Steiner and Kindred Spirits

Steiner and Kindred Spirits, by Robert McDermott. SteinerBooks, 2016.

Review by Terry Hipolito

This is Professor McDermott’s long awaited volume on Rudolf Steiner. Many readers of these pages of a certain age will certainly recall the earlier (1984) "The Essential Steiner" (and a revised second edition, "The New Essential Steiner", 2009) which made the most crucial of Steiner’s thoughts, with informed and erudite commentary, available to those of us striving to get into focus a clear picture of anthroposophy.

McDermott’s unique qualifications as an anthroposophical editor and commentator are still in particular evidence in this new volume which consists of wholly original writing. McDermott, in his scholarly life, has specialized in nineteenth century American philosophy and in Asiatic spirituality, especially Tibetan Buddhism and the Indian traditions surrounding Krishna. He is familiar with the works of German Romantic philosophy, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Sri Aurobindo, Rabindranath Tagore, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, C. G. Jung, Mahatma Gandhi, Desmond Tutu, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and many others. His probably unique expertise with these traditions and authors together with a profound study of anthroposophy give Rudolf Steiner and Kindred Spirits its primary strength. These nineteenth and twentieth century savants add a dimensionality to the consideration of anthroposophy that one simply cannot find elsewhere. The result is a unique perspective on anthroposophy as a profoundly cultural phenomenon, instead of, as is more usual, a monolithic accomplishment in spiritual science.

"Kindred Spirits" employs this vast and diverse cast of thinkers to shed light on the equally vast and diverse work of Rudolf Steiner. I have spent several years grazing in the lush pastures of anthroposophy and have yet to encounter so nourishing a source for considering the cultural milieu of anthroposophy as McDermott’s new work. We have of course had many close readings of Steiner’s works and syntheses of their contents; and we have also many speculative studies which attempt to put spiritual science into practice.

But never, it seems to me, has there been a volume which places Steiner so fully into his cultural context. In McDermott’s book this context is not merely full but overflowing.

There are far too many important insights which this study inspires to attempt even a full list in this space, much less a discussion of the list. The following, however, should give an indication of the structure of this study and some sense of its scope: The book has twelve chapters, the first two of them introductory and the final one concludes with “Spiritual Practice.” Between these are nine chapters on discursive topics, generally ranging from the abstract to the concrete. The third chapter places Steiner in the context of the spiritual philosophers of the so-called American Renaissance: Emerson, William James, and Royce. The fourth chapter takes on evolution of consciousness with a discussion of Hegel as the overall originator of the topic and including Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin. These thinkers are really only introductory; a full discussion of Steiner’s theory of evolution includes consideration of the planet, of the human race generally and of separate human cultural streams. This background makes it clear how much Steiner has contributed to the still strangely neglected topic of the evolution of consciousness. The fifth chapter compares Krishna, Buddha and Christ. These are topics which Steiner discussed and included in his overall vision; McDermott is perhaps uniquely qualified to compare these very diverse figures and to show how they truly interacted in the twentieth century and still continue to do so. The sixth chapter examines the immemorial topic of wisdom. The modern history of this topic is in itself vast. McDermott takes up the resurgence of Sophia in our times, Roman Catholic “sophiology,” the divine feminine and feminism, and of course Rudolf Steiner’s doctrine of Sophia, especially including Anthroposophia.

The succeeding four chapters are on more traditional topics: good, evil, and suffering; social justice; education; art and aesthetics; and ecology. The topic of good and evil compares Buber, Jung, and then Steiner’s descriptions of Lucifer, Ahriman, and the Christ. Social justice builds to threefolding by consideration of Gandhi, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr., the Dalai Lama, and Desmond Tutu; this is a must read for all of those for whom threefolding occurs as a monolith outside of time and tradition. The chapter on education compares Dewey, Montessori, and the Waldorf movement; it is in essence a history of pedagogy in the twentieth century. The discussion of art and aesthetics limits itself largely to Rabindranath Tagore and Steiner, with special consideration of art as a spiritual activity. There is emphasis in this chapter on eurythmy, on the architecture of the first Goetheanum, and on the sculpture of the Representative of Humanity. The eleventh chapter is on ecology, a topic which did not exist, at least by that name, in Steiner’s day. McDermott convincingly shows that Steiner, although he was active before the ecological movement, anticipated it and is in some ways still in advance of it; the twentieth century, for example, hardly began to deal with biodynamic agriculture. This chapter includes consideration of Teilhard de Chardin, and the contemporary ecologists Thomas Berry (1914-2009) and Sean Kelly.

The final chapter is entitled “Spiritual Practice.” It is an ambitious essay, worth the price of admission by itself, including discussions of Sri Aurobindo, the Dalai Lama, the Catholic Mass, Emerson, Jung, and Teilhard de Chardin. It concludes with consideration of the Act of Consecration of Man as celebrated in the Christian Community, and just how this is anthroposophical; finally there is a personal essay from McDermott on his own faith and how it has been influenced by the Christian Community and anthroposophy.

McDermott’s profound and clear study of Rudolf Steiner seems likely to remain relevant and useful for generations. He shows forcefully and perhaps definitively the intellectual and cultural milieu in which Steiner created the manifold of topics and activities involved in the development of anthroposophy. This it seems to me marks the first of two necessary steps for anthroposophy, now a century on from its birth, to join finally the mainstream of world culture. Rudolf Steiner and Kindred Spirits creates the cultural context which informed—that is, gave formation to—anthroposophy beginning a century or so before 1925. McDermott’s work is, in short, indispensable for anyone truly wishing to comprehend anthroposophy as a product of world culture.

As fascinating to me, and perhaps as important absolutely, is McDermott’s extension of anthroposophy into contemporary life, which it seems to me is the second of the essential steps to place anthroposophy into world culture. He is exemplary in explaining the nineteenth century background but also successfully seeks to project anthroposophy into the twenty-first century.

This is especially true in the chapter on ecology, a topic which did not clearly exist in Steiner’s time and which has obviously not yet concluded; McDermott here includes a description of Sean Kelly’s “integral ecology.” Professor Kelly is a colleague of McDermott; although he is apparently not an anthroposophist, he is clearly a fellow traveler, and his ideas are entirely relevant to and illuminative of McDermott’s project. There is a need for more such perspectives on anthroposophy as it still influences developments in contemporary culture.

In this way McDermott’s fine example might serve as inspiration for further work investigating how cultural developments since 1925 intersect with the findings of anthroposophy. For example, in several passages Steiner seems insistent that mathematics provides bedrock knowledge. Meanwhile developments in the twentieth century such as group theory, fuzzy logic, and category theory strongly suggest, it seems to me, that anthroposophy’s relationship to mathematics might fruitfully be reconsidered. Much the same might well be true of the revolutionary developments in physics since 1925, as the very boundaries between physical and spiritual science seem to have become increasingly questionable. Less obvious perhaps is a relation between physical and spiritual evolution. In spite of embellishments on Darwin such as “punctuated equilibrium” and “evo-devo” there is still no explanation I know of how, for example, the development of fangs and efficient hunting techniques might develop at once randomly and in parallel. A final example should more than suffice for this essay. The entire discipline of linguistics has developed within the general phenomenon of structuralism since 1950; one aspect of this has not been fully explored, although the Indo-European languages alone abundantly illustrate the evolution of tense, number, and agency, no doubt among many other steps in the evolution of consciousness.

These are just a few, although vast, areas that seem to me to call for thorough research. It is owing to fine work such as McDermott’s that such questions can enter the light after the long night of positivist materialism.

Terry Hipolito (tahipolito@earthlink.net) had his intellectual introduction to anthroposophy through the first edition of "The Essential Steiner". Professor McDermott’s background in philosophy and religion qualifies him, almost uniquely, to appreciate Steiner as spiritual historian, which was Hipolito’s primary focus when he emerged with flightless wings from the chrysalis of graduate study. Hipolito became (anathema) a software developer, part of the artificial intelligentsia, and student of medieval literature, but he remains fascinated by and indebted to McDermott’s unique qualifications.