The Sassquatch's Lair

Anthroposophy

Reception

Supporters

Anthroposophy’s supporters include Pulitzer Prize-winning and Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow, Nobel prize winner Selma Lagerlöf, Andrei Bely, Joseph Beuys, Owen Barfield, architect Walter Burley Griffin, Wassily Kandinsky, Andrei Tarkovsky, Bruno Walter, and Right Livelihood Award winners Sir George Trevelyan and Ibrahim Abouleish. Albert Schweitzer was a friend of Steiner’s and was supportive of his ideals for cultural renewal.

Scientific Basis

Though Rudolf Steiner studied natural science at the Vienna Technical University at the undergraduate level, his doctorate was in epistemology and very little of his work is directly concerned with the empirical sciences. In his mature work, when he did refer to science it was often to present phenomenological or Goethean science as an alternative to what he considered the materialistic science of his contemporaries.

His primary interest was in applying the methodology of science to realms of inner experience and the spiritual worlds (Steiner’s appreciation that the essence of science is its method of inquiry is unusual among esotericists), and Steiner called anthroposophy Geisteswissenschaft (Science of the mind, or cultural or spiritual science), a term generally used in German to refer to the humanities and social sciences; in fact, the term “science” is used more broadly in Europe as a general term that refers to any exact knowledge.

• [Anthroposophy’s] methodology is to employ a scientific way of thinking, but to apply this methodology, which normally excludes our inner experience from consideration, instead to the human being proper.

Whether this is a sufficient basis for anthroposophy to be considered a spiritual science has been a matter of controversy. As Freda Easton explained in her study of Waldorf schools, “Whether one accepts anthroposophy as a science depends upon whether one accepts Steiner’s interpretation of a science that extends the consciousness and capacity of human beings to experience their inner spiritual world.” Sven Ove Hansson has disputed anthroposophy’s claim to a scientific basis, stating that its ideas are not empirically derived and neither reproducible nor testable.

Carlo Willmann points out that as, on its own terms, anthroposophical methodology offers no possibility of being falsified except through its own procedures of spiritual investigation, no intersubjective validation is possible by conventional scientific methods; it thus cannot stand up to positivistic science’s criticism. Peter Schneider calls such objections untenable on the grounds that if a non-sensory, non-physical realm exists, then according to Steiner the experiences of pure thinking possible within the normal realm of consciousness would already be experiences of that, and it would be impossible to exclude the possibility of empirically grounded experiences of other supersensory content.

Olav Hammer suggests that anthroposophy carries scientism “to lengths unparalleled in any other Esoteric position” due to its dependence upon claims of clairvoyant experience, its subsuming natural science under “spiritual science”, and its development of what Hammer calls “fringe” sciences such as anthroposophical medicine and biodynamic agriculture justified partly on the basis of the ethical and ecological values they promote, rather than purely on a scientific basis.

Though Steiner saw that spiritual vision itself is difficult for others to achieve, he recommended open-mindedly exploring and rationally testing the results of such research; he also urged others to follow a spiritual training that would allow them directly to apply the methods he used eventually to achieve comparable results. Some results of Steiner’s research have been investigated and supported by scientists working to further and extend scientific observation in directions suggested by an anthroposophical approach.

Anthony Storr stated about Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy: “His belief system is so eccentric, so unsupported by evidence, so manifestly bizarre, that rational skeptics are bound to consider it delusional.”

Luc Paquin

Anthroposophy

Relationship to Religion

Judaism

Rudolf Steiner wrote and lectured on Judaism and Jewish issues for much of his life. In the 1880s and 1890s, he took part in debates on anti-semitism and on assimilation. He was a fierce opponent of anti-semitism and supported the unconditional acceptance and integration of the Jews in Europe.[74] He also supported Émile Zola’s position in the Dreyfus affair. In his later life, Steiner was accused by the Nazis of being a Jew, and Adolf Hitler called anthroposophy “Jewish methods”. The anthroposophical institutions in Germany were banned during Nazi rule and several anthroposophists sent to concentration camps.

Steiner emphasized Judaism’s central importance to the constitution of the modern era in the West but suggested that to appreciate the spirituality of the future it would need to overcome its tendency toward abstraction. Important early anthroposophists who were Jewish included two central members on the executive boards of the precursors to the modern Anthroposophical Society, and Karl König, the founder of the Camphill movement. Martin Buber and Hugo Bergmann, who viewed Steiner’s social ideas as a solution to the Arab-Jewish conflict, were also influenced by anthroposophy.

There are several anthroposophical organisations in Israel, including the anthroposophical kibbutz Harduf, founded by Jesaiah Ben-Aharon. A number of these organizations are striving to foster positive relationships between the Arab and Jewish populations: The Harduf Waldorf school includes both Jewish and Arab faculty and students, and has extensive contact with the surrounding Arab communities. In Hilf near Haifa, there is a joint Arab-Jewish Waldorf kindergarten, the first joint Arab-Jewish kindergarten in Israel.

Christian Community

Towards the end of Steiner’s life, a group of theology students (primarily Lutheran, with some Roman Catholic members) approached Steiner for help in reviving Christianity, in particular “to bridge the widening gulf between modern science and the world of spirit.” They approached a notable Lutheran pastor, Friedrich Rittelmeyer, who was already working with Steiner’s ideas, to join their efforts. Out of their co-operative endeavor, the Movement for Religious Renewal, now generally known as The Christian Community, was born. Steiner emphasized that he considered this movement, and his role in creating it, to be independent of his anthroposophical work, as he wished anthroposophy to be independent of any particular religion or religious denomination.

Luc Paquin

Anthroposophy

Relationship to Religion

Christ as the Center of Earthly Evolution

Steiner’s writing, though appreciative of all religions and cultural developments, emphasizes Western tradition as having evolved to meet contemporary needs. He describes Christ and his mission on earth of bringing individuated consciousness as having a particularly important place in human evolution, whereby:

• Christianity has evolved out of previous religions;
• The being which manifests in Christianity also manifests in all faiths and religions, and each religion is valid and true for the time and cultural context in which it was born;
• All historical forms of Christianity need to be transformed considerably to meet the continuing evolution of humanity.
  Spiritual science does not want to usurp the place of Christianity; on the contrary it would like to be instrumental in making Christianity understood. Thus it becomes clear to us through spiritual science that the being whom we call Christ is to be recognized as the center of life on earth, that the Christian religion is the ultimate religion for the earth’s whole future. Spiritual science shows us particularly that the pre-Christian religions outgrow their one-sidedness and come together in the Christian faith. It is not the desire of spiritual science to set something else in the place of Christianity; rather it wants to contribute to a deeper, more heartfelt understanding of Christianity.

Thus, anthroposophy considers there to be a being who unifies all religions, and who is not represented by any particular religious faith. This being is, according to Steiner, not only the Redeemer of the Fall from Paradise, but also the unique pivot and meaning of earth’s evolutionary processes and of human history. To describe this being, Steiner periodically used terms such as the “Representative of Humanity” or the “good spirit” rather than any denominational term.

This view has certain similarities to the concepts of Christogenesis advocated by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

Divergence from Conventional Christian Thought

Steiner’s views of Christianity diverge from conventional Christian thought in key places, and include gnostic elements:

• One central point of divergence is Steiner’s views on reincarnation and karma.
• Steiner differentiated three contemporary paths by which he believed it possible to arrive at Christ:
  Through heart-filled experiences of the Gospels; Steiner described this as the historically dominant path, but becoming less important in the future.
  Through inner experiences of a spiritual reality; this Steiner regarded as increasingly the path of spiritual or religious seekers today.
  Through initiatory experiences whereby the reality of Christ’s death and resurrection are experienced; Steiner believed this is the path people will increasingly take.
• Steiner also believed that there were two different Jesus children involved in the Incarnation of the Christ: one child descended from Solomon, as described in the Gospel of Matthew, the other child from Nathan, as described in the Gospel of Luke. (The genealogies given in the two gospels diverge some thirty generations before Jesus’ birth, and ‘Jesus’ was a common name in biblical times.)
  His view of the second coming of Christ is also unusual; he suggested that this would not be a physical reappearance, but that the Christ being would become manifest in non-physical form, visible to spiritual vision and apparent in community life for increasing numbers of people beginning around the year 1933.
• He emphasized his belief that in the future humanity would need to be able to recognize the Spirit of Love in all its genuine forms, regardless of what name would be used to describe this being. He also warned that the traditional name of the Christ might be misused, and the true essence of this being of love ignored.

Luc Paquin

Anthroposophy

Place in Western Philosophy

Steiner built upon Goethe’s conception of an imaginative power capable of synthesizing the sense-perceptible form of a thing (an image of its outer appearance) and the concept we have of that thing (an image of its inner structure or nature). Steiner added to this the conception that a further step in the development of thinking is possible when the thinker observes his or her own thought processes. “The organ of observation and the observed thought process are then identical, so that the condition thus arrived at is simultaneously one of perception through thinking and one of thought through perception.”

Thus, in Steiner’s view, we can overcome the subject-object divide through inner activity, even though all human experience begins by being conditioned by it. In this connection, Steiner examines the step from thinking determined by outer impressions to what he calls sense-free thinking. He characterizes thoughts he considers without sensory content, such as mathematical or logical thoughts, as free deeds. Steiner believed he had thus located the origin of free will in our thinking, and in particular in sense-free thinking.

Some of the epistemic basis for Steiner’s later anthroposophical work is contained in the seminal work, Philosophy of Freedom. In his early works, Steiner sought to overcome what he perceived as the dualism of Cartesian idealism and Kantian subjectivism by developing Goethe’s conception of the human being as a natural-supernatural entity, that is: natural in that humanity is a product of nature, supernatural in that through our conceptual powers we extend nature’s realm, allowing it to achieve a reflective capacity in us as philosophy, art and science. Steiner was one of the first European philosophers to overcome the subject-object split in Western thought. Though not well known among philosophers, his philosophical work was taken up by Owen Barfield (and through him influenced the Inklings, an Oxford group of Christian writers that included J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis) and Richard Tarnas.

Christian and Jewish mystical thought have also influenced the development of anthroposophy.

Union of Science and Spirit

Steiner believed in the possibility of applying the clarity of scientific thinking to spiritual experience, which he saw as deriving from an objectively existing spiritual world. Steiner identified mathematics, which attains certainty through thinking itself, thus through inner experience rather than empirical observation, as the basis of his epistemology of spiritual experience.

Luc Paquin