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“Dessoir presents his readers with a distorted picture of my views, and then speaks, not about them, but about what he has made of them, which has nothing at all to do with my views.”- Steiner
Characteristics of Intellectualism
Recent years have seen renewed interest in Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy. Modern technology and the work of many translators and archivists have greatly expanded access to his lectures. With this access, many people have ventured to comment on the meaning and significance of the lecture content. As is common in our time, as it was to a lesser but still significant extent in his time, any research pertaining to gender, race, skin color, nationality, religion, or other collective identification is especially scrutinized. Another area of intense scrutiny is research on the phenomenal dynamics studied by the natural and historical sciences. Some comments on these topics are offered as an apology, but these are usually a reaction to the more widespread comments that criticize Steiner as ‘a product of his time’, i.e., influenced by contemporary opinions, anxieties, prejudices, outdated assumptions, overturned theories, and so on. In both cases, there is a stunning lack of clarity about what ‘spiritual science’ truly is according to its intrinsic inner method. In other words, neither the apologies nor the criticisms seem to be rooted in a deep appreciation of that method and how it informs all spiritual scientific content.¹
What follows is not intended to offer a quick, definitive answer to what various passages mean, what cultural factors influenced them, or which interpretations are ‘right’, but to phenomenologically explore why attempts to pursue such answers fundamentally misunderstand the inner method of spiritual science. It is intended to further clarify why we can never properly orient to the meaning of spiritual scientific research without striving for that understanding, just as critics like Dessoir couldn't do so in Steiner’s time. We should attain a deeper appreciation, even if initially somewhat nebulous, of how the research took shape through higher cognitions that permeated his daily consciousness. Any references to specific claims should be viewed as a means of furthering this more expanded aim, as convenient reference points that anchor our ongoing exploration of broadly applicable inner aspects of spiritual scientific research. The aim here, as with spiritual scientific inquiry in general, is to render our inner activity more mobile, well-rounded, and suffused with life, gradually reorienting our cognitive perspective.
As an introduction, let’s consider the conference on Steiner hosted by the Harvard School of Divinity last year. The conference included several presentations on the ‘problematic’ aspects of Steiner’s output. Here is a passage from an article that summarized what unfolded there.
We also created space for one of the most challenging debates currently unfolding within the community of committed anthroposophists. Rudolf Steiner, like his predecessors in the theosophical movement, affirmed the spiritual equality of all individuals while also ascribing spiritual significance to racial differences, teaching that each race makes a unique contribution to human evolution. He also occasionally used derogatory language for non-European racial groups. Some anthroposophists believe that Steiner’s teachings about racial difference must be repudiated in order to allow his teaching about human equality to shine forth more clearly, and several anthroposophical initiatives have issued public statements to this effect. Other anthroposophists believe that Steiner’s understanding of racial difference provides a better path to racial justice than models of critical race theory currently prominent in the academy. In our panels, scholars holding both these perspectives met face to face, wrestling with the details of one another’s arguments.²
It may feel self-evident that these events, in which ‘both sides’ are represented, must be a productive step forward in grappling with Steiner and his work. Yet further contemplation of what this approach implies may reveal that the matter is not so simple, and that it reflects a regressive tendency in many ways. We need to carefully consider whether “wrestling with the details of one another’s arguments” is truly a spiritual scientific approach, or rather a more atavistic form of inquiry that the former strives to outgrow. Can we expect such presentations to offer a healthy orientation to the spiritual dynamics at the heart of Steiner’s explorations?³ To explore this question, we need to carefully consider the intellectual characteristics implicit in such discussions. What are we inwardly doing to evaluate and comment on the meaning of his lecture content? Let’s first take a look at a few of Steiner's observations about the characteristic dynamics of intellectual argumentation in his time, which have perhaps grown even more relevant in ours, when they permeate the discourse on various social media platforms:
Yes, the peculiarity of intellectualism is this: you can start with the idea anywhere and stop anywhere, and you can assert one thing, and you can assert another – I have emphasized this many times. In terms of thought, you can prove anything; in terms of thought, you can refute anything. Intellectualism, which is nothing more than a system of vapid and feeble thoughts, allows you to start anywhere and go somewhere, but you will stop at a certain point. But you can also start at this latter point and go the other way.
Today, one can be a very clever person and a gross materialist, because materialism can be quite well proven in an intellectual way. And if one is purely intellectual, one can, in the way it happened after our anthroposophical congress in Vienna at a meeting, one can, from the standpoint of today’s monism, quite intellectually lead the fight against the spirit. One can prove very well that materialism is right. But one can also want to be a spiritualist and prove this just as well. All these things, as long as one lives only in the intellectual, can be proved quite well, and they have the appearance of tremendous cogency, these intellectualistic discussions.
…The whole point of the talk is, after all, that one or the other sees what a tremendous swindle of one’s own self it is to live in intellectualism, because with intellectualism, everything can be easily proven. The only thing that matters is that one has immersed oneself long enough in some direction or current, in some sect or party or something else, then one can quite rightly say: Yes, that’s all clear; the other one who claims the opposite is an idiot. - Certainly, but the other one can just as easily prove that the first one is an idiot and his own claim is correct. Today, with the configuration that intellectual life has attained, this is perfectly possible and is taken for granted.⁴
A quick survey of intellectual debates across social media reveals how prescient this observation was. Yet even if we recognize the dynamic in such debates, it's harder to see its influence when we argue about the meaning of Anthroposophical lecture content. We are often quick to spot others running their thoughts on this intellectual hamster wheel, but even quicker to assume we have escaped the vicious cycle and are roaming free in our imagination, impartially evaluating the World content according to our untainted experience and impeccable reasoning. Instead of rationalizing the problem away like that, we can sit with it for a while and try to objectively perceive its inner nature. We can resist the default inner tendencies only if we first perceive them honestly and clearly, and relate them intimately to the flow of our daily life experience. We need to make our instinctive intellectual gestures, by which we navigate the meaning of all World content, increasingly conscious. Then we may gain some cognitive distance from the hamster wheel and thereby avoid stepping onto it in the first place.
Let's try to better grasp what Steiner describes above through a simple interactive experiment. Interactive, because most of the value of such an experiment comes not from merely contemplating its meaning as a detached observer, as we often do when reading about natural scientific experiments, but from actively participating in its phases and then later reflecting on the dynamics of the experience we just went through. We need to especially reflect on the experience of our participation, i.e., on how our intellectual activity felt when moving through those phases. That is a facet of scientific inquiries that is woefully neglected today: the first-person, real-time state of the experimenter as the experiment unfolds. Integrating this recursive facet of experimentation into our inquiries will certainly feel uncomfortable and inconvenient for some time, but that only further indicates that it's worth pursuing. Even if we are already familiar with this example, we gain much deeper value by engaging with it in this self-conscious way, as an exercise in expanding awareness of our intimate intellectual process.
Full essay - https://spiritanalogies.substack.com/p/ ... clarifying
