Rudolf Steiner: Towards an Architecture of Social Transformation

by John Bloom

In introducing any aspect of Rudolf Steiner’s work, it important to be clear from the outset that through his insights he not only pushed the boundaries of what we know, but also how we know. He offered guidance for both through his lectures, writings, and leadership during his lifetime. His spiritual worldview was cosmological in scope, yet much of his work focused on practical ways to be in the world with awareness of how spiritual forces are at work in and through it.

He urged his audiences to be interested in current affairs and states of knowledge, as he was, even while he often pointed out their limitations. In particular, self-development as a basis for knowing the world and the capacity for imaginative or intuitive thinking were at the heart of his hopes for anyone interested in grasping the spiritual foundation of knowledge. This approach is as relevant to understanding the nature of the human being as it is to re-enlivening the fields of agriculture, education, natural science, the arts, or, in the case of this essay, economics, money, and how best to organize our societies.

Through lectures in his own time, and in the transcriptions and writings that remain for us, Steiner asked repeatedly to be understood rather than believed. I think he also knew that the path of understanding would be the more difficult of the two, especially because it requires discipline and a continual openness to self-development. Such inner work can lead to a transformation of consciousness informed by multiple modalities of knowing—observation, practice, and reflection—and a fluid sense of time and space measured by the reality of experience rather than by clocks and rulers. He encouraged all students of his work to follow scientific methodology, despite the fact that the phenomenon being studied might not fit the conventional definition of research material.

The key to all science, and therefore all knowing, is observation. But Steiner, deeply inspired by the scientific work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, understood observation as a process of engagement, of seeing the physical reality as nothing more than a particular moment in a metamorphic process which itself can be “seen” in a context of time and space. This capacity for cognitive imagination, what Goethe described as “seeing his ideas,” plays an important part in working toward understanding Rudolf Steiner’s work, and it is a capacity patiently acquired.

At the core of Steiner’s work stands the human being. Each person is on a path of evolution unique to his or her individuality, a path that evolves across numerous incarnations. Each of us comes, according to William Wordsworth, “trailing clouds of glory.” This would be complicated enough to understand by itself, if only we did not need others in order to come into this world, into this body, at this time. But we do need others. We find ourselves on Earth, where we need to work with, live with, and love others, each of whom has a unique pre-history and a destiny path to map and follow that is different from our own. Thus, we struggle to find commonality, to find ways to get along, and to support each other along our paths.

No wonder social life, whether in a relationship of two or across a whole community, is complex. No money as a postmodern threshold experience, a mirror and magnifier of who we are as human beings. Money tends toward being anti-social in how we attach to it and it to us, even though each dollar is, as Steiner states, connected to all the division of human labor in the economy. In movement, in circulation, it reflects the pulse of material life. Money is both mystery and monster, misunderstood and misanthropic, a bearer of light and good intention, and evocateur of rapacious desire.

Money is as much a symptom of our inability to connect to the world as it is a symbol of just how deeply interdependent we are. Knowing money is a path to knowing oneself in relation to the economic world and its intersections with the political and wider cultural worlds. Money is social technology that pits self against the other and the world in the process of getting, and celebrates relationship in the world in the process of gifting and letting go. To see that we can live in multiple worlds and a multitude of transactions, maintain our integrity and recognize our interdependence through all of them, and still account for every penny, requires a new consciousness and a significant level of personal transformation.

Such transformation requires an architecture that acknowledges present reality with all its flaws, greed, corruption, and extreme inequity, and yet stands as a new structural system in which we can find aid and comfort, challenge and guidance, and above all, a way to live out of love and forgiveness rather than power and violence.

The task for our time is to bring practice and visibility to the social architecture that Rudolf Steiner described. What he articulated was that this structure is already there and further that we operate within it, but unconsciously. Through inner discipline, we can develop consciousness of the threefold nature of social life. Then, through that work, we can more fully inhabit the architecture of self and world in a way that brings about social harmony and supports a resilient structure—as the ancient cathedrals, temples, and mosques have stood the test of time—that is home to, honors, and inspires that which is spiritual in the human being and connects the individual with the wisdom of the cosmos.

John Bloom is General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in America and vice president for corporate culture of RSF Social Finance in San Francisco.

Adapted from John Bloom’s Foreword to Steinerian Economics by Gary Lamb and Sarah Hearn, Adonis Press, NY, 2014.