritage the scientific mode of thought, and made this the basis of his consciousness of the life and being of man. But this “spiritual possession,” with which he filled his soul, knew nothing of its derivation from an actual life of the spirit. The only spiritual life, that the workers could take over from the ruling classes, was of a sort that denied its spiritual origin.

I well know, how these thoughts will affect people outside as well as inside the working-class, who, believing themselves to have a thorough practical acquaintance with life, regard the view here expressed as quite remote from realities. The language of actual facts, as spoken by the whole state of the world to-day, will more and more prove this belief of theirs to be a delusion. For anyone able to look at these facts without prejudice, it will be plain, that a view of life, which never gets beyond their external aspect, becomes ultimately inaccessible to any conceptions save such as have lost all touch with facts. Ruling thought has clung on so long in this “practical” way to facts,—that the thoughts themselves have ended by bearing no resemblance whatever to the facts. The present world-catastrophe might have taught many people a lesson in this respect. What did they think it possible might happen? And what really did happen? Is it to be the same with their thoughts about social problems?

I know too, how someone who professes working-class views will feel about what has been said, and can hear him saying: “Just like the rest of them! trying to shunt the real gist of the social question off on to lines that promise to be smooth for the bourgeois sort.” With his creed, he does not see how fate has brought him into this working-class life, and how he is trying to find his way in it with a type of thought inherited from the ruling-classes. He lives as a working-man but he thinks as a bourgeois. The new age is making it necessary to learn not only a new way of life, but a new way of thought also. The scientific mode of conception can only become substantial and life-supporting, when it evolves, in its own fashion, a power to content the whole of human life in all its aspects, such as the old conceptions of life once evolved in their way.

This points the path for the discovery in its true form of one factor in the modern labour movement. And having travelled it to the end, the worker’s soul utters this cry of conviction: “I am striving after spiritual life. Yet this spiritual life is ideology, is merely man’s own reflection of what is going on in the world outside, it does not come to us from a spiritual world of its own.” In the transition to the new age, the old spiritual life had turned to something which, for the working-class sense of life, is ideology. If one wants to understand the mood of soul amongst the workers, as it finds vent in the social demands of the present day, one must be able to grasp the full possible effects of the theory that spiritual life is ideology. It may be retorted: “What does the average working-man know of any such theory? it is only a will-o’-the-wisp in the brains of their more or less educated leaders.” But anyone who says so is talking wide of life, and his doings in actual life will be wide of it too. He simply does not know, what has been going on in the life of the working-class during the last half century. He does not know the threads that are woven from the theory, that spiritual life is ideology, to the demands and actions of the out-and-out socialist, whom he thinks so “ignorant”;—yes, and to the deeds too of those who “hatch revolution” out of the blind promptings of the life within them.

Herein lies the tragedy overshadowing all our interpretations of the social demands of the day, that in so many circles there is no sense of what is forcing its way up to the surface out of the souls of the great masses of mankind,—that people cannot turn their eyes to what is actually taking place in men’s inner life. The non-worker listens with dismay to the worker setting forth his demands; and this is what he hears:—“Nothing short of communalising the means of production will make it possible for me to have a life worthy of a human being.” But the non-worker is unable to form the faintest conception, of how his own class, in the transition from the old age to the new, not only summoned the worker to labour at means of production that were not his, but failed even to give him anything to satisfy and sustain his soul in his labour. People, who see and act wide of the mark in this way, may say:—“But, after all, the working-man only wants to better his position in life and put himself on a level with the upper classes; where do the needs of his soul come in?” The working-man himself may even declare:—“I am not asking the other classes for anything for my soul; all I want, is to prevent them exploiting me any longer. I mean to put an end to existing class distinctions.” Talk of this kind does not touch the essence of the social question. It reveals nothing of its true form. For, had the working population inherited from the leading classes a genuine spiritual substance, then they would have had a different consciousness within their souls, one which would have voiced their social demands in quite a different fashion from the modern workers, who can see in the spiritual life, as they have received it, merely an ideology. The workers, as a class, are convinced of the ideologic character of spiritual life; but the conviction renders them more and more unhappy. They are not definitely conscious of this unhappiness in their souls, but they suffer acutely from it, and it far outweighs, in its significance for the social question to-day, all demands for an improvement in external conditions,—justifiable as these demands are too in their own way.

The ruling classes do not recognise, that they are themselves the authors of that attitude of mind, which now confronts them militant in the labour-world. And yet, they are the authors of it, inasmuch as, out of their own spiritual world, they failed to bequeath to the workers anything but what must seem to the workers “ideology.”

What gives to the present social movement its essential stamp, is not the demand for a change of conditions in the life of one class of men,—although that is the natural sign of it. Rather, it is the manner in which this demand is translated by this class from a thought-impulse into actual reality. Consider the facts impartially from this point of view. One will find persons who aim at keeping in touch with labour tendencies in thought, smile at any talk of a spiritual movement proposing to contribute anything towards the solution of the social question. They dismiss it with a smile, as ideology, empty theory. From thought, from the mere life of the spirit, there is nothing, they feel certain, to be contributed to the burning social problems of the hour. And yet, when one looks at the matter more closely, it is forced upon one, that the very nerve, the very root-impulse of the modern movement,—especially as a working-class movement,—does not lie in the things about which the modern worker talks, but in thoughts. The modern working-class movement has sprung, as perhaps no other similar movement in the world before it, out of thoughts. When studied more closely, it shews this in a most marked degree. I am not throwing this out as an aperçu, the result of long pondering over the social movement. If I may venture to introduce a personal remark I was for years lecturer at a working-man’s institute, giving instruction to working men in a wide variety of subjects; and I think that it taught me what is living and stirring in the soul of the modern proletarian worker. And from this starting point, I had occasion to go on, and follow up the tendencies at work in the various trades unions and different callings. I think I may say, that I am not approaching the subject merely from theoretical considerations, but am putting into words the results arrived at through actual living experience.

Anyone,—only, unfortunately, so few of the leading intellectuals are in this position,—but anyone, who has learnt to know the modern labour movement where it was carried on by the workers themselves, knows how remarkable a feature it is in it, and how fraught with significance, that a certain trend of thought has laid intense hold on the souls of large numbers of men. What makes it at the present moment hard to adopt any line as regards the social conundrums that present themselves, is that there is so little possibility of an understanding between the different classes. It is so hard for the middle-class to-day to put themselves into the soul of the worker,—so hard for them to understand how the worker’s still fresh, unexhausted intelligence opened to receive a work such as that of Karl Marx,—which, in its whole mode of conception, no matter how one regards its substance, measures the requirements of human thought by such a lofty standard. One man may agree with Karl Marx’s intellectual system,—another may refute it; and the arguments on either side may appear equally good. In some points it was revised, after the death of Marx and his friend Engels, by those who came later and saw social life under a different aspect from these leaders. I am not proposing to discuss the substance of the Marxian system. It is not this that seems to me the significant thing in the modern working-class movement. The thing that to me seems significant above all others is, that it should be a fact, that the most powerful impulse at work in the labour world is a thought-system. One may go so far as to put it thus:—No practical movement, no movement that was altogether a movement of practical life, making the most matter-of-fact demands of every-day humanity, has ever before rested so almost entirely on a basis of thought alone, as the present working-class movement does. Indeed it is in a way the first movement of its kind to take up its stand entirely on a scientific basis. One must however see this fact in its proper light. If one considers everything that the modern worker has consciously to say about his own views and purposes and sentiments, it does not seem to one, from a deeper observation of life, to be by any means the thing of main importance. What impresses itself as of real importance is, that what in the other classes is an appendage of one single branch of the soul’s life,—the thought-basis, from which life takes its tone,—has been made by proletarian feeling into the thing on which the whole man turns. What has thus become an inward reality in the worker is, however, a reality that he cannot acknowledge. He is deterred from acknowledging it, because thought-life has been handed down to him as ideology. He builds up his life in reality upon thoughts; yet feels thoughts to be unreal ideology. This is a fact that one must clearly recognise in the human evolution of recent years, together with all that it involves,—otherwise it is impossible to understand the worker’s views of life and the way those, who hold these views, set about realising them in practice.

From the picture drawn of the worker’s spiritual life in the preceding pages, it will be clear that the main features of this spiritual life must occupy the first place in any description of the working-class social movement in its true form. For it is essential to the worker’s way of feeling the causes of his unsatisfactory social condition and endeavoring to remove them, that both the feeling and the endeavour take the direction given them by his spiritual life. And yet, at present, he can only reject with contempt or anger the notion, that in the spiritual foundations of the social movement there is something that presents a remarkable driving force. How should he recognise in spiritual life a force able to bear him along, when he is bound to feel it as ideology? One cannot look to a spiritual life, that one feels as ideology, to open up the way out of a social situation, which one has resolved to endure no longer. The scientific cast of his thought has turned not only science, but religion, art, morality, and right also for the modern worker into so many constituent parts of human ideology. Behind these branches of the spiritual life he sees nothing of the workings of an actual reality, which finds its way into his own existence, and can contribute something to material life. To him, these things are only the reflected shine, or mirrored image of the material life. Whatever reflex influence they may have on the shaping of this material life,—whether roundabout, through the conceptions of men’s brains, or through being taken up into the impulses of the will, yet, originally, they arise out of the material life itself as ideologic emanations from it. These of themselves can certainly yield nothing that will conduce to the removal of social difficulties. Only out of the sphere of material processes themselves can anything arise that will lead to the desired end.

Modern spiritual life has been passed on from the leading classes of mankind to the working population in a form which prevents the latter from being aware of the force that dwells in it. This fact above all must be understood, when considering what are the forces that can help towards the solution of the social question. Should it continue to exert its present influence, then mankind’s spiritual life must see itself doomed to impotence before the social demands of our day and the time to come. Its impotence is in fact an article of faith with a large part of the working-class, and openly pressed in Marxism and similar creeds. “Modern economic life”—they say—“has evolved out of its earlier forms the present capitalistic one. This evolutionary process has brought the workers into an unendurable situation as regards capital. But evolution will not stop here, it will go on, and kill capitalism through the forces at work in capitalism itself and from the death of capitalism will spring the emancipation of the workers.” Later socialist thinkers have divested this creed of the fatalistic character it had assumed amongst a certain school of Marxists. But even so its essential feature remains, and shews itself in this way:—that it would not occur to anyone, who wishes to be a true socialist to-day, to say: “If we discover anywhere a life of the soul, having its rise in the forces of the age, rooted in a spiritual reality, and able to sustain the whole man,—then such a soul life as this could radiate the power needed as a motor-force for the social movement.” The man of to-day, who is obliged to lead the life of a worker, can cherish no such expectation from the spiritual life of the day; and this it is which gives the key-note to his soul. He needs a spiritual life from which power can come,—power to give his soul the sense of his human worth. For when the capitalist economic order of recent times caught him up into its machinery, the man himself, with all the deepest needs of his soul, was driven for recourse to some such spiritual life. But the kind of spiritual life which the leading classes handed on to him as ideology left his soul void. Running through all the demands of the modern working-class, is this longing for some link with the spiritual life, other than the present form of society can give; and this is what gives the directing impetus in the social movement to-day. This fact however is one that is rightly understood neither outside nor inside the working-class. Those outside the working-class do not suffer from the ideologic cast of modern spiritual life, which is of their own making. Those who are inside the working-class do suffer; but the very ideologic character of their inherited spiritual life has robbed them of all belief in the power of spiritual possessions, as such, to sustain and support them. On a right insight into this fact depends the discovery of a path out of the maze of confusion into which social affairs have fallen. The path has been blocked by the social system that has arisen with the new form of industrial economy under the influence of the leading classes. The strength to open it must be achieved.