The Big Questions of our Time and Anthroposophical Spiritual Knowledge is the collected title of GA 336, a volume of nineteen public lectures Rudolf Steiner gave between 6 February 1919 and 27 June 1921. These were not talks for members of the Anthroposophical Society. They were given in hired halls to mixed civic audiences in Bern, Basel, Winterthur, Dornach, Tuebingen, Mannheim, Dresden, Freiburg, Stuttgart and St. Gallen, and most of them were followed by open questions from the floor. One subject runs through all nineteen: the social question. What is actually moving in the demands of the modern working population, why the answers offered by the parties and programmes of the day kept sliding past that movement, and how public life might be arranged so that cultural life, legal life and economic life each work by their own law instead of one swallowing the other two.
Place in Steiner's Work
GA 336 belongs to the busiest and most exposed stretch of Steiner's public career. In the spring of 1919 he published The Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life in the Present and the Near Future, known in English as Towards Social Renewal, and issued the appeal To the German People and to the World of Culture. Out of those two documents grew the Threefolding movement, which ran a weekly paper, spoke to factory workforces, and tried to reach the works councils forming across southern Germany. In September 1919 the first Waldorf school opened in Stuttgart as the working proof of one third of the idea. This volume is the trace of Steiner carrying that same argument to general audiences over three years, and by the last lecture he is openly measuring how much of the opening had already closed.
Within the Collected Works the volume sits with the social series of the 320s and 330s, near the lectures given to the workmen at the Goetheanum building site and the courses on economics. What separates GA 336 from the member cycles is register rather than doctrine. Steiner does not begin from reincarnation, the members of the human being, or the spiritual hierarchies, and he does not ask the audience to grant him anything on authority. He begins instead from what a listener can check: the history of technology and capital, the collapse of the old crafts, his own years teaching at a workers' training school in Berlin, the language proletarian audiences used about themselves. Only after that does he show where an account of the human being as a spiritual being becomes necessary in order to explain the phenomena at all. For a reader approaching Steiner from politics, economics or history rather than from esotericism, this volume is one of the most usable doors in the whole corpus.
Themes and Structure
The opening lectures come in matched pairs. In Bern on 6 and 7 February 1919, and again in Basel on 13 and 14 February, the first evening carries the diagnosis and the second the remedy, and the titles say so plainly: the social question as determined by the necessities of contemporary humanity, then the solutions that life itself demands. After Winterthur in late February the lectures stand alone, each one a complete pass at the argument for a fresh city. The volume closes with two Dornach evenings, one on the Goetheanum and the threefold social order in May 1920, one on independent spiritual life in June 1921.
Four lines of thought recur across the nineteen.
The social question is a question of consciousness. Steiner fastens onto a word he kept hearing from workers themselves: class conscious. He takes it literally rather than as a slogan. The older craftsman lived inside instinct and inherited habit; the modern factory worker has been pushed out of that shelter into deliberate awareness of his own position and of the bargain he strikes with those who buy his labour. What looks like a dispute over wages is at bottom a change in how human beings know themselves. Any answer pitched only at hours and pay therefore misses what is actually asking to be answered.
Spiritual life has arrived as ideology. In the same opening lectures Steiner notes that the inherited cultural life reaches the worker as ideology, a vapour rising off the economic facts and possessing no substance of its own. His striking move is to refuse to blame the worker for that verdict. The educated minority had already hollowed out its own spiritual life, had already made a culture that only a few could enter, and had then handed the emptied shell down. He describes lecturing to his workers' school students on history and natural science and being met with full understanding, then walking them through picture galleries and feeling like a stranger speaking about nothing, because minority culture had no root in their experience.
Three ideals, three spheres. The nineteenth century concluded that liberty, equality and fraternity contradict one another. Steiner accepts the contradiction and locates its cause: all three are being demanded of a single unitary state. Sort them by sphere and the quarrel dissolves. Cultural and spiritual life, including schooling, science and art, needs freedom and self-administration. Rights and law belong to democratic equality, where every adult stands level with every other and nothing is decided by expertise or wealth. Economic life belongs to fraternity, organised through associations of producers, traders and consumers rather than through voting or command. He closes the Mannheim lecture of 28 July 1919 with the formula in three lines:
Freedom for the mind, Equality for the law, Brotherhood for economic life!
Economy as a web of trust, and the limits of the scientific spirit. The economic chapters are the most concrete. Each association has dealings with the next, and the next with the one beyond, so that a network of relationships of trust forms through which real interests become visible; this, not a central plan or a market price, is how a modern economy could learn what it is actually doing. Means of production pass to whoever has the confidence of his colleagues and can use them best, so capital ceases to be a private power over other people. Alongside this runs the knowledge question. Steiner grants the spirit of science every triumph its admirers claim for it, then argues that a method trained on lifeless nature cannot by itself read social life, and that what is needed is a further step taken in intellectual modesty: the admission that our ordinary thinking stands before the supersensible roughly as a five year old child stands before a book of poems, able to hold it but not yet to read it.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
Seven entries in the Thalira glossary draw on GA 336. Read together they form a compact map of the volume, and each entry gives sources, context and related terms.
- Class Consciousness: the word Steiner takes from the workers themselves and reads as a change in human self-awareness rather than a party position.
- Spiritual Life as Ideology: culture experienced as froth on economic fact, and why Steiner traces that experience back to the educated classes.
- A Dignified Human Existence: the question the soul cannot answer once it has been argued out of any relation to spirit.
- The Unitary State: the single sovereign body that forces liberty, equality and fraternity into contradiction by demanding all three at once.
- Economic Life Built on Trust: associations linked to associations, and management entrusted to demonstrated competence rather than held as property.
- The Spirit of Science: the authority of the last three or four centuries, credited fully and then tested against social life.
- Intellectual Modesty: the disciplined admission of present limits that Steiner treats as the entrance requirement for spiritual research.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text at the Rudolf Steiner Archive (rsarchive.org), which carries a complete English edition of GA 336 with the German originals alongside many of the lectures. Search the archive by the GA number to reach the volume. For printed and licensed digital editions, and for the closely related Towards Social Renewal, search the publisher catalogue at SteinerBooks. Because these were stenographic records of public evenings rather than texts Steiner prepared for print, expect spoken syntax, occasional repetition between cities, and discussion notes appended to several lectures.
Continue Your Study
- Work outward from the terms above through the full Thalira glossary, where the social vocabulary connects to Steiner's wider language of soul, spirit and human development.
- Browse the GA Work Library to place GA 336 among the other volumes of the social period and to find the lecture cycles that supply its background.
- If the epistemological thread interests you most, start from Intellectual Modesty and follow it toward Steiner's theory of knowledge rather than toward his politics.
- If the practical thread interests you most, start from Economic Life Built on Trust and read the 1922 economics course next.