ATELIER FOR THE SOCIAL QUEST

THE SOCIAL QUEST - EXPANDED TEXT 

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The social quest is at the core of human existence. The Greek philosopher Plato, long ago in his Republic, showed how the individual inner quest for harmony of the soul is analogous to the outer social quest, to the shaping of a social order which is beautiful and good, which is just. The relationship between individual and society has changed greatly over the millenia; today we need to understand this relationship anew, no matter how how dark the storm clouds of crisis which appear to be gathering in our postmodern, digital, globalised world.

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A century ago Rudolf Steiner made a mighty contribution to social thinking with his picture of a threefold social order. He shaped this picture out of the central striving of the French Revolution - the cry for liberty, equality, fraternity. Society is a living being, an organism of a particular kind, with an archetypal threefold form and integrity. Each member of this whole, each unique human individual, is a living being. The ideal of liberty relates to the creative needs of each unique individual - the ideal of fraternity relates to how individuals seek to work together to serve each other. Between these the ideal of equality mediates between and balances lawfully the collective and the individual. This is a picture of society as a living threefold unity.

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What is alive must be understood through a commensurate living form of thinking; “like knows like” is the ancient law of cognition known to 5th century B.C. sage Empedocles and Aristotle. It was Empedocles who said “we see Earth through Earth, Water through Water, Air through Air and Fire through Fire”. For Steiner and for us today, the burning question is: how can we develop a living thinking in ourselves and those we teach and interact with? Steiner called it a living picture imagination; such a thinking is still hardly on the horizon of modern thought. Anything merely theoretical, no matter how sophisticated, no matter how entrenched in academic life – socialist theory, capitalist theory or any blend or derivation of the two, any intellectual or political striving toward the left or right – will never be adequate. This is the question not just for schools and universities but for everyone concerned with the future of humanity and the Earth as we stand at the threshold of the human future.

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What does it mean to say that thinking can be alive? This is a thinking which does not merely philosophise about life but which itself has the quality of life. Life is something more than a logical construction, more than an objective conceptualisation. Only a thinking which cognitively participates in living forms and processes can be called genuinely alive; this thinking does not develop through logical propositions but, instead, unfolds through inner pictures which arise through exact forms of feeling. Artistic comprehension, in different ways for the plastic, musical and poetic arts, is participatory in this sense because the artistic imagination is able to enter into forms and experience growth and differentiation. This, for musical experience, is entirely normal. But the artistic imagination is usually viewed as the antithesis of science because it is considered to be inexact and thus not to pertain to what is conventionally called cognition.

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Steiner came to his views on living picture imagination through a long immersion in the methods of poet, playwright and “nature observer” J. W. von Goethe. Goethe, a prominent artist in the Romantic period of European culture, focussed mainly on plant studies, but also geology, meteorology, animal and human physiology.* It is called “Goethean science” but it just as much an art, the art of exact imaginative cognition. It was Steiner who transformed Goethe’s methods into the study of human society. That’s why Steiner referred to his social ideas as a "new goetheanism".** He said that his book Towards Social Renewal (1917) “is goetheanistic, if properly understood”.***

See also Cognitive Feeling.

 

* See for example Seamon and Zajonc (eds.), Goethe's Way of Science: A Phenomenology of Nature, State University of New York Press, 1998.

**  R. Steiner, Freedom of Thought and Societal Forces, SteinerBooks, 2008, pp.98-105. 

***​ R. Steiner, Lecture, November 22nd, 1920. GA197.

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