8 minute read
Reading Steiner
by Jon McAlice
There are many people who feel Rudolf Steiner is difficult to read. They find his language heavy, too Germanic, dated. He neglects to use conventional terminology in a conventional manner. “I now know what anthroposophy is,” said one young woman in a fit of exasperation. “It’s when you take all the ideas you thought you understood, mix them up until they no longer have any relationship to one another or what they once meant, then spew them out again!” She was in her second year of a Waldorf teacher training and had already completed a full course of studies at a German university. She was intelligent, very idealistic, and had just made a significant discovery about Rudolf Steiner’s work. She later confessed the source of her frustration:
Steiner said much the same thing about his work:
He would return to this theme repeatedly during the last year of his life, emphasizing 1) that anthroposophy was in its essence a living reality and, 2) that the way one became acquainted with, embraced and allowed this path to live within one was a key factor in coming to an experience of this living essence.
Without a sense of the living nature of the anthroposophical path and how the way you journey along this path can either allow its teachings to come to life within your being or leaves them lying cold and dormant within the intellect, reading Steiner can indeed be unbearable.
Unless, of course you are content to let his work accompany you through life like a casual acquaintance who is able at times to call your attention to things you would not have otherwise noticed. You can then read him at your ease, gleaning those thoughts which appeal to you as you might glean chestnuts in autumn from an Italian mountainside. These can be stored away and shared with friends when they come to visit.
Anyone who embarks on a serious reading of Steiner’s work soon discovers that he is in a class by himself. He asks of the reader what few other writers require. You cannot read Steiner the way you might approach Noam Chomsky, for instance. Chomsky will look at a social or political phenomenon, use examples to illustrate what from his perspective are essential aspects of it, develop an argument based on these illustrations, then draw a conclusion based on his arguments. In the end, you can choose to agree with him or not, depending on whether you hold his premises to be valid and his argument logically conclusive.
Reading Chomsky is an exhilarating intellectual endeavor. Reading Steiner, the intellect is but the springboard to a completely new experience of reality. As with every human experience, it can only have meaning if the individual is fully present in the experienced encounter.
A critical scholarly approach to Chomsky’s work provides insight into the philosophical foundations of his logical arguments, the sociological underpinning of his world view, and the ethics of his conclusions. When Steiner’s work is approached from this perspective, you only achieve what Steiner warned against: a theoretical analysis of anthroposophy; the dead shadow of a living reality. Autopsies can only be performed on corpses.
There is, however, a growing corpus of literature exploring the parallels between Steiner’s work, that of his contemporaries, and that of those who came after him. There are studies tracing the roots of his thinking back to the work of his predecessors, primarily Goethe and the German idealists. There is unquestionably a place for this kind of comparative historical commentary. Rudolf Steiner was after all a real person, who lived during a specific period of time and as such his work represents one facet in the historicity of human thinking.
A butterfly is only a being of light as long as it is free to live in the movement of the light-filled air. When captured and pinned in a box, it may remain a thing of beauty, but it loses the very qualities that made it so enchanting. Anthroposophy too loses its essential vitality when it becomes the mere object of academic examination.
Steiner cannot be read from a safe distance. He expects his readers to, as it were, pack their bags, lace up their boots, and be prepared to embark on a journey from which they will not return unchanged. It is a journey that challenges the travelers to question everything they have been taught to be true. It will lead them into the depths of their own souls; they will awaken anew to the world around them and, if their courage does not fail them, they will experience the spiritual reality that permeates both themselves and the world coming to expression within them.
Steiner demands not only active readers, but readers who are committed to becoming more intimately involved in their own inner development. At the core of every fruit is the seed of new life. The art of reading Steiner is the path to an experience of your own seed within the fruits of Steiner’s esoteric path. He offers his readers guidance in forging their own paths. His commitment to engaging the basic common sense and thinking capacities of his readers and listeners makes Steiner unique among modern esoteric writers. He took upon himself the challenge of presenting his experiences in and of the spiritual in a way that would make sense to anyone who made the effort to think them through. The thinking reader, following as it were in Steiner’s footsteps, is led by the experience of his own thinking activity to recognition of the validity of Steiner’s description. This experience of validity rooted in the activity of your own thinking allows you to trust Steiner’s presentations even though you are not yet able to experience directly what he describes.
He was seeking neither adoration nor blind devotion; he hoped only that he would be understood.
If one is actively present in the moment when reading Steiner, one finds that he is also present. This may appear to be a strange statement on the surface: Steiner died in 1925, already 90 years ago. Yet think, for example, of the Gettysburg Address. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on Good Friday, April 15, 1864, three years after Rudolf Steiner was born. It is almost impossible, however, to read this short address without experiencing Lincoln as he moved across the ravaged, one-time battlefield, seeing in his heart the valor and suffering of the young men who had fought and died there. His words are so deeply permeated by his experience of the sacrifices brought willingly by so many during the Civil War that this experience lives on in them as a permanent presence; yet at no time does he call attention to the personal dimension of the experience out of which his words were born.
Steiner presents us with a similar problem. One often wishes he would be a bit more human, giving his readers more insight into the minutiae of his life as an initiate. But he doesn’t. Instead he chooses to share only those moments of his life that have a bearing on the development of his anthroposophical work. In this way, the majority of his writings are similar to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: they transcend the personal and, by doing so, become the gateway to a purely individual experience of what lives on in them.
Freeing one’s words from their personal bonds is an act of selflessness. It frees what is said or written from the historical limitations of space, culture, and time. In this sense, the act of overcoming the personal self imbues one’s words with a quality of transcendence. Lincoln’s words at Gettysburg raised the personal pain and valor of the dead and wounded to a place where the conflict between good and evil, where the principles of freedom and democracy command the final sacrifice. His was an emotive transcendence, which allowed him to grasp and articulate eternal principles at work in the drama of the moment. One cannot hear the words of the Gettysburg Address without experiencing the tragic presence of this gaunt and haggard figure, his face etched with the burden of sorrow, his eyes fixed unwaveringly on what he was able to conceive of the eternal.
Steiner’s presence in the active reading of his works is of a different nature. The dramatic moment takes place not on the battlefield or in the clash of opposing principles. It takes place where the human soul is shaken by the inexplicable presence of the eternal within the narrow confines of its own self, where the human I awakens to the paradox of its innate polarity. This is his Gettysburg. Where Lincoln objectified the personal, Steiner shifts the locus of personal experience to the realm of the experience ideal, then goes on to articulate a path towards an existential encounter with the living forces of those ideals.
Lincoln’s presence has the iconic nature of the individual who is able to focus the vortex of historical forces; Steiner’s presence is neither historical nor iconic. His work is imbued with the presence of his spiritual becoming. Reading him is a dialogue between one’s own emerging spirituality and the source of his becoming.
Jon McAlice, a freelance designer and consultant focusing on the creative use of time and space, is co-founder of the Center for Contextual Studies, author of Engaged Community: The Challenge of Self-Governance in Waldorf Education and A Path of Encounter: Meditation, Practice, and the Art of Sensing, and translator of Rudolf Steiner, a Biography by Christoph Lindenberg.
