The Art of Lecturing is a short course of six lectures Rudolf Steiner delivered in Dornach, Switzerland, from the eleventh to the sixteenth of October 1921. Catalogued as GA 339 in his Collected Works and published in German under the title Anthroposophie, soziale Dreigliederung und Redekunst, the course was given to roughly fifty Swiss members of the Anthroposophical Society who were preparing to speak in public on anthroposophy and the threefold social order. Its core subject is not oratory for its own sake but the ethics and craft of speech: how a person can present spiritual ideas honestly, vividly, and in a way suited to a modern audience. Steiner opens with a plain warning that the beginner simply pours out everything he has read, while the accomplished speaker, as the volume's editor puts it, "knows his audience and calls forth wonder and insight."
Place in Steiner's Work
GA 339 belongs to the late, intensely practical phase of Steiner's teaching, the same period that produced his courses for teachers, farmers, doctors, and priests. By 1921 the campaign for the threefold social order had passed its first surge, and Steiner had come to see that the movement often failed less because of its ideas than because of how those ideas were spoken. Poorly chosen words made a living social diagnosis sound like utopian speculation. This course was his response: a training in speech aimed squarely at members who would carry anthroposophy into lecture halls across Europe.
The volume sits alongside his other work on language and expression, such as the speech-formation and eurythmy courses, but it approaches the subject from the side of the thinker rather than the artist. Where those courses examine sound and gesture, GA 339 asks what it means to speak truthfully about the spirit in an age whose language has grown abstract and materialistic. It is also closely tied to the social lectures, since nearly all of its worked examples are drawn from the case for a threefold commonwealth, making the course a bridge between Steiner's social thought and his understanding of consciousness.
The circumstances of publication tell their own story about the volume's place. Steiner never intended these talks for print. They were spoken to a small, specific gathering at a specific moment, and they were first typeset only in 1971, half a century after they were given. The English translation followed in serial form through the newsletter of the Anthroposophical Society in America before appearing as a single book. A reader today therefore meets a text that keeps the loose, conversational texture of an evening's instruction rather than the polished shape of a treatise, which is fitting for a course whose whole argument is that living speech resists being frozen into fixed sentences.
Themes and Structure
The six lectures build a single argument in stages. Steiner begins by insisting that an organism cannot be manufactured or organised from outside; it grows according to its own inner form. The threefold society, he argues, is such an organism, and a speaker who talks about it as though it were a constitution to be drafted has already misrepresented it. The first task of the lecturer is therefore to awaken a feeling for the subject before advancing any argument, since a present-day audience will not know at the outset what to do with an unfamiliar idea.
From this starting point Steiner sketches a history of speech itself. He describes three great stages. The first is beautiful speaking, an inheritance from the ancient Orient, where the inner thought was felt as something separate that a speaker fitted into language much as a sculptor fits a figure into marble; its highest form was the speech of ritual, and the sermon, he suggests, is a faded descendant of that ceremonial speech. The second is correct speaking, the logical clarity that rose with Greek and Roman civilisation as language and thought grew together and grammar hardened into logic. Here the sentence becomes the vessel of the judgment, and the criterion is no longer beauty but adequacy, the exact fit of word to meaning. The third, which Steiner says humanity must now learn, is good speaking: an ethics of speech in which the speaker feels whether a sentence is justified in its particular context, knowing that a statement true in one connection may be misleading in another.
This threefold history is not a piece of antiquarian curiosity. Steiner uses it to locate the modern speaker precisely. The Orient gave humanity beauty of speech; the middle regions of Europe gave correctness and logic; and the task of the present, he holds, is to add an ethical dimension that neither rhetoric nor logic alone can supply. He gives a memorable illustration from the German language, showing how a word like Begriff, meaning concept, still carries in its root the sense of grasping, a trace of an older living feeling for speech as an organism with a life of its own. When that feeling fades, language flattens into a set of interchangeable counters, and the speaker loses the sense that words are anything more than labels.
Much of the course is given to the consequences of this third stage. Because no single word or sentence can fully hold a spiritual reality, Steiner recommends that the speaker characterise a subject from several sides rather than define it once, comparing the method to a photographer who takes four views of a tree to convey its shape. He treats the moral weight of speaking, the danger of the merely useful or "as if" attitude he saw spreading from pragmatist philosophy, and the way a materialistic habit of language quietly distorts even sincere spiritual talk.
The critique of pragmatism is worth pausing on, because it shows how far Steiner's concern reaches beyond technique. He points to the philosophies of William James and their kin, in which truth is treated as whatever proves useful for living, and he warns that this attitude has quietly spread far beyond the philosophers who first named it. When a speaker no longer asks whether a thing is true but only whether it is convenient to assume, the whole tone of speech changes, and the listener feels it even without being able to name what has gone wrong. Against this, Steiner sets the demand that speaking about spiritual matters be lifted into the ethical and, beyond that, toward the reverent. The speaker's honesty about the limits of any single formulation becomes itself a moral act.
The later lectures turn practical, taking up the preparation of a talk, the handling of repetition and rhythm, the effect a speaker has on listeners, and simple exercises for freeing the voice from stiff, ready-made phrasing. Steiner encourages the prospective lecturer to immerse fully in the subject rather than memorise a fixed wording, so that the talk can be reshaped in the moment for the people actually present. Throughout, the guiding conviction is that form must arise from the whole, so that a well-made lecture is as necessary in its shape as a limb is to a living body. The recurring image of the earlobe, which could not be formed even slightly differently without implying a different whole human being, carries the point: genuine speech is not decoration added to a message but the message taking its rightful outward form.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
The following entry in the Thalira glossary draws directly on GA 339. This study guide serves as the hub for that term, and the entry explores the idea in greater depth.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text at the Rudolf Steiner Archive (rsarchive.org), where the lectures appear in Maria St. Goar's English translation. For a printed edition, search the current SteinerBooks catalogue at the SteinerBooks store. Because this was a working course never meant for publication, the English text carries the informal, spoken character of the original, and reading a lecture aloud is often the best way to feel what Steiner meant by good speaking.
Continue Your Study
To place GA 339 within the wider body of Steiner's teaching, several paths open from here.
- Browse the complete Thalira glossary to trace how the vocabulary of anthroposophy connects across volumes.
- Return to the GA Work Library to study the companion social and educational courses from the same period.
- Follow the glossary entry for The Art of Lecturing to see how Steiner's threefold view of speech reaches into daily practice.