A catchword, for Steiner, is a word that has lost its meaning and therefore works suggestively, letting crowds speak significantly while thinking nothing at all.
The Catchword (Schlagwort) in Anthroposophy is a word that has shed its original meaning and now works suggestively on speaker and hearer alike, both convinced that something significant is meant while neither thinks anything at all. Rudolf Steiner analysed the catchword in his 1898 essay On the Psychology of the Phrase, published in the Magazin für Literatur and collected in GA 29 (Collected Essays on Dramaturgy 1889-1900), during his Berlin editorial years before Anthroposophy took form. He held that a word must first lose its meaning in order to become a catchword; its power then rests on a residue that has nothing to do with sense. The catchword is the chief instrument of the thoughtlessness of the crowd, a key chapter of what Steiner called herd psychology (Herdenpsychologie). Modern research on the illusory truth effect studies the same mechanism: repetition, not meaning, makes phrases feel true.
The catchword is the one piece of language Steiner treated as a psychological force rather than a vehicle for thought. Writing for Berlin's literary press in 1898, he asked what remains of a word once its sense is distilled away, and why that meaningless residue gains, in his phrase, the magic power to rule over people who would rather speak than think.
In Steiner's Own Words
A sensible politician uses a word. It has its good sense and its full justification within the context of the version he gives. Now it happens that for a certain time we encounter this word in every political omission in the country to which the politician belongs. When the first sensible politician used it, it had the effect of a spark, because the meaning of the other statements illuminated it. But the countless others who use it do not think of this meaning at all. Bismarck makes a remarkable speech. A speech that is a political act. In this speech he says: “We Germans fear God, but nothing else in the world.” These words have a meaning within his speech. But they continue to have an effect as a catchphrase.
What it Means Today
What Steiner sketched as a chapter of herd psychology, experimental psychology later measured. In 1977, Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein, and Thomas Toppino published a study in the Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior showing that simply repeating a statement across sessions made people rate it as more true, regardless of whether it was. The finding, now called the illusory truth effect, has been replicated for decades; Lisa Fazio and colleagues showed in 2015 that repetition sways judgment even when people already possess the knowledge to know better. This is Steiner's catchword mechanism under laboratory conditions: the phrase works not through its sense but through the fluency of its repetition, and speaker and hearer alike mistake that ease for significance. Steiner's 1898 observation that one would be thought foolish for asking what a catchword means anticipates the finding's sharpest edge, that scrutiny is exactly what the effect suppresses. Thalira synthesis: the catchword is the shadow side of the word itself, language running on borrowed life after thinking has withdrawn from it, and the discipline Steiner later built his path of schooling upon begins here, in the refusal to say more than one thinks.
Steiner also proposed a practice, half in jest: a collection of observations on how catchwords work, a natural history of dead language. Anyone can begin one. Notice which words end conversations rather than open them, which phrases produce satisfied nods that no one present could paraphrase, and which quotations appear on flags, monuments, and editorials stripped of their original context. The exercise engages exactly the organ the catchword lulls to sleep.
Where to Read More