Threefold Systems in Dumézil, Steiner and Stirner
PIETER Bruegel the Elder's depiction of the medieval paradise, The Land of Cockaigne (1567), features a clerk, a peasant and a warrior and represents three ‘functions’ of Indo-European society. Set around a tree, which acts as the central hub, the figures in the engraving represent the spokes of a wheel, although the fourth position - that of the noble - has been taken by a roasted fowl.
One critic has suggested that Bruegel intended his work to lampoon the bourgeois complacency of the Dutch in the third quarter of the sixteenth century. The tripartite composition of Indo-European society has been discussed at length by the French philologist, Georges Dumézil (1898-1986), although his lifelong contention that a trifunctional system is a fundamental hallmark of Aryan society was criticised by J. P. Mallory (b. 1945) in his 1989 work, In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and Myth. In contrast to Dumezil's insistence that it represents part of our unique social identity, Mallory believes that it is a more universal concept and therefore not confined to the Indo-Europeans at all.
Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), on the other hand, who began formulating his theory of social ‘threefolding’ shortly after the end of the First World War, also believed in universal solutions, but his approach was somewhat different. Beginning with the biological premise that the human organism is comprised of three independent systems that co-operate with one another - namely, our ‘nerves-and-senses activity,’ the ‘rhythmic processes’ and the ‘metabolic system’ - he went on to explain how this could act as a blueprint for what he described as mankind's ‘economic life,’ ‘rights life’ and ‘cultural life’. Rather than divide people in accordance with some kind of class pyramid, Steiner wished to see a form of self-management in which we participate in each of the three spheres but continue to retain our independence. In the newly-translated edition of his 1991 text, The Threefolding Movement, 1919: A History, Albert Schmelzer explains that Steiner
“expressly defined himself therefore against Plato's ancient conception of an estates-state. While in the Platonic society human beings were to be divided up into three classes of scholars, soldiers, and farmers, society in threefolding is itself articulated into members in a manner that allows every individual to collaborate in a self-determining way in the life of the three areas” (p.53).
The map of the human organism becomes transposed into human society as a result of it being comprised of three systems that co-operate yet nonetheless maintain their autonomy. Steiner, who was strongly influenced by his anarcho-individualist predecessor, Max Stirner (1806-1856), was essentially fulfilling the so-called ‘Union of Egoists’ method that the latter had set out in The Ego and Its Own (1844). In Stirner's own words,
“only individuals can enter into union with each other, and all alliances and leagues of peoples are and remain mechanical compoundings, because those who come together, at least so far as the ‘peoples’ are regarded as the ones that have come together, are destitute of will. Only with the last separation does separation itself end and change to unification.”
As I explained in my book, The Self Unleashed: Max Stirner and the Politics of the Ego (2017):
“Rather than accept the abstraction of ‘community,’ the egoist sees only inequality and the potential to either use or ignore one's counterparts. This relationship does not have to be exploitative, however, because egoists are capable of forming unions as a means of fulfilling their mutual objectives. Such unions are not based on religious fervour or liberal values, by which the individuals themselves are bound to an ideal, and nor do they have to be centred around a family or tribe, because the union itself is owned by the individual and becomes his property in pursuit of what he needs. Neither God, humanity, state, nation, family or community allow for this kind of individual freedom.” (pp.103-4).
Stirner went on to say that
“You bring into a union your whole power, your competence, and make yourself count; in a society you are employed, with your working power; in the former you live egoistically, in the latter humanly, that is, religiously, as a ‘member in the body of this Lord’; to a society you owe what you have, and are in duty bound to it, are - possessed by ‘social duties’; a union you utilize, and give it up undutifully and unfaithfully when you see no way to use it further. If a society is more than you, then it is more to you than yourself; a union is only your instrument, or the sword with which you sharpen and increase your natural force; the union exists for you and through you, the society conversely lays claim to you for itself and exists even without you; in short, the society is sacred, the union your own; the society consumes you, you consume the union.”
Like Steiner, the importance of threefold systems was part of Stirner's philosophy and his work was divided into a trio of important developmental stages: non-intellectual (child), intellectual (youth) and egoistic (man).