We should not be asking: what does a person need to know or be able to do in order to fit into the existing social order? Instead we should ask: what lives in each human being and how can this be developed? Only then will it be possible to direct the new qualities of each emerging generation into society. Society will then become what young people, as whole human beings, make out of existing social conditions. The new generation should not simply be made to become what present society wants it to be! Rudolf Steiner

Rudolph Steiner died in 1925. Towards the end of his life he gave a lecture referring to a modern phenomenon: for no obvious external reason, many people begin to feel rebellious about the times they are living in, become convinced that quite fundamental changes are needed. It is to people who are in this situation, perhaps quite privately, that Steiner can be really interesting.

In the United States you have to be rather careful about using the word 'radical.' It is immediately identified with a pink, not to say red, kind of politics. Yet it really means to be concerned with the roots. The proper use of the word 'radical' is to indicate a conviction that the changes needed will mean uprooting some familiar things, will call for fundamental changes. In this sense, Steiner was a radical.

He was speaking, in the lecture referred to, to a fairly limited number of people-perhaps 200 to 300-in Stuttgart . He was describing this inner 'radicalism,' and remarked that it would very soon be experienced by millions of people. He then described a kind of private drama which unfolds in many individuals when this radical frame of mind awakens.

The first act of the drama is, quite simply, that they begin to feel at odds with their surrounding. They have been brought up in a certain way of life, but now begin to say to themselves: 'I am not just a product of my family, my education, my times. Deep down, in my real self, I am looking for something quite different.' If we had more time, or were doing a whole workshop, I would invite you to look back in your own lives and ask: 'Have you ever been at odds with the world you're in? Are you at odds with it now? If so, how and why?'

This is the first act of an inner drama, which Steiner saw as belonging in quite a new way to the 20th century.

Then he described the second act: 'The first act launches many people into a search. They don't want to believe that they are the only people who are thinking "radically," they start looking for others who think as they do. If and when they succeed, it is an enormously supportive experience. Out of this, all kinds of societies or groups grow up. There are now in this country, throughout Europe , and in many other parts of the world, perhaps tens of thousands of groups of people who are looking for something different. The search leads to a forming of groups or communities whose existence could not be predicted from studying the orthodox environment. They emerge from something which stirs quite deeply within human beings.'

The third act of this drama, as Steiner described it, opens when individuals and groups begin to feel that it is not enough to have a club or a society. Something must be done in the world at large. It is then, when we come to the threshold of action in the world, that life can become very dramatic indeed.

Now these three acts, the private rebellion, the forming of an alternative group, and then the point of really taking action, are probably recognisable to people here. We are meeting in a place called 'Cranks,' and what I have been describing is really the way of the 'crank.' I thought it might be useful to look at Rudolf Steiner's own life in terms of these three acts, because you can find them both in his personal life, and also in the way he worked with others later on.

So firstly, let us consider Rudolf Steiner's own private rebellion, in so far as we can discern it. He didn't say an enormous amount about himself, but at the end of his life he did write a partial autobiography.

The first act of his private drama really culminated when, at the age of 35, he wrote his Philosophy of Freedom . Yet it is not an abstract philosophy. He described it as an account of his own path in search of freedom. At the college where I teach, we work through this book each year, and it is still extremely interesting to follow it-to really follow it through as a search, an inner search, and ask students whether they can recognise similar steps in their own lives. The origins of this book go right back to Rudolf Steiner's childhood. It has its conscious origin when Steiner was six or seven. He was the son of a stationmaster in a very small country village in Austria , surrounded by a traditional peasant culture. His father, though, was a free thinker, and connected with what was then modern technology: into the village a steam train came twice a day, and the whole village would turn out to meet the train. The train was also a sort of social centre in touch with the future. That is where Steiner spent his early childhood.

At the age of about six, he had a powerful experience. Before this, but without fully realising it, he had been open to spiritual experiences in a quite natural way. He described some of these once in a little note he wrote as an adult. While walking in the woods he would experience the presence of elemental beings in the life of nature, beings active in the life of plants and trees, in streams and in the earth. Nowadays, this mode of experience is labelled animism, and is usually treated-quite wrongly in my belief-as fantasy projection.

If you have your eyes open, you may become aware that more children than one thinks have some glimpses of this mode of experience. They may tell us stories which we laugh off as fantasy. But if your ears and eyes are open, maybe you will take some things, perhaps very small things, which children tell you, more seriously. I recommend it. At the age of about six Steiner became aware that he had these experiences in nature, but that when he talked about them, the adults, even the adults in his peasant village, would say 'shush,' or 'nonsense.' And so he was faced with a situation of inner loneliness. His experiences of the elemental beings in nature were deeply felt, but he couldn't talk about them. You can see straight away how this related to every human being's first rebellion. You bear something within, which is not fully visible or acknowledged by your society. Your private life is at odds with the ordinary expectations of the world. At one level or another, an enormous number of people know profoundly different experiences of nature, especially a child, which are not included in the ordinary way we talk about the surrounding world, especially in our scientific age.

This experience accompanied Steiner all through his childhood and young manhood, and was the focus of his first private struggle. He said to himself: This one kind of experience must have some sort of connection with the world which I also experience in the ordinary way. There can't be two worlds, there must be one. But what is the connection of the one with the other? Some people who have these glimpses of other aspects of reality may begin to wonder whether they are sane. But in Steiner's case, there was a certainty and a clarity about his experiences which left him in no doubt as to their reality. His question was simply their connection with 'ordinary' reality. This led him along a long path which led eventually to the Philosophy of Freedom . In this book, he shows how this split in experience can be resolved, not only 'philosophically,' but in experience.

This division of our experience crops up through history in many significant ways, for example in the image of Plato's cave. He depicts a human being who comes out of sunlight into a cave, and sits on a chair facing the walls of the cave. The only knowledge of the world he then has is derived from the shadows on the walls of the cave. Plato used this picture to describe a journey of human consciousness, out of a world of immediate apprehension of a spiritual reality into the experience of ordinary thoughts. For the origins of these thoughts, we would have to retreat from the cave into the light which we have left behind, the light of the world before we were born. There are echoes of this in Wordsworth's poem Intimations of Immortality: Heaven lies about us in our infancy. We are not yet inside the cave. Then shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing boy . Wordsworth remembered withdrawing into a cave as he grew up, so that his experiences of the world became shadowy compared with what they had been as a child.

We can trace this withdrawal from spiritual experience of nature into a cave of intellect through history in many ways. Consciousness is finally divorced from participation in the world by Descartes, who divides human experience into the world 'out there,' and the world 'in here,' the world of the things of the mind ' res cogitans,' and the 'res extensa', the things which are extended in space. How are they connected?

Francis Bacon, Descartes' contemporary, brings the counterpart of this experience. He contemplates a nature drained of beings. He stills calls her 'she,' but speaks with enthusiasm of 'torturing her secrets from her.' Emotionally, he is entirely alienated from nature, and so he could use this phrase about science as a 'torturing.' Around the time of Bacon and Descartes, this split becomes consciously expressed. There emerges the 'detached observer' who is a stranger to the external world. What is its connection with the private life inside? This is the historical counterpart of the question that Rudolf Steiner was asking himself all through his youth. Then as an adolescent, he came across the philosophy of Emmanuel Kant. He describes how his history teacher would simply read to the class out of a text book. He decided he could read it just as well by himself at home. So he took his own history book out of its covers and bound in a copy of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason . Then he sat in the history lessons reading it while the history teacher droned on. Why should a 15-year-old concern himself with Kant? This becomes clear when you read the Philosophy of Freedom and other early works of Steiner's. Kant argued that human consciousness can never know reality in itself; we can only know the pictures we make in our minds. A strictly scientific description would say, similarly, that all we really know is our own brain processes, or the images which our brain processes somehow generate. This is a formal statement of an experience we describe in a more heartfelt way when we use the world 'alienation.'

Are we in the end strangers to one another? Are our insides quite separate from out outsides? Can we ever get out of our prisons and participate immediately in nature, the world, other people, the deeper realities of the universe? This was Steiner's problem, and it came into focus through encountering Kant. Plato's answer might have been that you can overcome separation only by going back before birth. There you will escape from this division in your experience created by entering your body, your cave. But Steiner wanted to go forwards, not backwards.

Steiner suggests that the inner rebellion I have described originates in some dim awareness or remembrance of another experience of the world, of the universe, of the realm you knew before you actually intered into the body. This discrepancy brings about a search for a just way of reuniting what has fallen apart. The Philosophy of Freedom takes you through a journey of observation of your own processes of knowledge. For example, we often describe moments of insight in terms of experiences of light-"that is a very illuminating remark"-you throw a flood of light on it. We don't mean physical light; but is it just an analogy? For these quite familiar experiences of 'illumination' Steiner used the word 'intuition' (a word now used in many different ways). The first part of the Philosophy of Freedom leads to a discovery of the birthplace of intuitive experience. It is also a record of Steiner's own inner journey which enabled him to confirm for himself that the door of Plato's cave is not closed, but that our ordinary consciousness includes more actual spiritual experience than we normally recognise unless we discover how to look for it.

Steiner confirmed for himself, and indicated for others, how we may explore our own processes of knowing, of cognition, and begin to find a bridge, a path, a door between what is an ordinary experience and a spiritual experience. We are not, as Kant argued, doomed to be locked up in our own little box of consciousness. We do indeed participate in knowing in the real world.

To establish this was the centre of Steiner's inner struggle up to the age of 35. During this time he grew up in a little village, was sent to a modern school by his father (who didn't want to send him to a grammar school where he might have been prepared for a seminary along with the other bright boys). He went to a technical university to study physics, chemistry and mathematics. While there, he met Professor Schroer, a Goethe scholar. In due course, Schroer invited Steiner to undertake the editing of Goethe's voluminous scientific works. This led him to Weimar , which was at that time a major centre for scholars from all over the world. Steiner established a solid reputation as a gifted young scholar. But then, at the end of the century, he went to Berlin . This brings us to the second act of his personal drama.

He began to search for other people who were at odds with their world. Berlin was full of avant-garde artists and revolutionaries, people seeking alternatives, convinced that a new age must be coming. Berlin was full of cranks, in fact. Steiner was editing an avant-garde magazine, involved in theatre groups, producing plays, and getting to know people in all kinds of radical movements. He became a teacher and lecturer at one of the first schools for working people in Berlin at the end of the last [ 19th ] century. There he was enormously popular: the working people found him, as a personality, quite different to what they were used to, and he began to draw very large audiences for his courses in history, philosophy, natural history and public speaking. But he would not ally himself with any definite political party interests and his employment at the school, which was dominated by the radical left, was eventually ended. Inwardly, he was still asking himself, with growing urgency: Must I keep silent about my spiritual perceptions and experiences? These reached far beyond anything he had included in his courses hitherto. Then he gave a talk about Goethe's fairy tale, The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. The theme of this is really a search for a bridge between material and spiritual realities. This attracted the interest of some Theosophists. The Theosophical movement, founded in the late 1870s, embodied a kind of spiritual radicalism. It pioneered the rediscovery of Eastern philosophy and spirituality. Here were people with questions to which Steiner could speak more directly. At the same time, this lost him the ear of many who had hitherto regarded him as a promising, radical but still orthodox, scholar. This came to a head when he was asked to address the Giordano Bruno society. Giordano Bruno was a heretic who was burned at the stake by the church in 1600, and the society was dedicated to free thinking. Nevertheless, when Steiner spoke in his lecture about the need to include in our thoughts the invisible worlds to which people in the past had access, and then mentioned the Theosophical movement, the whole audience started to freeze. Afterwards there was no applause, and he was not invited back. The word went round: 'Steiner has become a Theosophist.'

During the next few years, he worked in the Theosophical movement, helping them to understand more deeply, in a personal way, the language of the spiritual traditions and cosmology of India , renewing it in relation to modern consciousness and modern times. He wrote about the needs and possibilities of a modern meditative path, and he was essentially concerned with people seeking personally and individually a deeper understanding of human nature and the cosmos.

From 1909, he began to work more intensively with various artists seeking new ways for their work. He began on a series of remarkable 'Mystery Plays.' These are centred on the lives of a group of people, evidently more or less contemporary with Steiner himself. Gradually, we see more deeply into these lives; there are scenes where their relationships are experienced through the meditative experiences of one of the characters. He wrote four of these plays, attempts to depict deeper levels of real life in the form of art.

Shortly before the first world war, Steiner had to part company with the Theosophical movement, over the issue of the young boy who later became known as Krishnamurti, and who was then being hailed within the movement as the reincarnation of Christ. Steiner regarded this, quite simply, as a mistake, and insisted that the 'Christ mystery' was, on the physical level, a wholly unique event, which would not be repeated. He interpreted the 'Second Coming' quite differently, and was emphatic that it should not be expected in the form of an appearance of a particular human being.

From 1917 onwards, the last phase of Steiner's life began. In Germany and Austria , after the war, various people came to him to help with the new beginnings in various fields of practical and social life. The Managing Director of the Waldorf Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart asked Steiner to help found a new school for his employees' children. Out of this came the first Waldorf school. Steiner called together a group of teachers, helped them with introductory courses, and planted a seed from which has grown, despite the setbacks during the Hitler time, when the schools were forbidden in Germany , a world-wide school movement. There are now about 300 schools in the world (as well as many schools and homes for handicapped and maladjusted children).

He was also approached by doctors, farmers, architects, pastors and others. For the principality of Baden , in response to a request, he drew up a manifesto as a basis for what he called a three-fold social order-a way of thinking about social questions which could be translated into political action. For a year or so, around 1919-1920, he was lecturing to enormous audiences, 2,000-3,000 at a time, and there was a chance that something would be tried in political and public life along the lines he indicated. But there was growing hostility from the established order, especially from the extreme right and the extreme left. At one time he even had to have a bodyguard after threats to his life. But by 1922 it became clear that the opportunity had passed. What we can now recognise as the events which led to Hitler were already gathering momentum. Steiner said that the three-fold social order would have to wait for a more propitious time.

In this connection, he was giving emphatic warnings about the dangers of nationalism in the future, especially as embodied in Woodrow Wilson's apparently obvious ideal of 'the self-determination of peoples' as the foundations for the League of Nations .

In one speech, Woodrow Wilson asked, 'What makes history?' It was not a machine, he said, but 'a living thing.' Then he urged that we need not Newton but Darwin to grasp history. In other words, the 'survival of the fittest.' This is what Steiner warned against. We build a whole world on groups of people who call themselves nations, who establish themselves through a struggle for survival at the expense of their neighbours, of minorities, etc. It is a recipe for endless conflict. Since the 1920s, the whole idea of the nation state has been accepted as the fundamental basis for world organisations. Each nation claims the right to protect itself, and to fight for its own economic interests. The world economy has now become a battleground for nation states competing with one another, with the weakest, especially in the so-called Third World , going to the wall.

Steiner urged that we base our model not on Darwinism, but on the human being and the human organism, in which the different parts of the body do different things, but work together. He built on the ideals which were struggling for realisation in the French Revolution-Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Liberty and Fraternity are at opposite poles: Fraternity entails giving up some freedom in order to meet the needs of others. Liberty means the liberty to find one's own path through life. It requires, above all, the freedom of speech, education the arts and culture. The problem is to create a society in which both individuality and community are really given their full scope. They can be healthily related only through 'equal rights,' administered by the law, which ensures 'fair play' between individuals and groups. This should be the proper task of democratic government. Independent forms of organisation would be needed for economic and cultural life.

Many of the activities for social renewal begun at that time have developed within the anthroposophical movement, and are now coming forward in many parts of the world. But in 1922, Steiner and his associates suffered another heavy blow. The Goetheanum building at Dornach, in Switzerland , on which people from many of the warring nations had worked together throughout the first world war, was fired by an arsonist, and burned to the ground on New Year's Eve. However, the work went on. A year later, the Anthroposophical Society and a ' School of Spiritual Science ' were refounded in Dornach. In this School are the beginnings of a new foundation for collaborative work in the future. This was already implicit in the founding of the first Waldorf school. At that time, Steiner insisted that there be no headmaster, but that the teachers learn to carry the central responsibilities for the school as a group. At the same time, each teacher was to have real individual freedom in the classroom. What does this demand of people? You find that you need a 'spiritual school' as a foundation for work. In your individual work in the classroom, you will often feel inadequate. Out of the nature of the work itself, it becomes clear that you hve to do something about your own personal development. In the established world, if you have passed your exams you are 'qualified.' But however many exams you take, it has no real relevance in the colleagueship of a Waldorf school. All that is relevant is what you are trying to do in your classroom with your children, and within yourself to grow in your work.

But there is a second responsibility-that of working with your colleagues: the full scope of this is substantially taken away by our usual social structures. There is always someone above you in the hierarchy to whom you can refer problems. But in a true ' College of Teachers ' you have to carry each other. You can never avoid going through quite difficult experiences together, becoming aware in the process of each others' strengths and weaknesses. What has been carried by the 'system' now has to be consciously worked through in real life by human beings.

The third demand arises from seeking the aims of the work itself. Waldorf education does not offer its teachers a ready-made job description. The central question is: 'What do the children themselves really need?' Steiner predicted that unless we change the whole way we work in the schools, there would be chaos during this century. The reason is crucial to recognise: children coming into the world now are different. Life moves on; they bring with them a new consciousness and new needs.

When you have children in front of you, where do you imagine they come from? They really come, Steiner emphasised, from a great 'school' in which they participated before they were born. They have brought with them deep unconscious questions and resolves for their forthcoming lives. The teacher's task is to nurture and liberate what they have brought with them.

A young apprentice once asked Steiner why life was so difficult, when everyone simply wanted to be happy. 'Perhaps,' Steiner suggested to him gently, 'we do not come to be happy, but to fulfil a task.' So he spoke to the unborn will for life. The tasks we bring will not be the same in each generation. So the challenge to the teacher is to put oneself at the service of the present times-times whose origins are not explained by Newton or Darwin , but call for an intuition of the true spirit of our times, the Zeitgeist.

Steiner died in 1925, surrounded by new beginnings. The work of the Anthroposophical movement is growing in many fields, and is particularly well known in Germany , Holland and Scandinavia . Those who get to know Steiner's work intimately sense a prophetic voice of real genius, which can perhaps be better heard now, as we live in the inner and outer crises of the end of this century.

A talk by John Davy OBE, MA, November, 1983

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