Freedom, Immortality and Social Life is volume 72 of Rudolf Steiner's collected works, gathering ten public lectures given in Switzerland between 18 October 1917 and 11 December 1918. Eight were delivered in Basel and two in Bern, and all of them were addressed to general audiences rather than to an initiated membership. The three words of the title name the three questions the series keeps circling: whether the human being is free, whether anything in us outlasts the body, and how a spiritual view of the human being bears on the social conflicts that were tearing Europe apart while Steiner spoke. What holds the three together is a claim about method. Steiner argues that a science of the soul can reach all three questions honestly, without either borrowing its answers from religious tradition or surrendering them to the physiology of the brain.
Place in Steiner's Work
These lectures belong to the wartime Swiss years, when Steiner was building the first Goetheanum at Dornach and lecturing across neutral Switzerland to audiences that included academics, clergy and the merely curious. The timing matters for reading them. In 1917 Steiner published his account of the human organism as a threefold structure, with nerve and sense activity, rhythmic activity, and metabolic activity each carrying a different side of soul life. GA 72 is where that finding first meets a public audience in sustained form, argued rather than asserted, and set against the psychology of the day by name.
The volume also sits directly upstream of Steiner's social period. The last four lectures fall in the autumn and winter of 1918, in the weeks around the collapse of the Central Powers, and the social material grows noticeably sharper as the series proceeds. Readers who know the threefold social order of 1919 will recognise its seedbed here: the insistence that spiritual life, legal life and economic life follow different laws, and that a social theory which models society on a biological organism has already made its first mistake. GA 72 is therefore a useful bridge volume. It is late enough to carry the mature anthroposophical anthropology, and early enough that Steiner still troubles to justify every step to sceptics.
Because the lectures were public, they are unusually accessible. Steiner assumes no prior vocabulary, quotes the philosophers his listeners would have read, and repeats the core arguments across the ten evenings from different angles. For a reader coming to the collected works without a background in the earlier basic books, this volume is a fair place to test whether the method persuades.
Themes and Structure
The opening lectures take aim at a theory Steiner considered the great evasion of academic psychology: the doctrine that soul processes and bodily processes run alongside one another like two parallel streams, each complete in itself, neither acting on the other. He names Wilhelm Wundt, Hermann Ebbinghaus and Friedrich Paulsen among its adherents, and treats it as a confession of defeat dressed as a result. Against it he sets a positive account, and the account begins somewhere unexpected: with death.
Steiner opens the series by citing the philosopher Karl Fortlage, who in eight lectures on psychology given in 1869 had written:
Consciousness is a small and partial death; death is a great and total consciousness, an awakening of the whole being in its innermost depths.Karl Fortlage, quoted by Steiner in the first lecture
Steiner takes this as more than an aphorism. Ordinary waking consciousness, he argues, is purchased by a continual small dying in the nervous system: growth and nourishment are held back there so that awareness can arise in the space they vacate. The body is not the soul's instrument and not its parallel shadow. The soul first builds the body, then begins to consume it, and consciousness is the light thrown off by that consumption. Death on this reading is not the opposite of awareness but its full form.
The middle lectures set out the training that lets a person check the claim. Steiner describes an exercise of retrospection in which an experience is not examined while it is fresh, because bodily sensation is still bound up in it, but after two or three days have passed, when it has separated from the organism and can be met as pure soul content. He connects this interval to the review of life that he describes as following physical death. Alongside it he notes a strange feature of supersensible perception: what is seen there does not lodge in memory as sense experience does. The knower must reproduce the inner activity that reached it, each time, rather than recalling a picture. Steiner treats this failure of memory as evidence rather than embarrassment, since it shows that the content in question is not stored in the body.
A further thread reworks the old triad of thinking, feeling and willing. Steiner argues that only thinking is fully awake in us. Feeling has the character of dreaming, and willing the character of sleep, so that even in broad daylight two thirds of our inner life is conducted below the threshold of clear awareness. Franz Brentano, whom Steiner calls the most significant philosopher of the present and who had died earlier that year, is discussed at length as the thinker who came closest to the problem from the academic side.
The social lectures apply the same method outward. Steiner criticises Herbert Spencer's attempt to derive social structure from embryology, mapping the military, commercial and agricultural classes onto the three germ layers, and shows what such an analogy smuggles in: if the nervous system grows from the outer layer, the militarised state must be the highest social organ. Against this he sets a reading of history in which what is bought and sold in human labour has changed by stages. In antiquity the whole person was sold; under modern conditions only labour power is sold, priced like any commodity; and Steiner argues that this second stage will be overcome as the first was, by historical necessity rather than by sentiment. The closing lecture reaches the most human of his arguments, that everyone already knows the cognitive attitude required, because it is what happens when one person meets another in genuine love and interest.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
Nine entries in the Thalira glossary draw on GA 72. Together they map the volume's argument from its account of consciousness through to its social conclusions.
- Consciousness as Partial Death: the founding thesis of the series, that awareness arises where organic building-up is held back.
- The Body as a Creation of the Soul: the reversal of the usual order, in which the soul is the builder and the body the built.
- Psychophysical Parallelism: the academic theory Steiner names and rejects across the opening lectures.
- The Two-to-Three-Day Ripening of Experience: the interval after which an experience has loosened from the body enough to be observed as soul.
- The Non-Rememberability of Spiritual Experience: why supersensible content must be re-enacted rather than recalled.
- Dreaming Feeling and Sleeping Will: the graded wakefulness of the three soul activities.
- Love as Everyday Clairvoyance: the one situation in which ordinary people already exercise the faculty in question.
- Goetheanism: the name Steiner says he would prefer for his whole worldview, and the source of the Goetheanum's name.
- The Three Stages of Human Labour: slavery, wage labour, and what Steiner expects to succeed them.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts English translations of the lectures in this volume alongside the wider collected works. The archive is free to use and searchable, which makes it the practical starting point for anyone following a theme across several volumes.
For a printed edition, or to check what is currently available in English translation, search the publisher's catalogue at SteinerBooks. Print availability for the public lecture cycles changes from year to year, so it is worth checking directly rather than relying on an older bibliography.
Continue Your Study
- Follow the argument term by term through the Thalira glossary, which defines the concepts above in their own entries and cross-references the passages where Steiner develops them.
- Browse the GA Work Library to place this volume among its neighbours and to find the earlier basic books that GA 72 assumes without naming.
- If the social lectures interest you most, begin with The Three Stages of Human Labour and read forward into Steiner's writings of 1919, where the same analysis becomes a concrete proposal.
- If the epistemology interests you most, start from Psychophysical Parallelism and work back through the problem as academic psychology framed it.