7.1 The Spiritual Content of Public Law
Now, one often admittedly tends, at least in one’s behavior even though it is not often clearly expressed, to regard public law as something that in its value content is not in touch with the given situation or at least unsuitable for the nature of a spiritual society and above all not for the Free School. One overlooks thereby that one confuses legal archetype, legal form and legal interpretation and moreover misjudges the Christian character of modern esotericism that constitutes the middle between the outwardly and inwardly directed pendulum swing of cognition and action. It is certainly not necessary to remind Rudolf Steiner’s students of the significance that he attributed to public law; perhaps it is after all in any case useful to bring to mind anew the deliberations that he made in this respect in his “Philosophy of Freedom” (above all in the ninth chapter) and put them into context. These culminate in the sentences, “When he (the Philistine) could look beyond that (the period in which he lives), he would soon find out that the free spirit just as rarely needs to transgress the laws of his state than the Philistine himself, but never to really place himself in contradiction to them. For the laws of the state have all originated out of the intuitions of free spirit.” If one were to doubt whether these sentences are still valid even today (in view of the experiences that we have undergone in the [twentieth] century of the destruction of Europe, one would indeed hardly understand their intrinsic meaning. For they speak about intuitions, not unsubstantiated decrees. In so far as lawmaking on the basis of cognition applies to members of a bigger or smaller community, they can as cognizant human beings not come into conflict with it. It can naturally be questioned, whether the legal form and interpretation correspond to the legal archetype in question.
To bring the most modern society- and community-forming forces in line with the archetypal intuitions of public law is in the sense of the esoteric-exoteric character of the Christian mysteries [1]one of the tasks of the General Anthroposophical Society and the Free School, and the General Assemblies can and exactly should be the place in which such a correspondence is to be sought and found. The same is true again for every working community, which is to be shaped in the sense of the modern consciousness-raising principle.
[1] The concept of the nature of the mysteries requires an explanation, in the way Rudolf Steiner for example gave this in his [basic book] “Occult Science”. Here only a few indications will be mentioned. The mysteries were the centers of the pre-Christian cultures. They kept their schooling hidden away from the awareness of the public. Yet they were through their supporters and students as well as through the subconscious processes of public opinion of great importance for the formative and unifying processes of the communities under their influence. Today too, no working community can be formed, sustained and continued without ideational formative principles. These formative principles have under the influence of the materialistic school of thought diverged more and more from their spiritual archetype. They have converted into instincts of successful action, into ever more scientific rules of efficient management and rules of the game of cooperation and communication. The genealogy of the society-forming formative principles in their advancement from idea via ideology to operationalogy must still be written. The renewal of our social life can only occur through the return to its feeding sources. The charismatic center of every working community must be an educational system that develops fundamental but also continually further developing consciousness contents of its members. In this sense every modern working community must possess a mystery center or connect to one. By the mystery character referred to here is meant the individual as well as communal educational process that also today remains hidden from the public. The renewal of the life of our society will depend on the insight of the importance of the spiritualization of our educational system. Pointed hereby is not only to a new basic feature of our school and university system, but also to the quantity thereof, in so far as every working community must be integrated into an educational system suited to its specific task. This educational system must have a mystery character, because the formative force of the materialized educational system has been depleted and because powerful new impulses can only proceed from a spiritually experienced and enlivened educational system. The consciousness modality of our epoch however demands at the same time full public transparency. The mystery character of the new impulses can only be experienced as such. At the same time every person today must on the basis of its fully public character be able to find access to it. This does not exclude that the consciousness communities that are formed in this way need to be protected from misjudgment and falsification.
7.2 Submission of Motions and Modern Mysteries
It is also erroneous, in view of the preceding, to remain stubborn and insist that it can after all not be denied that voting according to the regulations of public law carry with it an executive coercion and that therefore public law, at least as far as this point is concerned, is incompatible with the mystery character[1] of the Free School (the direction of which is incumbent on the initiative Council). How far such a view is mistaken, is already shown by the fact that Rudolf Steiner in the “Principles”, the realization and execution of which he described as the task per se of the Council at the Goetheanum, has expressly included the right to submit motions (that thereby, as is to be further delineated below, becomes according to the constitution of the Free School a duty for the active members.) Moreover, in the foundational meeting of the year 1923 Rudolf Steiner allowed, with regard to each paragraph of the “Principles” proposed by him (at that time still called statutes), after extensive debate and having them read three times, a voting procedure to establish their acceptance. If this is in contradiction to the nature of the School, the “Principles” would become meaningless through self-annulment. A realistic view however conveys an altogether different picture, than the mere intellectual conclusion may present concerning the compatibility or incompatibility of the right to submit motions with the nature of the mysteries.
The following deliberations are not only of significance for a knowledge society, as the Anthroposophical Society in the sense of its founder ought to be,– even though they are for the latter of special importance. Rather, they concern (as will hopefully become evident from the whole content of this publication) every truly modern structural design of our social and cultural life. For that reason, it is not only justified, but, in the sense of the demands our time that requires profound and wide-ranging neoformations and reassessments, even necessary to develop these in a publication that addresses itself to the general public. For all processes of genuine social renewal (without which we will not survive in the future) must orientate themselves towards the archetypal social structure that Rudolf Steiner has given the Anthroposophical Society through its refoundation.
If one wants to come to an understanding about the relation between the formation of a modern working community on an ideational basis and public law, one needs to begin with only to inform oneself about the only precondition (already mentioned before) that on the part of those seeking to become a member of the General Anthroposophical Society according to its “Principles” must be fulfilled: Everyone can become a member, “who regards the existence of an institution such as the Goetheanum to be justified” (Principles, § 4). This precondition too has in accordance with the whole nature of the Principles not a rigid but a dynamic form: it points to the flow of interest that the members bring into the Society. This flow of interest must be met with a corresponding flow from the part of the Free School and the Council. It is expressed in the duty of the Council to issue a guiding statement of account (Principles § 10: in the ordinary Annual Meeting a complete statement of account is given by the Council) and in the free interaction with the members through the initiatives coming from it (Principles § 11: “From there (The Goetheanum) the Council is to convey to the members or the groups what it considers to be the task of the Society.” This free play of interest and initiative is thereby addressed as the basic process of modern society- and community-forming. This basic process is naturally in principle a continuous one, but it is meant to reach a sort of culmination at the General Assembly of a knowledge society, to be an occasion and the means of an in-depth self-examination and self-knowledge of all. To that end, it must be stressed as a basis for understanding all that follows that the members of the Council at the Goetheanum as active members of a spiritual community are subject to strict, freely out of insight undertaken obligations, while those entering the General Anthroposophical Society as new members do not assume any obligations of that sort, as long as they do not become members of the School.
This flow of interest is meant to convey on its waves everything to the Free School and the Council that exists in the Society as problems, needs, willingness to do or not do certain things, observations and accomplishments, and this must be answered, according to the educational form of a knowledge society, by that other flow that proceeds from the Free School, which as the result of its inner life and research in the form a counter current meets the incoming flow that conveys its needs to the officeholders. This meeting of the submitted interest can in a free society and according to the (unfortunately not superfluous) indication by Rudolf Steiner only appear in the form of an advice, a consultation from the Council regarding the life of knowledge and action of the members. The nature of this interplay and flowing exchange is, far removed from all coercion, free and freedom creating life – and therefore nothing should happen, above all not from the part of the Council, that could obtrude this life in the form of a compulsion or a decree. Therefore, it is for those acting in the spirit of the Free School (thus in the spirit of modern community-building) a necessity borne out of self-reflection to be on their guard that the initiatives proceeding from the Free School are never misunderstood and misused as decrees. Rudolf Steiner emphatically pointed to this basic difference that in this regard a serious danger exists of regressing into “association-like, i.e. bureaucratic behavior”: “By looking at this Council more and more in this way” (namely as an “Initiative Council”), “ it will become in the right way the advisor in all the concerns of the Society. And it wants to be an ‘advisor’; for it knows full well that it would completely contradict the spirit of the Anthroposophical Society, if it were to be an ‘enactor, one that decrees’. It will with its counsel, its pieces of advice appeal to nothing else than the free insight of the members; but it can also only be a proper ‘advisor’, if the goals and aspirations of the members are brought to its attention in the proper spirit.” And: “This anthroposophical-esoteric Council does not want to be an administrative Council, it wants to be an initiative Council that gives suggestions, offers proposals for what is becoming for the nature of the Anthroposophical Society.” In falling from the sphere of consultation and cognitional impulses to the level of decrees the initiative would lose its initiative character. For initiative, thus acting out a beginning, an origin, is only possible through the free origination in the spirit, this within that element in which human beings as spirit beings are blessed with the same originality. As conscious participants therein human beings will attempt to mutually further each other in that to which they equally belong, in the way that this happens through the process of consultation and understanding, but far removed from wanting to mutually impose their intentions. This is the libertarian duty that those striving towards freedom pledge to their own higher being, and this libertarian duty is the basic obligation towards the spirituality of the modern mystery centers (the cognitional participation in a spiritual world common to all people), from which all other obligations proceed that are connected with it.
One will never be able to form proper notions about the nature of the most modern of all societies and communities, a nature based on libertarian duties that their members acknowledge to their own spiritual essence, when one believes to be able to characterize it by mandatory rules, prohibitions and prescriptions. For the libertarian duties are the expressions of the stations on the way to the spirit that he who acts out of knowledge pursues and on which he himself becomes aware of the tasks that correspond to his specific stage of development. The stations of his path will not be reached by carrying out commandments and observing prohibitions nor by acknowledging a dogma, but only by knowledge and action out of conviction. Therefore the judgment about a behavior in view of the libertarian duties can neither pertain to its appropriateness for a framework, but can only have the character of an assessment. The latter can only express whether the wanderer on the path of knowledge did or did not reach a certain stage of development that reveals his spiritual standpoint, thus the mode of his integration in reality and therefore also in the community to which he belongs. Whoever wants to pursue this path therefore is faced with the decision, whether he chooses to ally himself with an administrative context, within which he is the supporter and executor of authorizations conveyed to him by majority rule and the follower of conditions under which these authorizations are to be gained – or whether he wants to set as his goal to prove himself progressively worthy of the blessing of a spiritual presence that together with all knowers in a consciousness society embraces him. Information about the coming into being of a consciousness society and its stage of development can only be gathered through observation as a co-active member.
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