Steiner's teaching that spirit-self, life-spirit, and spirit-man find their first earthly beginnings inside cultural life, the rights sphere, and economic associations.
The Higher Members and the Three Social Spheres in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's teaching that the three future members of the human being, spirit-self (Geistselbst), life-spirit (Lebensgeist), and spirit-man (Geistesmensch), find their first earthly footholds in the three members of the social organism. In a Stuttgart lecture of 22 November 1920, published in Polarities in the Evolution of Mankind (GA 197), Steiner taught that spirit-self begins where knowledge becomes personal again in cultural life, life-spirit where law arises from living human relationships rather than written constitutions, and spirit-man, in its first beginnings, through associations in economic life. Because these members belong to the future Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan stages of evolution, the earth alone cannot develop them; Steiner tied their beginnings to the Christ impulse working in social forms. Associative economies such as Sekem in Egypt work with this picture today.
The Higher Members and the Three Social Spheres names the crossing point of Steiner's anthropology and his social thought. The ego was formed by the earth, but spirit-self, life-spirit, and spirit-man belong to worlds the earth cannot supply. Steiner therefore looked for their first traces inside human institutions themselves: a cultural life of personal knowledge, a rights life of living agreement, an economic life of association.
In Steiner's Own Words
In the sphere of rights, then, people must become followers of the Silver King. In economic life, on the other hand, they must become followers of the Brazen King. This means no more and no less than that the abstract ideal of brotherhood or companionship must become something real. How can companionship become real? By associating, by truly uniting with the other person, by no longer fighting people with different interests but instead combining those different interests. Associations are the living embodiment of companionship. The life-spirit must be alive in the sphere of rights, and with the Christ spirit brought into economic life, spirit-man will come to life in its first beginnings through associations. The earth, however, yields none of this. Human beings will only come to this if they let the Christ, who is now approaching in the ether, enter into their hearts and minds and souls.
What it Means Today
Steiner's boldest claim in this lecture, that spirit-man should show its first beginnings in the economic sphere, the realm his own students were most tempted to look down on, has a working demonstration in Egypt. In 1977 the pharmacologist Ibrahim Abouleish founded Sekem on desert land roughly sixty kilometres northeast of Cairo, shaping it consciously on Steiner's threefold picture. Its economic core became an association: biodynamic farms and companies such as ISIS Organic, Naturetex, and Atos Pharma, bound to hundreds of supplying farmers through long-term agreements on price and quality rather than spot-market bidding. That is companionship made real through associating, in the exact sense of GA 197. Around this core Sekem set cultural life in its own organs: schools, a medical centre, and, since 2012, Heliopolis University for Sustainable Development. In 2003 the Right Livelihood Award honoured Sekem and Abouleish, who died in 2017, for joining commercial success with social and cultural development.
The Thalira synthesis: this teaching moves the higher members out of private meditation and into the ways strangers agree, trade, and learn together, so that social forms become the earth's first organs for capacities the earth itself cannot grow.
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