Common Language (Folk Spirit)

Submitted by Tom Last on Tue, 09/04/2007 - 10:55am.

I found 12 aspects to community building in Awakening to Community, Lecture VI by Rudolf Steiner. They are listed below. This is part 2 of a 12 part series.

People tend not to work harmoniously together. A Folk Spirit brings about a kind of harmony through common ethnic, cultural, and national characteristics. Using terms understood by others and working toward a commonly understood language is a community building element.

Community Building


1. Intellectual Division
2. Common Language (Folk Spirit)
3. Common Life Memories
4. Common Cosmic Memories
5. Awaken In Encounter With Nature
6. Awaken In Encounter With Soul-Spirit Of Another
7. Consciously Lift Ourselves To The Ideal Level (reversed cultus)
8. Presence Of Spiritual Being
9. Community Of Spirit
10. Community Building Force
11. Justification Of Points Of View
12. Reach Clarity Through Objective and Impersonal Discussion

Awakening to Community
by Rudolf Steiner, Lecture VI p.92

Common Language (Folk Spirit)
Now there is one kind of community in human life that everyone over the entire globe is aware of, and it shows that community is something built into humankind. It is a type of community to which a lot of attention is being given in modern cultural and even political and economic life, and this in an often harmful way. But there is a lesson of sorts to be learned from it, though a primitive one.

In a child's early years it is introduced into a human community that is absolutely real, concrete and human, a community without which one could not exist. I am referring to the community of human speech. Speech is the form of community that we might say nature presents to our contemplation. Speech - and especially our mother tongue - is built into our whole being at a time when the child's etheric body is not yet born, and it is our first experience of the community building element. 

We can lay it to the rationalism of our age that though people nowadays have some feeling for languages and nationality and conceive folk groups in relation to the language they speak, they do so from the political-agitational standpoint, without paying any heed to deep and intimate underlying soul configurations, to the tremendous aspects of destiny and karma attached to a language and to the spirit behind it, all of which are the real and intrinsic reasons why human beings cry out for community. 

What would become of us if we passed one another by without hearing resounding in the others words the same life of soul that we ourselves put into those same words when we use them? If everybody were to practice just a little bit of self-knowledge, we would be able to form an adequate picture, which I cannot take the time to develop now, of all we owe to language as the foundation of a first, primitive building of community.

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