Steiner's threefold of speech quality, in which good or bad speaking stands as an ethics of the word beyond the beautiful and the merely correct.
Good-, Beautiful- and Correct-Speaking is Rudolf Steiner's threefold measure of how an utterance can be judged. A sentence may be beautiful or ugly, correct or incorrect, and, on a third independent axis, good or bad. Good-speaking is the ethics of the word: a statement can be flawless in logic yet bad because it is unjustified within its living context.
In Steiner's Own Words
That is what I should like to call good speaking or bad speaking. The third form: alongside beautiful and ugly speaking, alongside correct and incorrect speaking, there comes good or bad speaking in the sense in which I have now presented it. Today the view is still widely held that there are sentences which one forms and which one can then speak on every occasion, because they hold absolutely. Such sentences in fact no longer exist for our life in the present. Rather, every sentence that is possible in a certain context is today already impossible for another context. That is to say, we have entered an epoch of humanity's development in which we have need to direct our attention to this many-sidedness of experience.
What it Means Today
The clearest modern echo of Steiner's good-speaking sits in linguistic pragmatics, in the work of the Oxford and Berkeley philosopher Paul Grice. In his William James Lectures at Harvard in 1967, published as "Logic and Conversation" in volume three of Syntax and Semantics (1975) and gathered in Studies in the Way of Words (Harvard University Press, 1989), Grice argued that meaning in conversation runs on a Cooperative Principle and four maxims: Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner. The Maxim of Quality asks the speaker not to say what is false; the Maxim of Relation asks the speaker to be relevant to the living context of the exchange. A sentence can satisfy formal logic and still violate these maxims, saying something true but unwarranted, off-point, or misleading in its setting.
That gap is exactly Steiner's. Correct-speaking answers to logic, the way Grice's truth-condition answers to the proposition. Good-speaking answers to the context, the way a Gricean implicature is judged by what the occasion warrants. Steiner gave his own worked example in the 1922 course at Dornach: he had said that Goethe was, in reality, never born at all, a remark that was apt within the living context of that lecture yet would be, in his words, quite mad if defended as an absolute thesis. The sentence was not incorrect so much as good in one setting and bad in another, which is precisely the distinction formal logic cannot register.
Where the two thinkers part is also where Steiner's term earns its place in spiritual science. Thalira synthesis: where Grice treats the contextual fit of an utterance as a cooperative convention between speakers, Steiner treats it as a moral act of the speaking soul, so that to characterize a matter from many sides, like a photographer taking several aspects of one tree, becomes not just clearer communication but an ethical responsibility toward the listener and the truth. For Steiner this many-sidedness is the proper mode of presentation for anthroposophy itself: no single sentence is adequate, so the speaker circles the subject and lets it show its faces.
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