Steiner's name for the reduced state economic activity puts us in, and his reason the economy needs fraternity rather than freedom or equality.
The Subhuman in Economic Life in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the diminished condition a person enters while producing, exchanging, and consuming goods. He introduced it on 23 April 1919 in Stuttgart, in the lecture he called an esoteric prelude to an exoteric consideration of the social question, part of the cycle Spiritual-Scientific Consideration of Social and Pedagogic Questions (GA 192), given while he was campaigning publicly for the threefold social organism. His claim is that economic activity submerges the human being in a stream of life shared with the animal, where instinct carries the work and active thinking largely stops. We do not stop being human, but we cease to be complete human beings, and we pay tribute to the subhuman in us. This is why Steiner assigns fraternity to the economic sphere: freedom belongs to spiritual life, equality to rights life, and only brotherliness can return to the economy what the economy takes.
The subhuman in economic life is not a moral insult. Steiner meant it as a description: buying, selling, making, and consuming draw the soul down into a level of activity we hold in common with animals, where instinct outruns thought. The economy therefore cannot be repaired by asking people to be more awake inside it. It has to be arranged so that the fraternity it lacks arrives through its structure.
In Steiner's Own Words
Do you not feel, my dear friends, that in economic life you are immersed in something that does not allow you to be so fully man as in the rights- or state-life? And it is so in still greater contrast to the life that flows out of your individual talents, out of the individual talents of all mankind. Without, as I said, adopting a false ascetic attitude, one feels with respect to the economic life that we cease to be complete men when we engage in economic activity. We are obliged to pay tribute to that part of us which is sub-human when we concern ourselves with economic life.
What it Means Today
The closest modern witness to what Steiner described is Simone Weil. In December 1934 she took unpaid leave from teaching philosophy and went to work as a machine operator at the Alsthom electrical works in Paris, then at the J. J. Carnaud stamping plant, then at Renault in Boulogne-Billancourt through the summer of 1935, keeping a factory journal throughout. The entries, collected after her death in La Condition ouvrière (Gallimard, 1951), report the submergence Steiner named with unusual precision: attention narrowing to the piece rate, thinking draining out of the hours, and a lasting sense of having been marked. Weil was not writing against work. She was recording what an economic process built without reference to the person does to the person inside it. In L'Enracinement, written in London in 1943 and published in 1949, she named what is owed instead: roots, obligation, and recognition by others, none of which a wage settlement supplies.
Thalira synthesis: Weil wrote the case notes from inside the wound and Steiner located the wound in the structure of the social organism, which is why the two complete each other rather than repeat each other. Weil could not name the remedy in economic terms, and Steiner would never have written the factory journal. Together they say one thing from two ends: because the economic sphere takes something from the human being that it cannot itself give back, fraternity has to be built into how the economy is arranged, through associations of producers, distributors, and consumers who see one another, rather than left to the goodwill of people already submerged.
Where to Read More
- Spiritual-Scientific Consideration of Social and Pedagogic Questions, GA 192
- Find the threefold social order titles at SteinerBooks
- The Chaldean Oracles: Ancient Theurgy and the Fire of the Gods
- Theseus: The Athenian Hero, the Labyrinth, and the Civilising of Chaos
- The Divine Aura: Unlocking the Science of the Halo