Rudolf Steiner's Threefold Social Organism

a recent talk about Rudolf Steiner's threefolding idea and social movement

An abridged transcript of my talk is below. For a more in depth look at social threefolding, you can also check out my article “The Urgency of Social Threefolding in a World Still At War With Itself” (2023).

I am grateful for the invitation to share a bit about the threefold social organism, or social threefolding as it’s sometimes called. This is an idea or a set of ideas, but also a plan of action that Steiner introduced in Central Europe after World War I. I will delve into that, but first, let me share a bit about my own interest in Steiner as a thinker. I am a philosopher and do a lot of transdisciplinary research, which means that I like to think about science. I like to think about the Natural Sciences and engage with scientists—physicists, biologists, neuroscientists, and so on. However, I am also really curious about the nature of human consciousness and spirituality, particularly how human consciousness is not something that Natural Science seems particularly well-suited to understand.

Steiner was a philosopher, a social reformer, and a spiritual teacher who, for me and many others, allows us to take Natural Science very seriously while also understanding human consciousness as a spiritual phenomenon that we need to actively cultivate and strive to deepen. We are born with a certain kind of consciousness through grace, but Steiner says that we can continue to develop it. Obviously, we develop through childhood, and I'll talk a bit about Waldorf education, which comes out of this threefold movement in 1919-1920 in Stuttgart. But Steiner’s suggestion extends beyond just education for children; he proposes that all of human life should be oriented around learning, which is a way of continuing to develop or evolve our consciousness.

I am interested in Steiner because he allows us to put these pieces back together. We can take science seriously and understand the human being in a very deep way, not reducible to the atomic elements and the physical processes that science understands pretty well. However, there’s a missing puzzle piece in that physical picture of the cosmos if we only consider the Natural Sciences' perspective. Steiner would say that missing piece is the human being.

Let me outline what I want to cover. I’ll start by sharing some biographical details about Steiner. I will focus on the relevant details for understanding where this social impulse Steiner introduces comes from. Then, I will contextualize it within European history and “the Social Problem” as it was called a century ago, or a little over a century ago. World War I had just ended, the German Revolution was underway: this is the tumultuous social context in which Steiner introduces not only the idea of social threefolding but also a movement and plan of action.

Steiner was born in 1861 and died in 1925, earlier than we would have liked, of course. He was born in what is today Croatia, but was then part of Austria-Hungary. His father worked at the railroad station, so Steiner was born into this new working-class context that industrialization brought to Central Europe. He understood intimately both the social transformation brought about by new technology—the railroad—and working-class life. But he was also a bright young man, gifted not only with his clairvoyance, which you may have heard something about, but also with his capacity for mathematics, understanding Natural Science, and his interest in literature. Steiner attended junior school and high school just outside Vienna from 1872 to 1879. He was an undergraduate at the Vienna Institute of Technology between 1879 and 1883, where he began to encounter the work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who is mostly known as a poet, though some also know him as a statesman, a member of the cabinet of Duke Carl August of Weimar. But Goethe was also a scientist.

Steiner was particularly interested in Goethe’s scientific work because it represented an alternative to the mechanistic, Newtonian form of science that Steiner was learning about at his technical college. Goethe offered an approach that allowed us to relate to nature as a living organism and thus to human society in a living way as well. After Steiner obtained his undergraduate degree, he was asked to edit Goethe’s scientific works. He worked extensively on the German national literature edition, known as the Kürschner edition, which eventually comprised five volumes by the end, with the last volume published in 1897. Steiner worked on this project for almost two decades through the 1880s and 1890s.

During this time, Steiner also edited magazines and was deeply engaged in the political questions of the day. He worked at the Goethe-Schiller Archives in Weimar in the late 1890s, having earned his doctorate in 1891. His dissertation focused on the German idealist philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who championed the concept of the “I” or the self. Steiner believed that Fichte had made contact with the core human capacity from which all freedom, imagination, and creativity spring. Fichte's focus on the self provided a balance to Steiner's interest in Goethe, who emphasized the natural world around us. Steiner’s task was to hold these two poles together—the Fichtean focus on the self and the Goethean focus on nature.

Steiner moved to Berlin in 1897, where he edited a literary magazine for a few years and taught at a worker’s school until 1904. In Berlin, Steiner engaged directly with the lives of the working class and accepted the socialist understanding of the plight of the workers and the injustice of capitalist class-based society. For five years, he taught workers, getting up close and personal with the rising socialist and Marxist sentiments in Europe, where workers had to sell their labor while a capitalist class owned the means of production.

During this period, in 1902, Steiner was also nominated as the General Secretary of the Theosophical Society. So while teaching workers in a Marxist or historical materialist school one day, he then lectured the next day for the Theosophical Society on the spiritual world. Steiner lived in multiple worlds at once—engaged in both the material and the spiritual realms. As the first decade of the 20th century progressed, Steiner became increasingly involved with the Theosophical Society. He hosted a conference in Munich in 1907. But he eventually found that the Society was moving in a direction that did not align with his views. Steiner was deeply inspired by the Christ impulse, not as a member of any Christian church, but because he perceived that the Christ being was central to the spiritual evolution of humanity. The Theosophical Society, on the other hand, began to focus more on Eastern spirituality.

In 1911, the Theosophical Society announced that a young boy, Jiddu Krishnamurti, was the second coming of Christ. This was the last straw for Steiner, who then split from the Society and formed the Anthroposophical Society in 1913. At the same time, he began constructing the first Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland. This marked the launch of Anthroposophy, a spiritual movement that Steiner would continue to develop even as World War I began in 1914.

As the war raged on, Steiner was mostly in Dornach, part of a neutral country during the conflict. Here, he focused on building the Goetheanum, a beautiful domed wooden structure designed by workers and artists from across Europe, even from countries at war with each other. They could hear the sounds of artillery fire from the nearby French-German front lines as they worked. Steiner, unable to travel around Europe during the war, reissued books and lectures that had been published in earlier years. One of these was The Philosophy of Freedom, a pivotal work in which Steiner articulated his more or less anarchist impulse in the political arena, rooted in an understanding of the free human spirit. He is perhaps best characterized as a Christian anarchist.

In The Philosophy of Freedom, Steiner wrote:

“A man counts as a free spirit in a human community only to the degree in which he has emancipated himself from all that is generic. No man is all genus, none is all individuality, but every man gradually emancipates a greater or lesser sphere of his being both from the generic characteristics of animal life and from the laws of human authorities which rule him despotically. In respect of that part of his nature for which man is not able to win this freedom for himself, he forms a member with the organism of Nature and of Spirit. He lives in this respect by the imitation of others or in obedience to their command. But ethical value belongs only to that part of his conduct which springs from his intuitions [from his free thinking], and whatever moral instincts man possesses through the inheritance of social instincts, acquire ethical value through being taken up into his intuitions. In such ethical intuitions, all moral activity of men has its root. The moral life of humanity is the sum total of the products of the moral imagination of free human individuals.”

Steiner’s dissertation on Fichte had focused on this thinking activity, this “I” that is not a fact or some entity in our heads, but an activity. In The Philosophy of Freedom, Steiner sought to bring light to this inner spiritual spark that we all know so well, yet overlook precisely because it is so intimately familiar to us. It is right under our noses. This spark is the basis of our freedom and the foundation of a free and loving society. Steiner believed that the purpose of education was to create conditions where human beings could become aware of their own freedom. For Steiner, freedom was not just the freedom to make trivial choices, like selecting breakfast cereals, but a much deeper power that demands our own effort and striving for self-transformation and growth.

Freedom, according to Steiner, is difficult and requires initiative. This spiritual core is central to Steiner’s idea of threefolding and his plan of action to seed a movement in Europe. Steiner watched Europe destroy itself during the war while continuing to build the Goetheanum.

As the war wound down, Steiner’s thoughts turned to social renewal. He first attempted a top-down strategy, meeting with European political leaders, including princes, foreign secretaries, and cabinet ministers, to introduce the threefolding idea. He wrote essays and private memoranda to these leaders, hoping to inspire them to take up his ideas. However, this top-down approach failed, particularly as the German Revolution began in 1918.

The German generals, outraged by the prospect of losing the war, ordered a final offensive against the British in October 1918. However, the sailors and dockyard workers in Kiel, Germany, mutinied, refusing to be cannon fodder. This mutiny sparked a socialist revolution in Germany, leading to the abdication of Max von Baden, who Steiner had met with earlier about threefolding. With the revolution underway and World War I ending on November 11, millions of soldiers returned home, looking for jobs and realizing that as workers, they now held the upper hand. It was time to address the major social problem of inequality created by capitalism.

The Social Democratic Party in Germany struck a deal with the Communists, agreeing to establish workers’ councils, where workers would have more power in the production process. With this shift in the social landscape, Steiner abandoned his top-down approach in favor of a bottom-up strategy. He aimed to “get the threefolding idea into as many human heads as possible.” In early 1919, he gave lectures in Zurich on "The Social Question" and published a pamphlet titled "Appeal to the German People and the Cultural World," marking the official launch of the threefold movement.

Steiner’s book Towards Social Renewal was published in April 1919. Later that year Weimar Constitution was signed, ending the revolution and establishing a temporary truce between workers and capitalists. During this time, Steiner was approached by Emil Molt, the owner of the Waldorf cigarette factory, to create a school for the workers’ children. Tobacco had been declared a military necessity during the war, enriching cigarette factories and providing the funds to seed the first Waldorf School, which opened in September 1919. Money works in mysterious ways.

The Waldorf School was Steiner’s attempt to push forward the cultural and spiritual sphere of the threefold organism. He saw Waldorf schools as microcosms of the social organism, embodying the economic, political, and cultural spheres. A school, in Steiner’s view, should have a bookstore and a foot in both the economic and political spheres while primarily engaging in the activities of education, research, spiritual life, and art.

Between 1919 and 1921, Steiner gave lectures to large crowds across Europe, and his books on social threefolding sold well. The New York Times even reviewed Steiner’s book in 1919, calling it “the most original contribution in a generation.” However, as Steiner’s popularity grew, so did opposition. In March 1921, Adolf Hitler wrote in a right-wing magazine, The Völkischer Beobachter, that Steiner’s threefold vision for society was a "completely Jewish method of destroying people’s natural state of mind." Steiner realized that he now had serious enemies, and by mid-1921, he recognized that the threefolding movement was unlikely to succeed in Germany.

Steiner began to retreat from the threefolding push, although he continued to lecture around Europe on other topics, including art, education, science, social life, medicine, pharmacology, therapy, agriculture, architecture, and theology. He focused on cultivating consciousness at the Goetheanum and in Waldorf education, waiting for a future time when society might be ready for the threefolding ideas on a larger scale.

In December 1922, on New Years Eve night during a Christmas conference at the Goetheanum, the building was set on fire by an arsonist and burned down. Despite the devastation, Steiner continued with his planned lectures the next day in a nearby cabinet-making workshop. However, within a year, it became clear that he was mortally wounded, possibly poisoned, and by September 1924, he’d give his last lecture before passing away in March 1925.

Steiner left behind numerous initiatives, including social threefolding, rooted in his idea of the threefold human being. He proposed that the human soul could be understood in terms of thinking, feeling, and willing, with social problems stemming from disorders in these capacities. Steiner applied this threefold understanding of the healthy human being to the social organism, suggesting an analogy between the human organism and society, though with important differences.

The three spheres of the social organism—economic, political, and cultural—can be compared to the thinking, feeling, and willing capacities of the human being. However, Steiner noted that the analogy is not straightforward. While we might initially think that culture corresponds to thinking, politics to feeling, and economics to willing, Steiner reversed this analogy. He argued that the economic sphere is actually the head of the social organism, comparable to the intellect, while the cultural sphere corresponds to the metabolism, or the digestive system, of the social organism.

Steiner rejected the Marxist view of historical materialism, which suggests that material conditions and economic life are the primary drivers of history. Instead, he argued that economic life is actually the source of decay and death in society, with cultural and political life counterbalancing this by bringing in life and renewal. In this view, healthy economic life arises from cultural and spiritual life, not the other way around.

Steiner concluded that the element of death in economic life must be counterbalanced by what the cultural organism produces. He emphasized that the cultural and spiritual sphere is where human freedom is cultivated, and that while competition might be healthy in the cultural sphere, economic life should be based on cooperation, and political life on equality and fairness.

To illustrate threefolding in practice, we can take the example of education. In the United States, the public school system is controlled by the government, with standardized tests and a curriculum imposed by the state. Steiner believed that this top-down control stifles creativity and freedom in education. Instead, he proposed a system where education is a right (funded by gift money or taxes), but free local schools are run by teachers, not the state, allowing for a diversity of educational approaches.

Steiner also addressed the issue of wage labor, which he saw as a form of wage slavery. He argued that workers should not be paid based on the time they work, but on the value of the products they produce, with fair salaries determined by need. This idea challenges the conventional wage system, which makes it difficult to implement due to state regulations.

Despite the challenges, Steiner’s ideas continue to be relevant today, particularly in the context of the social problems we face, such as the rise of nationalism, climate catastrophe, and a meaning crisis caused by materialism and nihilism. Steiner’s vision offers an alternative to liberalism, communism, and fascism—a vision that respects the autonomy of each of the three spheres of society.

Although Steiner’s threefolding movement faced opposition from all sides, he was not defeated. He believed that even if only a small group of people kept the flame of threefolding alive, the Earth would still radiate spiritual light into the cosmos. Steiner’s emphasis on awakening individual human beings to their spiritual and social responsibilities continues to inspire movements like Waldorf education, which embody his ideals of freedom, fairness, and fellowship in cultural life, the life of rights, and economic life.

While Steiner’s threefolding movement did not succeed on a large scale during his lifetime, the ideas he seeded continue to live on, waiting for a time when individuals may be ready to embrace them more fully. Steiner’s work reminds us that change begins with individuals and their associations, and that the future of society depends on our ability to cultivate a deeper understanding of the human being as a spiritual and not just a material being.