In my garden's care and favour
From the East this tree's leaf shows
Secret sense for us to savour
And uplifts the one who knows.
Is it but one being single
Which as same itself divides?
Are there two which choose to mingle
So that each as one now hides?
As the answer to such question
I have found a sense that's true:
Is it not my songs' suggestion
That I'm one and also two?
—J. W. von Goethe, "Ginkgo Biloba" (from Goethe's West-East Divan, 1819)
New in the Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner
The Tension between East and West
Rudolf Steiner
10 lectures at the Second International Congress of the
Anthroposophical Movement, Vienna, June 1–12, 1922 (CW 83)
This dynamic set of lectures (given in 1922 at the second international congress of the anthroposophical movement in Vienna) attempts to lift the veil from modern social and spiritual problems as experienced in the polarities between East and West. Understanding the geographical and spiritual background of world history is vital to any assessment of where we stand in history today—as Steiner points out here and in many other lectures given during and in the years following the First World War.
This volume is an important study not only in the spiritual, cultural, and political relations between East and West but in the very meaning of being human on earth today.
***
Several persuasive books were written to demonstrate that liberty, equality, and fraternity cannot be completely and simultaneously combined within the state. And one must admit that these ingenious arguments do evoke a certain skepticism. In consequence, people once again found themselves face to face with a contradiction imposed by life itself.
Yet it is not the nature of life to avoid contradictions; life is contradictory at every point. It involves the repeated reconciliation of the contradictions that arise. It is in the propagation and reconciliation of contradictions that life consists. It is, therefore, absolutely right that the three great ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity should have been put forward. However, because it was believed in the nineteenth century, and right down to our own times, that everything must be centrally organized, people went off the rails. They failed to perceive that it is of no importance to argue about the way in which the means of production be employed, capitalism developed, etc. What matters is to enable people to arrange their social order so that it accords with the innermost impulses of their being. And in this connection, we must say: We need to comprehend, in a vital way, how liberty should function in spiritual life, as the free and productive development of the personality; how equality should function in the political-legal sphere, where all, jointly and in a democratic manner, must evolve what is due to each individual; and how fraternity should function in the associations, as we have called them.
—Rudolf Steiner, from the lecture “Towards Social Renewal,” in The Tension between East and West (CW 83)
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