“Dear Anthroposophical Self,” by Andrew Sullivan

Because, in what you’re about to read, I’m in fact talking to myself, I have no problem asking you to take what I’m about to say not only the right way but also a wee bit the wrong way, so that you have just the very slightest urge to dismiss it. I want to get your blood not so much boiling but simmering. For it’s about time our blood was more than the lukewarm of a too-often spiritually bypassing and self-satisfied equanimity. Think of this as a test of our anthroposophical fragility in the Age of Covid-19 and George Floyd’s murder. Anthroposophical Self, you have needed to hear this for a long time. This is the message of a sort of “still small voice” that has finally resorted to a megaphone because for decades it has been mostly ignored.

From this moment on, I beg you to stop treating anthroposophy as a reenactment society with a far-too-often slavish fidelity to the past. A living tradition is good, semi-conscious reiteration not so much. Risk doing art besides veil painting and eurythmy (stand-ins for all traditional anthroposophical arts) or try innovating them; risk choosing or creating new aesthetics and fonts for your publications; risk other spiritual traditions, hip hop, psychedelics, micro-dosing atavistic clairvoyance, Foucault, and avenues without authorized “indications.” A bit of hybridity will not pollute! There are poets besides Mary Oliver and Novalis, subtle organismic thinkers besides Goethe, and thinkers besides subtle organismic thinkers, as well as epistemically significant ways of relating to the world besides thinking. Doing the Six Basic Exercises and Eightfold Path are no guarantees against being a racist, sexist, pedantic, elitist, and provincial blowhard. Steiner will not answer all your questions. A million Steiners won’t either. Imagine if anthroposophy were the only culture in the world, a hegemony of anthroposophy! It would be an impoverishment of what we have now, as difficult as now is. Let that sink in, Anthroposophical Self. It would be an impoverishment.

As you no doubt know, anthroposophical selves like to speak of the “being of anthroposophy.” What sort of being is this? Is this being relational, open, empathetic, wise, and willing to be moved? Is this being really interested in the lives of others or does this being instead like to explain others to themselves, as they really are in their spiritual essence, with anthroposophical concepts, as though such concepts are the last best word on everything? This is not a dying to self that allows an awakening in the other; this is a colonization of diverse experience by spiritual science, or, more accurately, spiritual scientism. I want the “being of anthroposophy” to be a being in a community of beings, helping that community flourish, not a being who lives, like the Essenes as Steiner characterizes them in The Fifth Gospel, a life apart and of dubious ethical value.

Where, Anthroposophical Self, are the black anthroposophical feminists; the anthroposophical queer, neuroqueer, and critical theorists; the anthroposophical sanestream dogma critiquers; the anthroposophical anti-racist activists who bravely challenge racism in anthroposophy and in the world; the anthroposophical sex-positive, sexworker intellectuals afraid of no taboo subject? If they are out there, and let’s hope for anthroposophy’s sake they are, we have not centered them enough. We again and again forget or sanitize or uncritically laud Steiner’s radical, beautiful, spiritual approach to life. Anthroposophy, to be anything of value in the future, must live up to its birthright and become queerer and queerer, developing ever newer and more subtle interpretive moral imaginations and intuitions, not to mention, actions and ways of being.

Any philosophy worth anything must have its own dissolution baked into its DNA—anthroposophy, in my experience and when rightly understood, is such a philosophy. Put another way, a philosophy worth anything should be like a map that is designed precisely so that you’ll forget about it because the territory it has led you to is far more interesting, nuanced, unmappable, and surprising. Put still another way, if anthroposophy were the Goetheanum, it would be more scaffold than Taj Mahal. And that’s exactly what we’re looking for, Anthroposophical Self, still other ways of being human in a world and cosmos responsive to and calling for our creative participation.

Warmly,

Your Other Anthroposophical Self

Andrew Sullivan (sullivan.ap@gmail.com) is a Waldorf graduate, high school teacher at his alma mater, the Sacramento Waldorf School, and co-leader of the teacher education program. A lapsed member of the Society, he has had a continuing interest in Steiner’s work mostly in the areas of epistemology, spiritual practice, and esoteric Christianity. He is also in the middle of a Doctoral program in Philosophy and Religion at California Institute of Integral Studies.