
ATELIER FOR THE SOCIAL QUEST
Shaping the Social Threefold
THE SOCIAL QUEST
In the human social organism today great oppositional forces are at work. We are experiencing an intensification of age-old conflicts, in particular between individuality and the demands of the "common good". What is completely new is the way the modern digital reality has globalised society and has allowed for the emergence of unprecedented potentials for both tyrannous control and individual freedom.
Virtually nowhere today in our tertiary educational institutions is heard the call made by Rudolf Steiner, over a century ago, for a living social thinking. He warned us that social transformation is not a matter of bringing forward new versions of theories coming from either the left or the right. To understand and work creatively with the living social organism we must develop a living social thinking. Materialistic thinking, in the form of "critical theory" of either a socialist or liberal orientation, can no longer serve us.
". . . a spiritual contemplation of nature will provide means for the kind of training in thought which, among other things, makes it possible to comprehend the social organism".
Rudolf Steiner, The Renewal of the Social Organism
The journey of Atelier for the Social Quest begins with the study of natural phenomena – plants, animals, colours and the human form. The natural scientific insights of the poet J. W. Goethe in the 19th century were developed further by Rudolf Steiner in the twentieth century. Their work forms the basis of this study. In this holistic science the scientific and artistic are inseparable.
The artistic observer learns how to read the language of nature and the social organism. This is the possibility of an exact imaginative thinking. Goethe, in his natural scientific studies, interpreted this language in terms of these primary elements - the archetypal phenomenon, polarity, metamorphosis, intensification. Each of these principles is vital in order to be able to understand and work with Steiner's picture of a threefold social order.
