The two soul forces Steiner made preconditions of effective public work: genuine love for the cause itself, and insightful love for the people addressed.
Love for the Cause and Love for Humanity in Anthroposophy is the pair of soul forces Rudolf Steiner named as the precondition of effective work for the threefold social organism, stated in the opening lecture of his Stuttgart course of 12 February 1921, collected as GA 338, How Can We Work for the Impulse of the Threefold Social Order? The first, Liebe zur Sache, is a real love for the matter itself, the only thing that lets a spoken judgment carry inner conviction. The second, Menschenliebe, is an insightful love for the fellow human beings being addressed. Steiner calls the two imponderables: unspoken qualities that accompany speech and decide its effect. Where ambition or vanity stands in their place, he says, the most logically unimpeachable argument still fails to work. In present-day terms the pair describes a speaker's inner condition as a working variable, not a private virtue.
Love for the cause and love for humanity are the two basic soul forces Steiner asked of anyone speaking publicly for the threefold social organism. He puts them before technique and before content: the argument must still be sound, yet without these two it lands flat. They are conditions of the speaker, checkable before a single word is said.
In Steiner's Own Words
But there are also other things that must characterize our speech, and these are precisely the two soul qualities of which I spoke: real love for the cause, which alone can carry inner conviction, and love for humanity. Of course, these two soul forces cannot replace what the content of the spoken word is. The content of the spoken word must, of course, be unimpeachable. But it has no effect if it is not supported by the two soul forces that I have mentioned. Therefore, today, when we are more inclined to dismiss, I would say, the formalities, it must be said that we must bear in mind the extent to which we have these two forces present in our souls.
What it Means Today
Carl Rogers published The Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of Therapeutic Personality Change in the Journal of Consulting Psychology in 1957, and reached a structurally similar claim from clinical data. Rogers held that change in a client followed not from the therapist's technique or school, but from three conditions in the therapist: congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding. Method came second; the practitioner's inner state came first. Person-centred training since then, beginning at the University of Chicago Counseling Center Rogers founded in 1945, cultivates those conditions rather than scripting the session.
Steiner had made the same demotion for the public speaker thirty-six years earlier. Love for the cause corresponds to congruence, the speaker actually holding what the speaker says. Love for humanity corresponds to positive regard joined to insight into the listener's real situation, which Steiner treats separately when he warns his audience against carrying illusions about the people they will address.
Thalira synthesis: Rogers measured these conditions from the client's side and Steiner named them from the speaker's side, so the 1957 finding is outside corroboration of an imponderable Steiner had already made a working requirement in 1921.
The practical use is a pre-speech audit rather than a rhetorical one. Before a meeting or a class, ask which of the two forces is actually present, and whether ambition or vanity has taken the place of either.
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