Rudolf Steiner: The Man and His Vision

Rudolf Steiner: The Man and His Vision by Colin Wilson; The Aquarian Press, 1985, 176 pages

Review by Frederick J. Dennehy

In the wake of two magisterial biographies of Rudolf Steiner, one written by Christoph Lindenberg in 1992 and translated into English by John McAlice in 2012, and the other written by Peter Selg in 2012, it may be of some interest to examine Colin Wilson’s 1985 popularization entitled "Rudolf Steiner: The Man and His Vision: An Introduction to the Life and Ideas of the Founder of Anthroposophy."

Both Lindenberg’s and (especially) Selg’s biographies have been criticized by some readers as “hagiographies” or “insider” accounts of Rudolf Steiner. No one could accuse Wilson’s book of being an “insider” account, much less a hagiography. Wilson sees Steiner as an ordinary human being possessed of some extraordinary abilities, and approaches him with the insouciance of a British journalist, speculating about his sexual proclivities, and viewing Steiner’s writings and associations with a cold eye on his career ambitions. Nor could this largely impressionistic leapfrogging through the highlights of Steiner’s life be characterized as a scholarly or even an investigative report. Yet in Wilson we do have an experienced writer very sympathetic to many of the points of view of anthroposophy, and one who is well versed in esoteric history. For these reasons, Wilson’s take on Steiner was of interest to me.

Many readers will remember Wilson. He was the 'enfant terrible' who wrote a groundbreaking study of alienation and creativity, "The Outsiders", in his early twenties, and awakened the interest of a wide array of skeptical readers with his comprehensive survey "The Occult: A History", more than a decade later. Wilson was the blue collar voice—a self-taught, bold, unafraid explorer of the paranormal and the esoteric—who went unapologetically wherever his instincts took him. He believed passionately that ordinary reality could and should be transcended. He had faith in powers that “slumber within us,” and was convinced that there is a “Faculty X,” an enhanced sense of reality that can extend consciousness to other times and places, and which in theory can be cultivated by most people, if they would only wake up to its potential.

Colin Wilson was approached by a publisher in the mid-1970s and commissioned to write a book on Rudolf Steiner. He accepted, but after a few weeks wrote “a regretful line” saying that even with the best will in the world, he could not go through with it. In large doses, Steiner “simply infuriated” him.

Why? The first off-putter, for Wilson, was Steiner’s style, which he describes as “unappetizing as dry toast.” But that was not what drove Wilson away. The real problem for Wilson was the “content” of certain texts such as Cosmic Memory, and Steiner’s lectures about King Arthur at Tintagel—writings that struck Wilson on first impression as “so outlandish and bizarre that the reader suspects either a hoax or a barefaced confidence trick.”

Roughly half a decade later, Wilson found that he had to consult Steiner again in order to complete a portion of another book. This renewed pursuit of Steiner led him to some of the early works such as "Goethe’s World View" and "The Philosophy of Freedom". Wilson discovered, to his surprise, that Steiner was a philosopher and cultural historian “of considerable brilliance.” Even more important for Wilson was his gradual realization that Steiner was a writer with a total lack of artifice, not out to impress anybody, but to communicate as honestly as he could. How was he to reconcile the “two Steiners”?

In Wilson’s estimation, what “went wrong” with Steiner, what turned him from an original and accomplished philosopher and psychologist to (in Wilson’s assessment) an often self-deceived occultist, was his decision “to swallow the doctrines of Theosophy in order to gain an audience—rather as a poor man might marry an ugly but wealthy widow.” Wilson is convinced that many of Steiner’s clairvoyant revelations were simply delusions that had become a part of his inner landscape and persisted even after Steiner’s break with the Theosophical Society. He sees Steiner’s theosophical legacy as the Goetheanum, what he calls the “visible church of Anthroposophy,” with its “scriptures,” including "Cosmic Memory", "Karmic Relationships", "Christianity as Mystical Fact", "Rosicrucian Esotericism" and "The Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric". While these “scriptures” may contain some nuggets of insight, they are, in Wilson’s view, peculiar to Steiner, and by virtue of their volume alone constitute a formidable barrier between Steiner and “the intelligent reader.” Steiner’s incandescent energy, and the enormous production of written works that resulted from it, obscured the “clarity and simplicity” of what Wilson takes to be his “basic insight.”

Wilson’s explication of this “basic insight”—that through cultivation of the inner life one can attain “Faculty X”—falls short. For Wilson, Steiner was able to open “the door to the inner universe” through turning his attention toward what Maslow has described as “peak experiences.” But this capacity is essentially not very different from what Wordsworth and Proust experienced. At one point he describes it as a form of “psychometry.” Wilson does not trouble to distinguish between Faculty X and the painstaking process of initiation.

“Faculty X” and the recognition that it could be generally cultivated, for Wilson, was Steiner’s principal contribution to esoteric history. Steiner understood that, through this inner focus, we may become aware that we are the “conductors” of our inner lives. Ordinarily, we are subject to “misery, distress and mental strain,” because we continue to drift into short-sightedness. The cultivation of a deep inner life, of “Faculty X,” will allow us to understand that the problems that typically defeat us are trivialities. Once we have learned to grasp this, we will never forget it. We will find ourselves standing on the threshold of a new spiritual world and developing a power that we never suspected we possessed. “Faculty X” gives us access to reality, rather than the shadow of reality, and also gives us powers, such as the ability to “see” a landscape farther than our unaided senses would allow us, both in time and space. All this is fine. But that is where it stops. Wilson is simply unable to see Steiner in terms beyond the general conceptions that Wilson had held long before he encountered Steiner. He is unable to recognize that what Steiner achieved cannot fit into Wilson’s own preformed categories of experience. He refuses to let Steiner take him anywhere new. In this sense Wilson exhibits the same limitations in grasping Steiner as does Gary Lachman, who for all his breadth of knowledge and insight, reduced Steiner’s clairvoyance to a permutation of something already familiar to him—the hypnagogic state.

Wilson’s biography is disappointing, not so much because of its refusal to treat Steiner as a special case, but because it could have been far more than it is. Wilson’s final assessment of Steiner is positive. He recognizes and celebrates Steiner’s fundamental optimism. He believes that Steiner had discovered an important secret, and that all his books and recorded lectures, even those that Wilson would deem ultra-recondite and partially delusional, contain glimpses of that secret. He admires Steiner for breaking out from the dualistic paradigm of the times. But Wilson himself cannot do the same. Dualism, and its bedfellow, naïve realism, remain central to Wilson’s basic intellectual landscape in his own chase after “Faculty X.” He cannot conceive of, let alone maintain, the distinction between informational content and meditative content, between the literal and the imagistic. He believes that he has the healthy human understanding to grasp esoteric texts without the need to exercise a hygienic development of his consciousness. He celebrates the existence of realms of higher consciousness, but he will not do what it takes to get there. He is fixated upon the results of consciousness rather than the processes of consciousness. He longs for tangible realizations of extraordinary faculties—minor miracles—and when he did not find them in ways that can be expressed in the language of tabloid journalism, he senses failure if not disgrace.

In Wilson’s estimation, Steiner should have stayed with his basic “insight.” Reaching beyond this, using theosophy to propagate his personal vision, becoming a preacher and a spiritual leader, accumulating celebrity and attracting the malice of other celebrities, is what became Steiner’s “tragedy.” The tragedy, I think, is Wilson’s. He speaks passionately of breaking free from the prison of habitual thought, the claustrophobia of reductionism, and while he may escape for a time, he is constantly being brought back to the limited critical perspective of what Owen Barfield calls “an unimaginative man sometime around about the middle of the morning.” While Wilson sees into the promised land, he does not have the wherewithal to get there. He is waiting for transportation when he should have begun the journey on his own two feet.