The Crisis of the Present and the Path to Healthy Thinking gathers ten public lectures Rudolf Steiner gave in Stuttgart across 1920, from early March to mid November, and it belongs to the volume catalogued as GA 335 in the collected edition. These were open evening addresses, not talks reserved for members of the Anthroposophical Society, and their occasion was the wreckage left by the First World War. Steiner opens by weighing John Maynard Keynes and the economic aftermath of the Versailles settlement, then argues across the cycle that the visible breakdown of economic and political life traces back to an invisible cause: a way of thinking that can describe nature in detail yet says nothing true about the human being. The core subject is therefore a diagnosis and a remedy at once, naming the sickness of modern consciousness and sketching what Steiner calls a healthy, spiritually grounded manner of thought.
Place in Steiner's Work
GA 335 sits squarely in Steiner's most intensely public period. By 1920 he had spent nearly two years carrying the idea of the threefold social organism into lecture halls, pamphlets, and the founding of the first Waldorf school in Stuttgart the previous autumn. The lectures collected here are the outward face of that campaign. Where his earlier esoteric cycles addressed spiritual development for a prepared audience, these evenings speak to citizens, teachers, and workers unsettled by inflation, defeat, and the collapse of old certainties. The volume is best read alongside the social-question writings of 1919 and 1920, because it supplies the philosophical undergirding those practical proposals assume. Steiner is not, in these talks, chiefly asking how to reorganize a state or an economy; he is asking why the people who run states and economies have lost the inner ground from which sound reorganization could come.
The volume also marks a bridge between two sides of Steiner's output. On one side stands his early epistemology, the account of thinking he first set out in his philosophical works of the 1890s. On the other stands anthroposophy proper, with its claim that disciplined inner training opens genuine knowledge of a spiritual world. GA 335 shows him drawing both together for a lay crowd: the healthy thinking he urges is continuous with the free thinking of his youth, now extended into a method that reaches past the senses. That continuity is part of why the cycle rewards study rather than a single reading.
It helps to remember the year itself. In 1920 Germany was living through defeat, punishing reparations, and the first tremors of the inflation that would soon become catastrophic. Old institutions had lost their authority, and radical Marxism was gaining ground among industrial workers. Steiner speaks into that unsettled hour. He treats the social question not as a matter of finding better institutions but as a question of human worth, asking how the educated classes and the laboring masses, long divided, might be brought back into a common life. That practical urgency gives GA 335 a texture that his more contemplative cycles lack; every abstract claim is tethered to a crisis his listeners were living through.
Themes and Structure
The ten lectures move in a loose arc from diagnosis toward remedy. The opening addresses of March 1920 set the problem in the sharpest terms. Steiner contends that the natural science of the preceding three or four centuries achieved brilliant results about nature while growing mute about the human being, and that this silence, hardening across generations, drained inner substance from public speech until only the empty phrase remained. He treats the political rhetoric of the war years as a symptom of that emptiness, a language of large words with nothing living behind them.
From this diagnosis the cycle broadens. One lecture takes up the peoples of the earth, arguing that a nation cannot be understood as a mere sum of individuals, and that genuine mutual recognition among peoples requires perceiving each folk-character as a real, supersensible being rather than a passing sentiment. Another turns to the history of humanity, reading the long development of consciousness as the slow passage from instinctive, dreamlike awareness toward waking individual freedom. Steiner threads his account of the human being as a threefold organism through several of these talks: thinking bound to the nerve-sense system, feeling to the rhythmic life of breath and circulation, and willing to the metabolic processes, a structure he presents as the natural counterpart to the threefold ordering of social life.
The later lectures, running from summer into the autumn of 1920, grow more directly contemporary. Steiner speaks on education and teaching in the face of the world situation, and here the young Waldorf school gives him a concrete example rather than a theory. He describes returning to the school and sitting in on a history lesson, and he argues that when history is taught as the living development of humanity, children of thirteen or fourteen carry away not dates but inner strength for the whole of later life. The point he draws is larger than pedagogy: the science inherited from the ruling classes, he says, failed to protect those very classes from steering civilization into ruin, so simply carrying that same science to the masses through adult education would spread the decline rather than cure it. What is needed instead is a renewed foundation of knowledge, one he claims spiritual science can supply. He points to parallel work begun that same year in Dornach, where he had spoken to doctors and medical students about grounding a science of the healthy and sick human being on the same footing.
He also delivers several addresses explicitly framed as speeches on questions of the day, weighing the mood of decline then fashionable in Europe, associated with talk of the decline of the West, and asking who has earned the right to speak against it. The final lecture returns to the cycle's keynote, setting the spiritual crisis of the present against the forces that might carry human development forward. Throughout, the promised path to healthy thinking is not a technique bolted onto ordinary life but a widening of cognition itself, a way of thinking that keeps the rigor won by science yet refuses to stop at the threshold of the human. Steiner's claim is that a science able to speak truthfully about the human being, and not only about matter, would restore substance to public speech and give will its lost direction.
Because these were spoken lectures aimed at a general public, their tone is argumentative and vivid rather than systematic. Steiner reaches for the figure of the day, the book everyone was discussing, the writer half-forgotten, to make his case land. A study guide can only summarize that texture; the lectures themselves reward slow reading, since the argument accumulates by return and variation rather than by numbered steps.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
The Thalira glossary draws on GA 335 for the following entry. This page serves as a hub for the volume, and the linked term leads to its fuller treatment.
The Peoples of the Earth in the Light of Anthroposophy
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of this cycle in English at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts a complete translation of the volume at rsarchive.org. For a bound edition, or to check what related titles remain in print, search the publisher directly at SteinerBooks. Reading a lecture or two at the source alongside this guide is the surest way to test the summaries above against Steiner's own words.
Continue Your Study
- Browse the full Thalira glossary to see how the term above connects to the wider vocabulary of Steiner's thought.
- Return to the GA Work Library to find study guides for neighboring volumes from the same social-question period.
- Follow the linked entry on the peoples of the earth to study how Steiner's idea of folk-spirits reaches past this single cycle.