A Treatise on Living Thinking

Review of A Treatise on Living Thinking: A Path Beyond Western Philosophy, Beyond Yoga, Beyond Zen, by Massimo Scaligero, translated by Eric L. Bisbocci; Lindisfarne Books, 2014; 103 pages

by Fred Dennehy

Massimo Scaligero (1906-1980) is a somewhat shadowy figure to anthroposophists in America. Some may have heard of him as one of a cadre of fascist anthroposophists in Italy who (according to anthroposophist critic Peter Staudenmaier), during the 1930s and 1940s, wrote numerous articles endorsing antisemitism and Nazi Germany’s “decisive racist campaign,” and purveyed visions of a “noble Roman heritage” and “the solar tradition” it supposedly embodied. According to Staudenmaier, Scaligero depicted World War II as a racial conflict, stated that only the victory of the “Aryan race” could reintegrate spirituality into human life, and said that Jews spread “Ahrimanic, sub-human, and materialistic” forces throughout the world.

Staudenmaier’s writings are heavily slanted against anthroposophy, and he writes like a high school debater, eager to present the evidence for one side and to conceal the rest. I have no reason to believe that Staudenmaier’s references to Scaligero’s early writings are wrong. It is not known to me, however, that Scaligero continued in later life to espouse his wartime points of view. There is some anecdotal evidence that he underwent a conversion experience after the war. I am also aware that Georg Kühlewind was a close colleague and friend of Scaligero from 1969 until Scaligero’s death in 1980. Kühlewind was Jewish.

Others will be familiar with Scaligero as an anthroposophical thinker who had significant influence on Kühlewind. In a biographical statement that was included in “Stages of Consciousness” in 1984, Kühlewind wrote:

In 1969, I met Massimo Scaligero, the Italian anthroposophical thinker. As a matter of fact, our real and effective meeting did not occur personally, but only through his books after personal acquaintance. Out of this, a deep and helpful friendship emerged which still lasts after his death—he died in 1980—although there was more than one question on which we did not agree. Our agreement was perfect, however, concerning questions of knowing and the inner path.

Relatively few American anthroposophists have read Scaligero, despite the fact that Steiner Books has published "The Light" (La Luce) in 2001, "The Secrets of Space and Time" in 2013 and, most recently, "A Treatise on Living Thinking". Still fewer, I suspect, have read a Scaligero book to completion. All three of these books, as translated by Eric Bisbocci, employ an intricate syntax and a sliding vocabulary that forces the reader to reread again and again. The text of "A Treatise on Living Thinking" will appear on first reading to be extraordinarily repetitious. Unlike Kühlewind, Scaligero does not provide the reader with familiar examples of the modes of thinking he speaks of, or any basic “how to” advice. Although one is urged most enthusiastically to engage in “living thinking,” there is no specific prescription for how to do so.

But "A Treatise on Living Thinking" is a powerful book. It speaks out of the present, and has the clear ring of authenticity. Just as meditation upon a phrase or a sentence consists not in coming to “understand” that phrase or sentence, but in realizing it, the “concatenation of thoughts” in this book is “assembled in such a way that the retracing of it begins to be the experience proposed.” Scaligero urges us, by abandoning the pervasively dialectical movement of our ordinary thinking, and by employing forces of the “I” schooled through concentration, to experience pensiero vivente, or “living thinking.” "A Treatise on Living Thinking" is woven out of Scaligero’s own non-linear, meditative experience, and it is his hope that the readers’ “retracing of the thoughts assembled in this book” will begin to yield the very experience the book proposes to the reader.

The “argument” of the book is similar to that of Rudolf Steiner’s The Philosophy of Freedom. Scaligero, however, is not interpreting Steiner, but recounting his own independent and parallel experiments in thinking.

Scaligero begins "A Treatise on Living Thinking" with a daunting “Premise”:

The present treatise, even if logically formulated and accessible, proposes a task that, most likely, can be actualized by very few individuals.

For Scaligero, a theme or an object is always something already thought, and as such, abstract, dialectical, and reflected from a living thinking now lost. It is “the substance of a dead culture” inhabited by those who no longer think in thoughts, but in words or in numerical correlations. It is—in Scaligero’s word—“non-existent.”

What is “already thought” can again become “thinking.” This resurrection of the “already thought” is “thinking in the act of reflecting itself” (pensiero pensante), but pensiero pensante alone does not permit us to exit the redundant circle of reflectivity. Only if we can cognize this activity, if we can perceive (through concentration) the dynamic moment of its life, which is “continually disappearing,” may we ascend to “pure” or “living” thinking. Living thinking is the experience of thinking in its dynamis, or primal force, before it dies into “reflectivity.” We may “attain” it through concentration or meditation, both of which require our release from sensory bondage.

To realize living thinking, we cannot be mere “passive receptors” of earthly experience. We have to become. We have to be “cooperators in the fulfillment of earthly experience.” And this task demands of us a radical metanoia. We have to pass from being merely created, nature-dependent beings to free beings who create according to our own principle. That principle is the Logos. All creatures, including the rest of humankind, who are bound to earthly conditions, wait in suffering for us to liberate them by changing ourselves in this way.

Scaligero cites the “greatest modern teacher of thinking,” Rudolf Steiner, to confirm his own experience that the inner realization of the transformative discipline of spiritual practice requires concentration (1). Concentration restores, even if only momentarily, the dominion of the “I.” We realize that dominion by willing a theme as a means to “unify and intensify the normal current of thinking.” When we turn our attention totally to a theme or an image or a concept, thought “discovers its own original unity,” which is the force of the “I.”

Ordinarily, thought is under the control of the astral body. Only when the “I” is active do we experience direct knowledge of the suprasensory. The “I” must be fully present and realized if “chaos” is not to rule. But experiencing chaos—which manifests as neurosis, mental illness, and unhealthy experiences of all kinds—may provoke the counter intuition that consciousness can actually arrive at the origin of the thinking activity. It may arouse the transcendent forces of the “I,” so that they can incarnate in us. A discipline that avoids the breakdown of higher forces into “reflected thought” can give thinking a way to unfold according to the direction of the “I.” This discipline, in fact, is anthroposophy, what Scaligero refers to as “the path of thinking of the new times.”

Living thinking is limitless, and not subject to logic, dialectic, or “spiritualist” intellectualism. Its transcendence becomes immanent at the point where thought “actualizes the power of the resurrection and genuinely overcomes death.” This transcendence is the Logos, “whose light alone can restore the original divine nature to the soul.”

The light of thinking becomes life and finally becomes the love of the world. “The warmth of instincts becomes the power of love.” Thus, the ultimate “purpose” of living thinking, of “thought’s transcendence gathered in its everyday immanence,” is to “transform evil into good,” to “dissolve the darkness of the human psyche” into light. It is the power of love, “which incarnates in thought’s transcendence,” as the Logos itself has incarnated.

It is fatuous to judge a spiritual path by a kind of moral litmus test of its proponent. But one hopes that Scaligero’s experience of the living thinking that leads to the power to transform evil into love (in terms of the John Gospel, the transformation of aletheia into charis) came after he had abandoned the antisemitism and the enthusiasm for Nazi doctrine that he exhibited during the war years. Otherwise, the experience Scaligero recounts can be at best only a seeing in part, “through a glass darkly.”

Fred Dennehy is an attorney in practice in New Jersey, serving as General Counsel to a large law firm and specializing in professional responsibility. He earned a PhD in English and in recent years has performed in more than a dozen Shakespeare plays. He is a classholder in the School for Spiritual Science and editor for reviews in being human.

1 For Scaligero, at the moment when concentration “grasps the very process of thinking that lies at the heart” of any inner technique, it has become a path “beyond” that technique, whether the technique be philosophy, yoga, zen, or something else.