Evaluating Rudolf Steiner - and his post-1900 corruption

My interest in Rudolf Steiner is focused mainly on his early three philosophical works culminating in The Philosophy of Freedom (1894).

However, I believe that post 1900-ish Steiner became (I have to say) corrupted by his later situations - and that he reverted to extensive use of what he termed Atavistic Clairvoyance (or, what Owen Barfield termed Original Participation) - in other words the post-1900 Steiner increasingly employed mediumship, or what we now term channelling.

This is quite explicitly described in passages of his later works (although Steiner strenuously denied that it really was atavistic clairvoyance - nonetheless, he describes visualisation and hearing words; much like Jung's hallucinatory Active Imagination); it is described in eyewitness accounts of Steiner's behaviour (eyes closed, frequent trance-behaviours); and it accounts for the vast and indiscriminate productivity of his later years: a vast productivity of (let's be honest...) mostly-nonsense; albeit highly-systemised* nonsense.

(All this behaviour is in stark contrast to the purposive, alert, aware thinking so convincingly explained and advocated in Philosophy of Freedom.)

My position is therefore that Rudolf Steiner was a great man, a genius of historic stature, originator of among the most important and relevant truths vital for our situation - yet, taken in total, he was mostly wrong about most things.

And for all their good work - this wrongness has been accentuated by the Anthroposophical movement - who have in practice taught almost everything except his core and essential philosophical insight.

This failure of the Anthroposophy movement was indeed made almost inevitable by Steiner's own errors in trying to systemise spiritual development into a (wholly-conjectural, on his part) process of 'initiation' and formal cognitive exercises. He should instead have pointing at the goal (which he had already done, in Philosophy of Freedom) and recognised that each person must find their own path to reach that goal; by trial and error (and repentance); as Steiner himself had done. 

I believe we need (and I mean literally need) to take Steiner's insights from PofF and apply them in our lives and in our civilisation - and we should (pretty much, but not entirely) ignore the truly vast structure of Spiritual Science he generated after writing Philosophy of Freedom^.

...With the exception of recognising that Steiner became a Christian in 1898 - and we too must have a Christian framework for our spiritual work on transforming consciousness.

We know this by experience of the multitudes who have tried to be spiritual but not religious (often implicitly anti-Christian), and observing the feebleness of the results. Our proper lineage includes William Blake, ST Coleridge, Owen Barfield and William Arkle - all of whom were serious Christians - as well as mystics or esotericists. 


Notes:
   *Steiner was a genius of quite astonishing intelligence and knowledge - and he was culturally German - so had capacities for systemisation far beyond normal, perhaps unique in history. My understanding is that he took information derived partly from channelling, and substantially information from reading, and incrementally elaborated these into his massive ideological system by addition and interpolation.
    ^Although there are indeed many nuggets of insight scattered throughout the post-1900 work which I would not wish to be without - for instance I am amazed and fascinated by the prophecy in lecture The Work of the Angels in Man's Astral Body, of 1918. Half of the lecture is 'nonsense' (harsh, but I mean it is incorrect and inessential) - but the other half is the only absolutely compelling example of prophecy I have ever encountered. 

The spoiling of Rudolf Steiner

"There slumber in every human being faculties by means of which he can acquire for himself a knowledge of higher worlds."

Thus wrote Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy. In The Philosophy of Freedom he demonstrated that thinking was the power that allowed modern human beings direct access to the spiritual worlds, an access that had once been the privilege of only a handful of mystics. 

No longer was it necessary for average human beings to depend on scripture and other forms of religious authority, for they could discover spiritual truth directly through strengthened thinking. This direct knowledge, he argued, was the only foundation for true moral freedom. He went on to develop and teach practical methods by which it could be achieved.

A century later, the Society he founded seems dedicated mainly to preserving and disseminating his nearly 60,000 transcribed lectures [Note: this number seems considerably too large an estimate, since Steiner only lectured actively for about 25 years, which is about 9,000 days - and he did not deliver six lectures every day]. 

The result of his own spiritual research, these lectures cover everything from gnomes to seraphim, from the history of Atlantis to recipes for compost. "Steiner says" is the constant refrain of anthroposophists, who seem to prefer citations from these lectures to direct knowledge of anything. While Steiner's initiatives in education, biodynamic agriculture, homeopathic medicine and care of the mentally retarded have been lovingly preserved, anthroposophy has, since his death, produced little in the way of social innovation. 

Anthroposophists, when they can be understood at all, express superstitions and prejudices that would embarrass a redneck. Fearing injury by everything from rock music to microchips to Jesuits, they have become a society of esoteric hypochondriacs, in neo-Amish withdrawal from modern political and economic life.

How is it that a movement dedicated to strengthened thinking produces so many goofy and morally useless ideas?

How did the author of The Philosophy of Freedom become this ghost to whom his readers so idolatrously surrender their independence of judgement?

That sound and stirring concepts give rise to corrupt and neurotic human organizations is pretty much a summary of the history of all spiritual movements...

From the introduction to Work on what has been spoiled by Catherine MacCoun. 

I have been again engaging with Rudolf Steiner - because I regard him as one of the most significant thinkers of all time, and because he is a vital contributor to my deepest understanding of reality. Steiner is essential, but...

Yet again I find myself up against the phenomenon of which MacCoun speaks above. When I read or listen to Steiner's own lectures, or to the best of his followers expounding, I am overwhelmed by a sense of suffocation under such a mass of wrongness that I find it hard to continue.

But I disagree with MacCoun in her specific diagnosis that this is due to the Anthroposophical Society (AS), and the way it dealt with Steiner's legacy. I also disagree with her belief that the AS could - in principle - be reformed... I regard the AS as a symptom of Steiner's deep mistakes, and therefore it is unreformable

The problems lay with Steiner himself, and with his decision to become a spiritual leader of an organised movement.  But I repeat myself...


The problems are deep, because Steiner made the serious error of developing a meditative technique that he regarded as intrinsically scientifically valid; and spent two and a half decades, day after day, putting himself into this trance-state and spouting forth in lectures whatever came to him in this state.

Steiner did not live up to his own best understanding - indeed as a matter of daily routine he fell below the standards he himself had understood and explained. Steiner distinguished the Luciferic and Ahrimanic types of spiritual evil - and he fell into both in his late work of lecturing and organising the Theosophical then Anthroposophical societies.

Steiner's focus on meditative technique - and training in this method - was Ahrimanic, materialistic. But (contrary to his own assertion that meditation should be in clear, alert consciousness) the actual meditative method he used was Luciferic - it was (according to multiple descriptions) a dissociated trance state of lowered consciousness, including lucid dreaming. He then took this unconsciously-generated, 'altered state', 'atavistic' material and systematised and taught it as fact - Ahrimanic again.

For many years, Steiner had this working like a machine. Ask him a question, he would go into a trance, and from his unconscious would generate vast masses of material on the subject - and by Steiner's unique intellectual brilliance (he was a genius) this dream-material would be systemised and rationalised even as it emerged in his speech. 

The vast bulk of Steiner's work from about 1900 was, then, an exemplification of exactly those errors and evils that he himself first diagnosed as spiritual problems of our time: the backward looking Luciferic trances, and the modern bureaucratic organisation he founded, led and left-behind: the Ahrimanic Anthroposophical Society.

Scope and limitations of Rudolf Steiner's Philosophy of Freedom

There is, perhaps, no more-important book that The Philosophy of Freedom (PoF) by Rudolf Steiner; yet it is, of course, limited in its scope - and potentially misleading.

Steiner himself apparently took several years to see its limitations (after-which he became a, very-unorthodox, Christian), and never properly acknowledged the fact that PoF was written from something like an anarchist/ Nietzschian/ anti-Chrstian stance. He pretended that the later Christian and spiritual metaphysics was latent in, and implied by, the PoF - which untruth makes the book extremely bizarre, and deeply puzzling to the spiritual-Christian reader...


It is possible to read PoF as a free-standing and self-justifying work; and indeed I think it likely that that is the best, perhaps the only, way to understand it. Contextualising the work can only come after it has been understood. So I would recommend accepting the book's implicit premises while reading it - until the overall thesis has been grasped. There is a useful website called The Philosophy of Freedom which does exactly this.

This way of reading PoF accepts Steiner's assertion that he has proved his thesis with 'evidence' (evidence from logic and introspection) - and it therefore accepts the book's self-designation as epistemology - and its function in terms of a libertarian-anarchist rationale for absolute individuality. 

But further reflection reveals that PoF is metaphysics, Not epistemology; it is asserting a thesis about the structure of reality, not merely about knowledge of reality. But only if PoF were true epistemology (and only if epistemology could deliver on its promise of assumption-free knowledge - which in fact it cannot ever do!) could PoF legitimately use evidence to prove its thesis - since if the thesis is true, it changes the nature of what-counts-as evidence. And this is to assume what is being proved - and so the argument undercuts its own legitimacy.

At the level of epistemology (as is usual/ universal with epistemology), PoF is therefore circular reasoning - and the reader can only choose either to enter the circle and believe its truth; or else reject it. And on what possible legitimate grounds (other than prior metaphysical assumptions) should he make such a decision?   

PoF leaves-open such questions as why reality really-is the way that it is described by PoF; and if it was - how could we ever know the fact?


Most importantly, the book simply asserts that freedom is the ultimate value - which many or most people would dispute. PoF asserts that a real morality must be independently arrived at and embraced wholly by the individual from his own resources - yet this is the opposite to traditional ideas; and there is no way (other than a kind of mockery) rationally to argue that the one morality is better than the other; except by asserting the (assumed, never proved) primacy of freedom, autonomy, agency...

Furthermore, in order to explain clearly; PoF presents a very simple model of how cognition is inserted into the world, which it splits between sensory phenomena and the concepts requires to make sense of them. This is very helpful, but must be transcended since, again, it is a circular model and gives no idea of how we could know its truth, or its limitations.

(Did Steiner personally observe his consciousness being instered into the world, and the effect it had? Does he personally know what life without/ before consciousness is like? Can he compare individual morality with universal morality to confirm that they are one? Clearly not - so where does this knowledge come-from?)


None of these limitations to PoF are a significant problem if we read it from the Christian metaphysical perspective that there is a loving creator God, we are his children; and creation was set-up and continues mainly to make possible the development of human consciousness towards a divine situation in which freedom/ autonomy/ agency are indeed prime goals.

From such a perspective PoF is revealed as being about both individual agency and the cohesion of reality; because they are the same. The true concepts by-which we understand the perceived world are the same as those of God's creation; and the truly-agent individual is able to participate in God's on-going creation - which is the purpose of the evolutionary-development of consciousness towards freedom and autonomy.  

But we need to bring this metaphysical perspective to our reading of PoF - it is not to be found within the work itself.

My advice is to do just this - and then to read it!

My understanding of Rudolf Steiner's Philosophy of Freedom

What is the relation between total reality and the ideas of the human mind? Steiner asserts (and I think proves, given his assumptions) that the ideas of the human mind are the same thing as total reality (albeit a tiny and biased sample from that total reality).

By 'same thing' - he means identical with.

The modern positivist/ relativist skeptic asks why (on earth!) this should be?

Steiner's answer is that the creator deity made things so.

(This I infer based on assumptions that are not given clearly and explicitly in PoF - and this makes it harder to understand this book, and Steiner's whole system, than it was 100 plus years ago).

*

Total relativity is sampled by thoughts as they occur in the process of thinking. This reality is generated, as it were, automatically: it is what thinking does.

Steiner regards thinking as not just automatic but necessarily valid. This arises from the fact that the units of 'thoughts' are identical with the units of total reality (insofar as any 'unit' detached from an inter-related-whole, can be valid).

More specifically, reality comes to us cloven in twain - split between percepts (coming through the senses - external and internal) and concepts which we derive from the totality of reality.

Thinking matches the percept to its complementary concept - that is what thinking does - and then weaves these thoughts into understanding.

And this understanding is a microcosm of total reality.

(All this is given us - by the basic set-up of creation.)  

*

But Men are variably conscious of this thinking - because consciousness has different strength and different focus.

Hunter-gatherers and youngish children unconsciously accept the validity of thinking.

Modern Man (older children and adolescents) became aware of the separate (and radically incomplete) realities of percepts and concepts; and becomes aware of the metaphysical assumptions of deity, creation, Man's make-up and thus doubts the validity of thought - notices that these assumptions are not compelled (and therefore denies them).

Future Man (mature adults, of whom there are apparently very few) will become conscious of thinking as valid - as reality itself.

*

So thinking actually is in itself a microcosm of reality. But what of the incompleteness and bias of thinking? How can each person discover these inaccuracies, and correct and improve their thinking - to make a more complete and representative sample of reality? And why should Man do this?

Further assumptions - that Man is made by God to-do-this, because Man's destiny is to become more divine. God has knowledge of the totality of reality: Man's destiny is to approach ever closer to this condition.

So Man is set-up with innate and spontaneous impulses to seek knowledge; to correct, make more consistent and complete knowledge. Furthermore, deity purposively assists this process, by many and various means.

*

The message of Philosophy of Freedom is therefore to restore confidence in the truth of thinking. Thoughts are real and true, they are indeed identical with ultimate reality. We should not waste time on doubting thoughts and thinking - but we should strive to be aware of them.

We should instead consciously seek to increase experience by exposure to the most helpful percepts. Don't waste time on doubting deity - accept that you dwell in a created universe, you were put into that creation and the whole fits together - communicated directly and reliably. Work towards the fullness of knowledge and increase of deity.

(If a Man was - after vast aeons of experience perhaps - to attain total knowledge: what then? Would he merge with deity? If so, then what would be the point of the whole protracted exercise? The answer is that Man would become a different deity - different on the basis of having a unique set-up, and different in the linearity of experience.)

The common distinctions between subjective and objective, spiritual and material, imagination and common sense are collapsed - all these are obliterated in thinking: if some-thing can be thought (really thought) then it is real and true.

*

But consciousness is what enables us to be aware of thinking, and consciousness may abstract from thinking, may create abstractions from thoughts, may create models from these abstractions.

Modern consciousness has fallen into many bad habits of abstraction; bad habits of abstracting artificial concepts from thoughts, and manufacturing abstract model systems from these abstractions.

These are not real - most of what is in modern consciousness is not real. Our automatic, unthinking consciousness, automatically misreads thinking.

To repeat: Modern Man automatically and habitually fails to observe thinking and instead focuses on abstracted, detached, modelled (hence unreal) phenomena. What consciousness is telling us are our thoughts and thinking, are not our thoughts and thinking but instead abstractions and models.

*

The test of un-reality is that we cannot think it!

Contrariwise - anything and everything we can and do think is real - including anything we can imagine and think.

So - The problem for modern Man is not Thinking but Consciousness.

What Modern Man needs to do (must do, if he is to fulfil his destiny) is to redirect consciousness away from percepts and concepts and onto thinking. To do this we need to be aware of what we are doing wrong with consciousness.

We think in truths: our task is to stop ignoring the fact. 

*
In 1894 Rudolf Steiner published a book Die Philosophie der Freiheit variously Englished as The Philosophy of Freedom (PoP), The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path.
The book can be read online at:
http://www.rsarchive.org/Books/GA004
Or listened to at:
http://www.rudolfsteineraudio.com/POSA/posa.html

If Rudolf Steiner is essential - then what is his essence?

Thinkers I respect such as Owen Barfield and Jeremy Naydler have stated that Rudolf Steiner is essential to our time. But given the truly vast volume of his work, its range, as the problematic nature of his legacy this leaves open the question of just what it is about Steiner that is essential? (In contrast with what is of perhaps important but lesser status: as well as what may better be neglected or ignored.)

Steiner himself gave a clue in the importance he attached to his earliest books, especially those about Goethe's science, his doctoral thesis published as Truth and Knowledge and (in particular) The Philosophy of Freedom. In other words, these were works of a metaphysical nature rather than being concerned with Steiner's specific or detailed 'findings'.

Steiner's modern legacy, by contrast (as far as I can determine) is focused around these specific findings - for example in relation to education, medicine and agriculture. There is also a considerable and commendable publishing and dissemination activity with respect to the vast number of works and the scholarship of summarising, systematising and analysing these works. Beyond this, there is the activity of teaching and supervising a specific technique of meditation.

My feeling is that none of this captures the essence and none is 'essential'.

(In one paragraph) What seems to me essential is what Steiner called monism and modern people might call holism - in particular, the bringing of imagination into the realm of one, single mode of thinking that can be called true 'science'; so that the perceptual ('objective', external) world of the natural sciences is united (again) with the conceptual ('subjective', inner) world of imagination; and this in a way that both heals our personal alienation and also creates a realm of public and shared discourse - a realm which is variously referred to by Steiner as Spiritual or Occult or Esoteric Science. 

This making of a science of the imagination, and the possibility that each of us participate in it; requires, first, a proper understanding of the nature of science. This comes from the Goethe books - but has, I think, been lost underneath a focus on the Steiner-described and recommended technique of meditation as if this was the science.

As I argue in my book Not Even Trying

http://corruption-of-science.blogspot.co.uk

real science cannot be defined by technique but only by aim and ideals - science is, descriptively, nothing more specific than a truthful sustained examination of some rather specific class of phenomena, done in such a way that it is a social activity - which entails group production of some kind of public, communicable, evaluable content.

Thus, spiritual science cannot be captured by any particular technique of meditation, but only by the aim of some (perhaps small) group of investigators studying the imagination (presumably mostly by introspection, but in principle by any helpful method); honestly and in a sustained manner, and inter-communicating and critically evaluating their findings.

If this description of Steiner's essence is correct, then we can see that his essence is a mid-level activity, as appropriate to any science - it is not an ultimate activity like a religion.

This is confirmed by Steiner's biography - he was himself a Christian (albeit of a very unusual type) but did not require of his followers that they be Christian. But, and this is important, Steiner's philosophy presupposes religion of a certain type - it only makes sense within the metaphysical context of a religion that enables his work to have meaning.

Steiner's work does not make sense in a secular, atheistic context - with the nihilistic metaphysics that entails - because in such a context it is no more than a large number of bare assertions.

In sum, a true follower of Steiner must be religious (within a restricted range of deistic religions) - if he is not to be engaged in a self-refuting and ultimately incoherent activity; but he need not necessarily be Christian as Steiner himself was.

What makes Steiner essential (or, at least, nearly so) is that he uniquely offers the possibility of a Science (which modern Man seems to require) of the Imagination (which Modern Man to desperately lacks); and as an active, fundamentally-engaged participant (not merely as a passive observer, consumer or obedient follower).

In this sense, therefore, the essence of Steiner is as necessary for modern Christians and other religious people as it is for the secular majority.

Owen Barfield's epistemological terminology of 'consciousness', contrasted with Rudolf Steiner's epistemology of 'thinking'

Owen Barfield regarded himself as a disciple of Rudolf Steiner - in a not-altogether healthy way; because it exerted a constraining effect on his potential and caused Barfield to leave out - unexplained - considerable aspects of his world view. 

Instead Barfield, at a certain point, would merely recommend his audience to 'read Steiner'; which is, for most people, way too much to ask; since locating and extracting the undoubtedly gold insights from Steiner's voluminous dross of error and nonsense is the work of several years hard labour...

I speak as one of not-many of Barfield's great admirers who actually have put-in these years of work. Having done so; I was rather surprised to find that Barfield makes a very noticeable change to Steiner's terminology from The Philosophy of Freedom (insights from-which form an essential basis to Barfield's schema as expressed in (for example) Saving the Appearances, Unancestral Voice, Speaker's Meaning and History, Guilt and Habit.

How do we attain knowledge of reality, and is such knowledge indeed possible? This question forms the basis of that branch of 'modern' (post-medieval) philosophy called epistemology. 

However, the modern attempt to make epistemology fundamental (as does so much 19th and 20th century philosophy) is actually an error, and has gone nowhere. 

Nowhere; because epistemology takes-for-granted the primary level of philosophy, which is metaphysics: that discourse which tries to describe our most fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality. 

Thus, both Steiner and Barfield fail to describe their primary assumptions about reality before they embark describing their model of knowledge - which has the effect of giving these models a rather arbitrary, take-it-or-leave it quality. 

(For instance, both Steiner and Barfield ought to describe what they assume about God before they describe what they believe about knowledge; since for them both the possibility of knowledge depends on a personal creator God who has certain attitudes towards Men.) 

Nonetheless, since I share broadly the same metaphysical assumptions as Steiner and Barfield, I regard their models of knowledge as very useful - which is all that can reasonably be asked of any simple model of reality; especially one that aims at a time-less hence 'static', cross-sectional description of reality. 

The following is a comparison of the terminological equivalents of the epistemological models of Steiner and Barfield: 

Rudolf Steiner

Percept + Concept = Thinking

Owen Barfield

Perception + Thinking = Consciousness

The potential confusion when reading these authors is that they use thinking to mean different things: Steiner's thinking is the end result of our perceptions of the world being understood and interpreted by concepts. 

But for Barfield, thinking is (more or less) what Steiner means by concepts': the processes by which we understand and interpret perceptions  - or 'images' in the case of ancient Man, whose perceptions came packaged with meanings. 

Steiner thus talks a lot about 'thinking' of a particular kind (e.g. 'pure' thinking, or 'heart-thinking') as being the main aim of modern Man; the destined path ahead. This thinking (says Steiner) can be cultivated by meditative exercises which are intended to (but actually do not!) promote the desired kind of thinking. The desired kind of thinking is itself True Knowledge - and this is therefore Steiner's epistemology.

By contrast; Barfield talks about the destined and desirable future state of Consciousness; which is self-aware, active and chosen (rather than unconscious, passive and automatic): he calls this Final Participation; and for Barfield this is True Knowledge - as well as the proper aim of created Man (because Final Participation is to join with God in the work of creation).

After struggling to 'get' this for a few years; I think the above equivalence is broadly correct; and might be helpful to those who wish to read both Steiner and Barfield.   

How to refute and filter-out the "outlandish and bizarre" content from Rudolf Steiner - using a method that Steiner himself fundamentally-approved and recommended

Of all the important thinkers of the twentieth century, Rudolf Steiner is perhaps the most difficult to come to grips with. For the unprepared reader, his work presents a series of daunting obstacles. 

To begin with, there is the style, which is formidably abstract, and as unappetizing as dry toast. But a determined reader could learn to put up with that.

The real problem lies with the content, which is often so outlandish and bizarre that the reader suspects either a hoax or a confidence trick. 

Books like Cosmic Memory, with its account of Atlantis and Lemuria, seem to belong on the same shelf as titles like Our Hollow Earth, or My trip to Venus in a Flying Saucer. 

The resulting sense of frustration is likely to cause even the most open-minded reader to give up in disgust.

The first paragraph of Rudolf Steiner, by Colin Wilson, 1985.

*

The Big Problem with Rudolf Steiner (as I have said many times) is that most of what he said and wrote was wrong; but some of what he wrote is sufficient to establish him as one of a handful of the most vital thinkers of the past couple of centuries. 

But because most of Steiner (a very high percentage!) is wrong; on the one hand, most people reject his work outright; while on the other hand, Steiner's disciples and followers (mostly in the Anthroposophical Society, which he founded) are mostly wrong in what they believe - to the point that they miss the significance and importance of what he was right about.  

What Steiner needs, therefore, is scholars who will take was is good and leave aside what is not; and the closest we have to this is Owen Barfield who, in addition, added much of value to what he took from Steiner. 

But even Barfield seems to have been unable to be clear about the nature of Steiner's work, and respected him to the point that he never (that I have seen) denied anything that Steiner ever said. What Barfield instead did was - in his writings - focus on the aspects of Steiner about which he was most sure; and said little or nothing about the colossal number of claims that Steiner made about... everything under the sun, and indeed from many ages before the sun. 

Barfield always recommended Steiner's earliest philosophical books; but did not make clear to the putative reader that most of Steiner's later books will strike most people as simply absurd, and obviously false. 

My understanding is that the major problem for those who regard Steiner as important, and who accept his core analysis and teachings; cannot find grounds from within this teachings for rejecting anything that Steiner ever said or wrote. 

Steiner purports do be doing a spiritual science; and repeatedly emphasizes that anyone can test his claims for themselves by spiritual investigation - yet, in practice, it seems that nobody ever feels able to do this, and must therefore treat all of Steiner's claims as if they constituted inerrant scripture.  

This seems to be because Steiner was able (at will) to produce in himself - while awake and alert and with full reasoning and memory capacities - a kind of consciousness that perceived the occult world - from which he reported back his observations and interpretations; and nobody else has since been able to do this. Certainly not in the vast volume that Steiner did in his lectures after about 1897, and accelerating until near his death in 1925. 

Because Steiner's followers cannot do what Steiner did to generate his claims, they feel unable to check his claims; and therefore simply take them on trust - regarding them as true because Steiner said them. Steiner discourse is therefore closely analogous to 'fundamentalist' Protestants in terms of Anthroposophists citing their scripture, and argument proceeds by proof-texting - by trading quotes and citations. 

For reasons that I set out in the post earlier today; I believe there is another and practical way of checking Steiner's claims; which can be done by anyone serious about understanding what is valid in Steiner, and using methods that Steiner recommended as the best and himself practiced. 

And that 'method' is simply by reading Steiner in the spirit of direct-knowing, of heart-thinking. 

Instead of trying to replicate Steiner's method of observing the hidden spirit world by inner perception; the reader tests Steiner's claims by intuitive means. 

Whenever a claim of Steiner's fails to be sustained by heart-thinking, whenever his premises or a line of argument is unsupported by the direct-knowing of our deepest thinking - then it is rejected as untrue. 

In other words; we accept from Steiner only that which is specifically sustained and confirmed by our own deepest-possible intuitive responses. 

This, I repeat, is exactly what Steiner recommended in those works of his that he regarded as his most important (specifically The Philosophy of Freedom, which he repeated many times was his fundamental publication). 

Therefore, we can - and in a viable and valid fashion - refute the mass of Steiner, and filter-out from the nonsense that which we most need and could benefit from. 

This business of "thinking" - why such an emphasis here?

Over the past years I must have written hundreds of blog posts that are focused on "thinking"... but thinking of a particular kind, and in a particular context. 

It really is extraordinarily difficult to get across the centrality of this! - and I have rather floundered around with various nomenclatures - primary thinking, heart-thinking, direct knowing... these are some of them. 

The basic idea came from Rudolf Steiner, and I found it very difficult to grasp. The best source is his Philosophy of Freedom - written when Steiner was in his thirties, and before he became a Theosophist and 'cult leader'. 

But for me the penny didn't drop, until I after I had read (or rather listened-to, as an audiobook by Dale Brunsvold) Steiner's PhD thesis published as Truth and Knowledge, and also Otto Palmer's book of excerpts of Steiner's own comments on Philosophy of Freedom. I hoped that I would be able to provide readers of this blog with an easier and more direct route to understanding what Steiner meant - and free of the obscuring accretions that Theosophy brought. 

(As I have often said, my greatest strength as a 'philosopher' is that I know when I have not 'got' something; and therefore when I want to 'get' something, I know to keep on returning, and keep "banging away" at the problem - until either I do get it, or know that I can't. This was the case with Steiner's Philosophy of Freedom.)

Anyway; I have described what this thinking is like, as an experience; so that it can be recognized when/if it happens - how it can be distinguished from 'mundane' thinking (i.e. from the ordinary, everyday activity that most people think is all of thinking).

 Yet actually doing 'primary thinking' is only half of what is needed; and somebody might experience this frequently and yet get none of the positively transformative benefits it potentially contains. 

This is because we need to know the significance of primary thinking, know its importance in Man's destiny (especially "Western Man", and even more even-more especially those whose racial and cultural backgrounds are from the British Isles, Western and Central Europe, Scandinavia...).

And, for this, we need to know what is happening in primary thinking, where it comes-from (it's provenance) in terms of our-self (our real, divine, primary self - as-contrasted-with the externally-constructed, mortal, surface personality or persona).  

We need to know why primary thinking is valid (i.e. valid within the constraints of our mortal incarnation into this 'entropic' world). 

In other words, half of primary thinking is our explicit, conscious, and chosen knowledge of what it is; and the other half is actually doing it! 

Unless we are conscious of the situation; unless both understanding and practice are in-place, unless we are doing all this by choice and taking responsibility for the business... Then primary thinking is of not much help, or no help at all, to our situation in the world. 

It sounds hopelessly complicated! But the complications seem to arise from the problem of getting past established (mostly unconscious) assumptions and recognizing something very simple and clear which was "there all the time" but needed to become explicitly-known and chosen - at least that was my case. 

It's one of those things that is hard to "get", but when it is "got" then that is that. It is clear and obvious; and everything is changed by it. 

How do we recognise when we Know some-thing? (A model of intuition, based on Rudolf Steiner's Philosophy of Freedom)

In Rudolf Steiner's Philosophy of Freedom (1894) he has a model of thinking that describes thoughts as being formed from the combination of a sensory percept (or a memory of a perception) with a concept - or idea. Percept and concept, combined equals a though; the process of this combination through time is think-ing. 

 

But many or most of our concepts are false - being derived (perhaps especially nowadays) from external sources that are untruthful. And, naturally, when our sensory perceptions are understood using untrue concepts - then the resulting thinking will itself be false. 

However, for Steiner, the true and correct concept to join-with a percept is actually universally available - from what might be termed a realm of truth. We might, in this model, think of the realm of truth as a kind of divine omnipresent, all permeating ether of true ideas. In principle, it is possible to know the truth - really to Know something - if we combine our perceptual inputs with those real-and-true concepts, drawn from the divine ether. 

 

How might this happen? In the first place, we must be correctly motivated - and this motivation could be described in terms of love; and also in terms of a seeking motivated by the transcendental values of truth, beauty and virtue. 

A properly motivated person can therefore - in principle - know the truth; because he is always able to access the true concept with which to interpret his sensory/ memory perceptions. 

 

Yet we all know that what happens in our modern lives is that we are confused and distracted by a vast deluge of false concepts. It is usually very difficult to pick out the true concept from among some many, such frequently arriving, wrong, untrue, misleading ideas that are swirling in our thoughts. 

We need, therefore, to be able to recognise when we really-know something, from the more frequent occasions when we are wrong about it, because we are using wrong ideas to interpret it. 

The answer lies in that type of introspection which could be termed intuition; and my purpose here is to explain a model of intuition based on the Steiner model of thinking. 

I believe that we can, by introspection, recognise the provenance of a true concept. That is, we can we can look within our own thinking, and recognise when a concept comes from the 'realm of reality'. And I believe that this is an inbuilt (indeed God-given) ability. 

 

In other words, those who are capable of love have the ability to know when they Know. 

This is to know that our ideas come from a divine realm. With the proviso that this provenance-detection of reality is only available to those whose motivations (at that particular moment of introspection) are good (loving, truthful, virtuous, in pursuit of transcendental beauty). 

And, those whose real motivations are selfish, self-seeking, unloving, dishonest, manipulative, un-virtuous etc - are Not able to know when they Know. 

 

Such people (and I think there are many of them; and nearly all of us, for much of the time) live is a state of un-fixable, chronic confusion. They are unsure about everything - all of the time, because all of their ideas are wrong. 

And even if they - by chance - stumble-upon a truth, they will not be able to recognise that truth intuitively - it will be indistinguishable from the distracting mass of errors; because their motivations are to use that truth in some way that sustains the side of evil; against God and divine creation. 

 

So those with Good motivation can recognise when they really-know something. However, this inner, wordless knowing is different-from explaining to our-selves what exactly it is that we know - typically using language or symbols. This is a further and fallible, error prone, matter. 

Self-explaining is, indeed, a matter of 'modelling' - inevitably by selection and simplification, the totality of what we know, into something manageable with our cognitive ability and in the available time.

And - having explained our inner knowing to ourselves; there is a further step of 'translation' involved in communicating (or rather, trying to communicate) that inner-explanation to other people. And it is only this which is available 'objectively' (as we call it) in public discourse - to be subjected to analysis etc.  

It is in these at-least-two stages of modelling - of summarising and communicating - our recognised real-knowledge; that the varieties of differences in intuitions arise. But, all intuitions of knowing are - in and of themselves, true - hence the same; whoever is accessing them at any particular time and place.

  

Note added: This is just to emphasise that the above is a model, Steiner's is a model - therefore it is certainly wrong. It is an attempt to overcome our Ahrimanic consciousness with something else Ahrimanic. All true - therefore it is something that may, or may not, help understanding; but itself needs to be overcome. And in our era we need to overcome System with The Personal - with relationships between persons; and bringing that personal understanding (which is spontaneous in young chidlren) to consciousness, and consciously choosing it. Just a reminder... 

"Everyone is an artist" - what did Joseph Beuys mean?

I have been reading the avant-garde 'artist' Joseph Beuys recently (who some authorities regard as the most important 'artist' of the late 20th century) - from my recognition that his work was an explicit continuation of the philosophical insights of Rudolf Steiner; as expressed most clearly in The Philosophy of Freedom. 

In other words; if one engages with Beuys from a basis in The Philosophy of Freedom; we can see his work - especially its quantitatively-major element, the teaching - as directly derived from the same insights as Steiner described. Indeed, these insights were described, advocated and put into practice by Beuys across a wide range of activities.  

I said 'artist' in scare quotes - because Beuys was not really an artist in the traditional sense; or, at best, a rather mediocre one. Having surveyed the span of Beuys's work, it seems obvious that as a sculptor or in terms of his drawings, he was no better than most decent art school graduates. 

Indeed, his surviving artistic productions are mostly unpleasant in effect - being mostly dull, drab, depressing - and, in many instances (and sometimes deliberately) decaying. 

Yet Beuys was a genius - and this was based on (at least...) three major attributes:

1. Beuys was extremely intelligent - far more intelligent than 99% of the people around him in the art world - including the artists, students, gallery owners, critics and scholars (partly because art does not attract the best intellectuals and does reward confident frauds).

2. Beuys was extremely creative in his thinking. This is obvious in his speaking - the records of interviews and accounts of lectures. He (rather like Steiner) did a truly colossal amount of teaching and discussing - at times apparently up to 10 hours a day in public discussions, day after day, week after week. 

From the combination of intelligence and creativity; Beuys always seems to have something to say about anything (again, like Steiner); was very quick on the uptake and in response, and had considerable general knowledge at his command. 

3. Beuys had an extremely dominant, charismatic and magnetic personality - such that people who were in his presence were often overwhelmed, but could never ignore him - and those who spent much time with him seems to have been affected for the rest of their lives. 

Beuys was very influential, and launched several projects and 'organizations' - although it seems clear that from his point of view these were not intended to be moral, 'functional' institutions; but mostly venues for conversation, stimulation, and endlessly developing ideas and thoughts. 

His most famous slogan was "Everyone is an artist" which was apparently intended to mean that traditional art - the production of beautiful artifacts that could 'stand-alone' - was to be superseded by Steiner-esque Thinking from a condition of Freedom (which I regard as the same as my understanding of Primary Thinking). 

In other words, while an artist (i.e. everybody) continues to do and make things; the focus ought to be on the creative thinking which was primary, rather than the products which derived from thinking. 

This creative thinking was revealed more by discussions and conversations about 'art objects' and the thinking behind them - than it was by the objects themselves; this activity being embedded in a context of the evolutionary development of human consciousness under divine providence. 

In other words - I would regard Beuys as aiming to move from the 'medieval' (Intellectual Soul) world view, to the other-side of modernist meaninglessness and isolation - to arrive at the condition of Barfieldian Final Participation - when Men consciously choose to participate with divine creation in the creation of their own world-view. 

For Beuys to assert and operate on the basis that 'everyone' was an artist, was self-destructive from the point of view of a Professor in an art school - and indeed Beuys was sacked from his position. 

He regarded teaching as by far his most important activity; and went on to found (or develop the concept) of a Free University as providing a forum. But this is oxymoronic, and could not exist without refuting its own premises. 

Beuys's other projects had a similarly paradoxical and self-contradicting nature. He was a founder of the German Green party, but left it when the party began to operate as a party - winning elections, getting power etc.  

He also often asserted Rudolf Steiner's Threefold organization of society; which nowadays operates in a realm of quixotic idealism - and functions mainly as the basis for that kind of radical and open-ended discussion which Beuys so much enjoyed and advocated.

It seems that Beuys was a comprehensive failure at his articulated goals (whether in art, education, environmentalism. politics) - but that this was inevitable and indeed 'part of the plan' - since he was in reality a spiritual philosopher aiming qualitatively beyond current societal possibilities.

In the artistic productions, 'actions', teaching etc; Beuys was trying to 'cast a spell' (which worked only partially, and intermittently - and was heavily dependent on his presence) through which to imagine a personhood and society beyond our totalitarian bureaucratic materialism; and thereby inspire individuals to understand and adopt a Steiner-like understanding of Freedom rooted in primary and creative thinking, and an unorthodox Christianity.  

My impression is that hardly anybody understood what Beuys was doing, despite his repeated explanations - just as hardly anybody understood Steiner, Barfield or Arkle. People had very different metaphysical assumptions and interests, and were mostly trying to get along in society as-it-was; and their bottom line was ideological and pragmatic, rather than spiritual and idealistic. 

Like everybody must; Beuys operated in this mainstream world of ideology and practicality; and of course - like everybody - was prone to lapses, selfishness, vanity etc. - since this mortal life is about learning, not achieving perfection. Among his writings (as with Steiner's) there is a good deal of pretentious nonsense, showing-off, and pandering to the audience. 

There was definite dishonesty - especially in Beuys's claimed life-story relating to his self-propagated legend of having been a Stuka pilot rescued from a crashed plane by Tartar tribesmen, smeared in fat and wrapped in felt for warmth - which so many critics took as the basis for biographical and critical understanding. And the surviving 'works' mostly come across as enervating and miserable. 

Yet there is an underlying, implicit, but directly-knowable energy, seriousness and Goodness about Joseph Beuys; which stands in stark opposition to the evil inversions of the art-world that has perpetuated his memory and legacy. 

Indeed; Beuys's motivational Goodness and Romantic Christianity has become indirectly more evident recently, by high-level critical attacks on the man and his legacy - that derive from the heart of darkness constituted by the propagandists for the mainstream modern establishment. 

These attacks take the usual form of slurs alleging Fascism, racism, colonialist appropriation etc. - typical 'deplatforming' stuff deployed against any person or institution from The Past by evil powers when they detect potential danger from true values.  

My point is that - with the correct assumptions, and a willingness to sift and discern - there is potential value in the work of Joseph Beuys - despite his having been, while he lived, the darling of some of the most ridiculous and pernicious folk on the planet - i.e. the trendy, lefty, commissars of the 'modern art' Establishment.  

Freedom in Thinking: the essence of Final Participation (and the destiny of modern Man)

Continued from: http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/modernity-is-do-not-try-to-join-dots-in.html

Final Participation is simple to summarise in its essence - it is Freedom in Thinking.

This is why Rudolf Steiner's most important book was entitled The Philosophy of Freedom - but of course Freedom here is of an ultimate and existential nature: it is, indeed, the Freedom in Thinking with agency, from the Self.

Freedom, by this account, was in general not possible to Men at any time in the past - such freedom is the destiny of the future; but as yet Man has not embraced but rather denied and rejected this freedom (from wickedness, ignorance and wrong ideas).

Freedom of thinking is possible because Man is a child of God, hence has the divine creative capacity to originate - to be an uncaused cause.

In early Men, and in childhood; the self was not autonomous - and thinking was a consequence of immersion in other causes.

With the evolution of consciousness, Man's thinking became incrementally cut-off from the environment (for example, in very different ways; the abstract philosophy of the Ancient Greeks, the detachment from immersion in God and nature and forbidding of representations of God and nature of the Ancient Hebrews).

Man became in a sense more free - less influenced by externals; but at the cost of this freedom being cut-off from participation in reality. The end point was modern alienation, meaninglessness, purposelessness. The self cut-off even from its own thinking...

The future is for Man to be free in thinking: thinking that is primary and uncaused, thinking from the real self (not any social construct), thinking of unbounded scope - thinking which encompasses and integrates all. This is Final Participation - in Owen Barfield's term - 'final' because it is the divine mode of thinking.

Naturally, Man's divine thinking would be partial and distorted compared with God's thinking (which is whole and true); nonetheless it is the next and necessary step.

So, when confronted with a modern world of isolated, meaningless, purposeless, incoherent 'dots'; and experiencing the need to 'join' these dots and attain wholeness and understanding - this is Not a matter of actually taking these dots as they currently-are and joining them. These existing dots are partial, distorted, dishonest... the task is near infinite in scope - overwhelming in complexity...

Rather, the task is much simpler. It is first to attain real, true, thinking and then confront all of reality (sensations, perceptions, feelings, memories, intuitions... everything) - on the basis that everything is significant - and to think them.

Suppose yourself to be looking at the night sky. With Final Participation what we do Not do is to think about the stars as a scientist might; we do not and cannot be un-self-consciously immersed in the experience as our ancestors might; neither do we think concepts of the meaning of stars as a philosopher or theologian might...

With Final Participation we think the stars, we think with the stars. The stars are real, objective and universally-accessible things that are included-in the stream of thinking along with... whatever might be other foci of attention such as the garden, the trees, our memories, our intuitions and imaginations... All are part of thinking, and this thinking is free because it originates in the self, and the self is agent and uncaused.

Such thinking is primary, all-encompassing; and we are not detached from anything that may be thought-about, because we think with it; but we rather participate-in anything, in this thinking.

This is what we need to do, we need to practise doing it until it is voluntary and habitual. This is metaphysics - first philosophy - and we should not be distracted from it, at least not initially, by second-order and 'epistemological' questions about the validity of the various bits and pieces of thinking.

(Naturally, even if our thinking is pure and uncontaminated by external causes, or by wrong motivations - and much thinking will, sooner or later, be so contaminated; our personal thinking will be partial and incomplete as compared with God's thinking. But to demand to know exactly how our own thinking matches up to God's - exactly where it is true and where it is not - is in fact to demand to know as much as God! Epistemology is therefore a fool's errand, a snare and a pitfall. Leave it alone!)

Insofar as we attain to this concept of Freedom in Thinking we are doing what is most important for us to do - that is for us to do, here and now. It is the essential next step in the primary purpose of the saved Christian - which is theosis, to become more divine, to become more like to Jesus Christ.

Limitations of Rudolf Steiner's (nonetheless essential) Philosophy of Freedom

Rudolf Steiner's The Philosophy of Freedom (PoF; 1894) played a very important role in my personal development - indeed, it was perhaps vital. Nonetheless it is ultimately wrong and can cause serious problems if not (after understanding it) one fails to discard or transcend it. .

This is because PoF explains itself in terms of an abstract, simplified, and grossly incomplete model of human thinking. It is A Model (Percept + Concept = united by Thinking).

And any model is false - because simplified compared with complex reality; and false because abstract when reality is 'animistic' (about Beings and their Relationships).

The PoF is, in fact, Ahrimanic in structure: it divides the world into categories of percepts and concepts, and suggests that these are united in thinking. Yet the world is not really divided into percepts; not is thinking objectively divisible into concepts.

Therefore if we begin in Ahrimanic materialist alienation; if we then understand PoF which tells us how it works, and how to escape it...

But if we stop at that point; assume the validity of PoF and try to live by the model of PoF - then we will be stuck in just another kind of abstract materialism: we will loop back into the demonic traps of Ahriman.

We will just create yet-another bureaucratic religion - as happened with Rudolf Steiner's Anothroposophy: which consists merely in learning stuff (studying the scriptures of The Doctor) and doing Anthroposophic stuff (education, medicine, agriculture etc) according to the usual Ahrimanic vocabulary/ lexicon, blueprints, flow charts, recipes, rules and regulations...); as defined by the usual Ahrimanic hierarchy or authority and temple structure with sacred places and rituals...

The Philosophy of Freedom does not, therefore, in itself give us freedom, not even a little bit - unless it is seen as a first step; as a ladder that is ascended then discarded. We need an alternative to Ahriman, not merely a different kind of Ahriman; nor a reaction back to seek an impossible to Luciferic unconscious instinct - or Original Participation...

We need, in other words, to move forward to what Steiner called the Intuitive Soul and Barfield called Final Participation - and this entails something qualitatively different-from the analysis, theories and methods of Steiner's Anthroposophy, and different too from the philosophical abstractions of Barfield.

They are perhaps essential - at least for some people such as myself, but they are a starting-point merely.  

How can we know the hidden, super-sensible, spiritual world that is 'behind' the perceptible world? (concerning Rudolf Steiner)

I am re-reading Colin Wilson's excellent book about Rudolf Steiner: the man and his vision (1985) - which he opens by saying that Steiner's core assumption is twofold: that there is a super-sensible, spiritual world hidden 'behind' the everyday world of the senses - and from-which the perceived world is derived. And secondly; that thus world is knowable by those who choose to develop their latent abilities. 

So far, this is hardly distinctive; except that the way in which the hidden ('occult') world was discovered was not by trance, dream or other 'hallucinatory'-state but by an intensification of the alert, awake, clear thinking that Steiner regarded as characteristic of science.

Steiner therefore called his practice a Spiritual Science (and the specific type of spiritual science he recommended, he termed Anthroposophy).

But when we are told of a spiritual world behind the perceptual world; this naturally seems to evoke a picture in our minds of two perceptual worlds. 

In other words, we often imagine the surface everyday world of solid-things, then - separated from it by a barrier - another world of spirit-things. 

When we imagine ourselves knowing the spiritual world, therefore we imagine seeing/ hearing/ touching the spiritual world by something like of an extra set of new senses.  

At times, especially in his later career as a leader in the Theosophical Society then originator of Anthroposophy; Steiner writes exactly like that about his own experiences. 

He describes observing, in an inward fashion, the activities of spiritual beings such as the so-called-dead or angels, on planes of reality not perceptible to the senses. 

Steiner describes (what seems like) observing events of the life of Jesus, or the evolution - and re-incarnation - of the earth; and/or the history of reality in 'Akashic' records that sound like scrolls recording everything that ever happened, but which can be seen and read by inner sight.  

This seems exactly like traditional religious experiences of a 'hallucinatory type'; seeing visions, hearing voices, perceiving other times and places... But with the difference that Steiner had these experiences - not in the context of a trance or dream or religious ecstasy, but in everyday waking consciousness.    

But at other times, Steiner seems to be clear that the understanding of supersensible reality comes by direct understanding, into the realm of thinking; and therefore Not by means of observing inner perceptions with new inner senses. 

(This is the message of his early books Science and Knowledge, and The Philosophy of Freedom.) 

This is what I have variously termed primary thinking, heart-thinking, or direct-knowing; and is a type of intuition. 

It is envisaged as learning without the intermediary of first perceiving some kind of representation like a picture, and then needing to understand what one has perceived. But with direct-knowing, instead the understanding comes into our thinking without mediation - the subjective experience is that knowledge simply 'arises' in our thinking.  

Such a mode of direct and unmediated knowing, is a much rarer and historically more distinctive way of penetrating to the hidden world of the spirit. 

My conclusion is that Steiner did both: Sometimes he perceived the hidden world of spirit with inner vision: Other times he knew the hidden world directly, in thinking. 

But he failed always to be clear about which he had done, and about which was the better mode of knowing.  

Of these; direct-knowing is the more fundamental and potentially valid way of understanding the hidden spiritual world; because any form of inner vision must entail the further step of interpreting its meaning. 

Whereas (by my understanding - not Steiner's) the perceiving mode provides a very high volume of potentially very specific information - but its validity is much less than direct knowing. 

Because this kind of perceptual information can be 'manufactured' by learnable techniques of meditation, and produced almost at will by those with aptitude. Yet, at the level of specific detail, each such 'visionary' will produce his or her own unique and unreplicable description from observing the hidden world - as can be seen from comparing (say) Swedenborg, Blavatsky and Steiner; or the various New Age channelers of the late 20th century.

(Although Steiner seems to have copied then modified a great deal of Blavatsky's general descriptive scheme of metaphysics and history.)    

To avoid confusion; we would need to avoid talking about the super-sensible world in ways that conjure up an inner world of pictures, stories, observed beings. 

We would need to cease talking about experiences such as watching the work of angels, reading the Akashic records, hearing the words of spiritual guides and the like, feeling our hands driven to engage in automatic writing - and other similar things.  

In sum: There is a hidden spiritual world, and it can be known; but it is ultimately known-by-knowing, therefore not known by (yet another) layer of perceiving. 

A note on the biographies of Rudolf Steiner

I have read several biographies of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) - including his partial Autobiography, which I would recommend (albeit it is not factually reliable, but more of an apologia working from the covert agenda of explaining 'why I was always right').

However, none of the biographies greatly impressed me so far except for volume two of Peter Selg's seven (!) volume study; which is that covering the years 1890-1900. 

This was the period after Steiner finished University and began seven years of editorial work on a collected edition of Goethe's scientific writings, in Weimar; then moved to become a journalist in Berlin.

This is also the period when Steiner wrote his PhD thesis (now published as Truth and Knowledge) and his major philosophical work The Philosophy of Freedom. 

It was also the period when he began his remarkable career as a lecturer, and (around 1898) became a Christian. This was a major and sudden change, since up to the early 1890s, Steiner was apparently anti-Christian (according to his writings), moving in radical anarchist circles; also deeply engaged with the work of Nietzsche (befriending for a while Nietzsche's sister, and meeting the mute and demented philosopher; and having published a book about him in 1895). 

I am currently reading the first volume of Selg's biography (1861-90) having read all but one of the later volumes). So far there is very little detail beyond what was reported by Steiner retrospectively and many years later. 

Indeed, his early years are extraordinarily poorly documented, for such a famous and influential man. It seems that none of his thousands of disciples made any serious attempt to collect information while he was alive or just after. Or perhaps enough effort has not yet been made?

But I am looking forward to the later years, from when Steiner studied at the Vienna Institute of Technology; where I anticipate more in the way of external corroboration from independent sources. 

In general, nobody has so far been much interested in Steiner except for his followers (Colin Wilson and Gary Lachman's overviews probably make the best starting point); and Anthroposophists seem incurious to seek beyond what Steiner himself said about himself. This is not difficult to understand, given the past and continuing attitude to Steiner within the Anthroposophical Society... 

In Steiner circles, he is not really seen as a Man - but as something more like an angel or deity whose entire vast work is necessarily necessary, coherent and of timeless relevance. It would be blasphemous for any normal person to select-from, critique, let alone criticize, such an individual. 

For example, Stanley Messenger was asked in the Q&A after a talk whether Steiner had ever made an error; and SM was unable or unwilling to mention even one instance - but instead said that Steiner may sometimes have been misunderstood. 

Even Owen Barfield - a major genius in his own right, as well as (probably) Steiner's greatest follower and developer - never (to my knowledge, in print) allowed himself to reject anything ever written by Steiner; the furthest OB would go was to state that he did not speak about that which he had not, yet, confirmed. 

So, I am not exaggerating. And this attitude serves to maintain the near-total neglect of Steiner, who was certainly a major genius and of vital relevance to these times; but who (to one outside the charmed circle) was a also flawed character, most of whose work outside of philosophy and the history of consciousness can and should be ignored or set-aside.  

Nonetheless, as a major genius with such vital things to say; I find myself driven to continue exploring Steiner's biography, through the available channels; and to draw my own conclusions. 

The cursed conceit of being right and Rudolf Steiner

'I'll hae nae haufway hoose, but aye be whaur
Extremes meet - it's the only way I ken
To dodge the cursed conceit o' bein' richt
That damns the vast majority o' men.'

From 'A drunk man looks at the thistle' by Hugh MacDiarmid

Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) was prone to the cursed conceit of being right! - he always tried to show that he had been consistent in all his assertions (when looked at deeply), and never - really - changed his mind about anything.

Well, we all have our faults - but this one was very misleading when it comes to describing how it was, by what stages, that Steiner became one of the most insightful and important thinkers of recent centuries.

As a child and young man he was a natural 'clairvoyant' of the usual type seen throughout history - the state that Steiner later called 'atavistic clairvoyance' - a 'throw-back' to Man's original unreflective and unselfconscious state of perceiving spirits and being a part of everything.

That is, Steiner lived spontaneously in a dream-world that was true - yet imprecise. He could perceive the universal spiritual reality, but in a state of altered (and somewhat impaired) consciousness. By his own account; he found it difficult to focus on the material mundane world, he lacked interest-in and awareness-of specific details and was naturally forgetful of facts.

But from his later twenties, Steiner the philosopher created a theoretical world-view in which active, alert, purposive thinking - thinking of the real and universal self - was considered to be reality and truth. Indeed the key to all knowledge - past and present - including knowledge of meaning, purpose and morality.

This is brilliantly argued in his early works, at first only partly consciously but with increasing clarity and explicitness: developing throughout the prefaces to Goethe's scientific work from 1883, the book on Goethe's implicit philosophy (1886), the published PhD thesis of 1892 (Truth and Knowledge) up to The Philosophy of Freedom (published 1894) where it reaches its final and complete statement.

 So - first Steiner was a dreamy-spiritual person; then from his early twenties to his middle thirties he developed a theoretical framework for a new kind of clairvoyant (clear seeing) spirituality based on thinking rather than dreaming.

But only when Steiner was in his mid thirties was he actually able to live this new kind of alert and thinking focused spiritual-seeing - which he later called Spiritual Science.

And that was not the end - because in his middle thirties Steiner was broadly hostile to Christianity. However, over the next seven or so years he used his new ability in spiritual science to explore Christianity; and at the end of this time, around 1900 and aged about 42, Steiner finally arrived at what was to be his resting point of Christianity as the basic metaphysical and theological frame within-which the method/ process of Spiritual Science operated.

Steiner changed - he ended up very different from how he started-out; and the change took many years - about twenty years, in fact, from beginning to end!

Why is this important? Because:

1. It shows that change is possible.

2. But change is slow. If it took Steiner twenty years, it might well take us longer...

3. Theory may be well worth doing, and productive and constructive - it can lead to a change of person.

4. Method (spiritual Science) is not enough: religion is also required.

5. Religion can be a thing of the spirit, primarily.

6. Steiner's personal trajectory was very unusual - in that he went from being naturally an atavistic (dreamy, passive, mediumistic) atavistic clairvoyant - to Spiritual Science; whereas most of those who wish to follow him will be coming-from the opposite direction - from an utterly un-spiritual materialism.

7. For me this explains the proven ineffectiveness of Steiner's spiritual 'exercises' - since they were implicitly designed to increase concentration and precision in people who were naturally dreamy-spiritual; while most of us nowadays are all-but unable to be dreamy spiritual and live in a meaningless, purposeless dead-materialism.

8. In sum - to end up where Rudolf Steiner was aged from 42 onwards; we modern Westerners need first to escape materialism and enhance our spiritual sensitivity - perhaps initially with dreamy-clairvoyance: but with the conscious eventual aim of both spiritual science as process, and Christianity as framework.

Barfield misunderstanding Barfield...

One of the difficulties about understanding Owen Barfield, is that he did not really understand himself! 

I mean that Barfield did not really understand the nature of his own philosophical work; and thereby said some misleading things about it. 

Barfield's major work was Saving the Appearances; and in his introduction to the 1988 edition of this book (which are Barfield's first published, and framing, words in the reprinted editions since then), Barfield tries to provide a helpful framework to avoid what he terms a misunderstanding, and a difficulty. 

What Barfield regards as the 'misunderstanding' is that "some readers have treating the work as claiming to provide a complete metaphysical theory of the nature of reality. Not so". 

(Leaving aside the weasel word "complete" - because nothing finite ever is complete...) 

But Of Course Barfield is exactly providing a metaphysical 'theory' of reality! Metaphysics is that philosophy which deals in the fundamental nature of reality; and Barfield is claiming in StA that reality is inextricably consequential of both 'chaos' and consciousness; because chaos is meaningless and unknowable without consciousness. 

Also, Barfield asserts that consciousness has changed through time; and therefore (says Barfield) reality itself (and not just perception of reality) has changed through time: "Nature itself [has] changed in the course of time in a mode not covered by the doctrines of biological evolution".

Furthermore; without consciousness (says Barfield) - there is no knowable reality - only chaos. 

So that from Barfield's assumptions: it is incoherent to theorize about a world without consciousness. 

Thus, a cosmology which - like both Big Bang and Steady State theories - speculates on the formation of a non-alive universe in the absence of consciousness is not so much mistaken as simply incoherent; as are similar speculations on the formation and evolution of an inorganic earth before the advent of Life.  

Barfield's (drawing heavily upon Rudolf Steiner's - albeit not identical-with Steiner) is indeed a fundamentally different understanding of reality than anything in the Western or Eastern mainstream of philosophy or theology. 

Therefore, whether Barfield acknowledges it or not: in StA he is indeed "doing metaphysics", and proposing a particular metaphysical description. 

Barfield claims he "tried to preserve neutrality towards all such [metaphysical] speculations, by referring to objective reality (that is to say, reality insofar as it is independent of our awareness of it)... sometimes as 'the particles' and sometimes as 'the unrepresented'. 

But this is not neutrality - because neutrality in metaphysics is impossible. 

Barfield's conceptualization of 'objective' as 'unrepresented'/ 'particles' is itself a metaphysical division and definition.  

Barfield then says: "The subject of this book is not the nature of reality; it is the evolution of consciousness". 

This translates as Barfield saying he is not doing metaphysics, but is (implicitly) doing a kind-of 'science' that he claims to be independent of ('neutral' about) metaphysical assumptions. 

So, Barfield's detailed account of the way that word-meanings have changed through human history; is claimed to be (in effect) 'empirical' and independent of metaphysical assumptions. 

But this is false, because Barfield's understanding of the implications of meaning change being located in consciousness; and consciousness being inextricably a part of reality; are excluded by the implicit and unconscious metaphysics of mainstream linguistic history. 

The changes of word meaning through history are interpreted using a very different and incommensurable significance than that which Barfield proposes - and the mainstream linguists would regard Barfield's interpretation as bizarre and obvious nonsense. 

Likewise, astro- and geo-physicists would regard Barfield's assertion that their theories of the formation of the universe and of earth were incoherent - because excluding any "observing consciousness" from such theories - to be absurd nonsense. 

Such physicists would almost certainly assert that their theories 'work' empirically, have been cross-checked by multiple mathematical analyses and physical observations - and that there is just No Problem.  

The difference between Barfield and the physicists is precisely metaphysics: each is arguing from different basic assumptions concerning the nature of reality. 

 

My understanding of Barfield is that he was Just plain wrong about what he was doing; just as Rudolf Steiner was wrong in The Philosophy of Freedom. 

Barfield claimed to be doing 'science' and Steiner claimed to be doing epistemology; but in fact both were doing metaphysics: both were (in these works) putting forward a different way of describing ultimate reality from that which was mainstream. 

This wrongness had an unfortunate effect in terms of obscuring the reader's understanding; because a convinced reader is given the false impression that Barfield and Steiner have 'proved' their arguments in a neutral fashion (which ought to be universally acceptable); rather than having provided a radically different framework for the structuring of arguments. 

Furthermore, by failing to notice that they themselves are 'doing metaphysics'; Barfield and Steiner both leave out God as a primary explanation for their understandings of reality. 

I have said before that it would be Much easier for the reader to understand Saving the Experiences if Barfield had set-out at the beginning that the 'evolution of consciousness' which Barfield describes is a divine plan, which aims at the incremental divinization of Man towards the level of God as creator.

Lacking this structuring and explanatory reference to God; Barfield's attempted-neutral description of the evolution of consciousness sounds like he is proposing a kind of 'law of nature' - a biological principle that sounds like a rival theory of the same kind as mainstream biological evolution by natural selection.   

I believe the consequences of this confusion can be seen in most of mainstream Barfield scholarship since the 1960s; and this has been exacerbated by a failure to engage with the work of Rudolf Steiner. Yet, if we begin by stating Barfield's metaphysical assumptions as such, including the presence and role of God; it really is not difficult to understand - because then its validity does not hinge on understanding and following complex, multi-step arguments or evidence. 

Terry Boardman on the current crisis

Ever since this crisis broke, I have been awaiting with anticipation Terry Boardman's analysis: here it is - I excerpt a few of the more striking (and accessible) insights (lightly edited - italics are mine):

Again and again in his lectures on The Karma of Untruthfulness, Steiner emphasised the importance of the search for truth. He began with the question that was in everyone’s minds at that time of the First World War: “what can I do in this crisis?” – and answered simply and directly: “Endeavour to understand! See through things!”

Thoughts, he said, are forces and have effects. What people think is far more important than what they do, because thoughts become deeds in the course of time. 

We live today on the thoughts of past times; these thoughts are fulfilled in the deeds of today. Clear and proper understanding of what is going on is the only way – “Nothing else is of any use”. 

We need wide-awake vigilance and discrimination in all things. All forms of atavistic mediumism and spiritual practice that avoid the conscious mind are anti-modern and harmful. At the very beginning of his public life, in his book The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (1894; a.k.a. The Philosophy of Freedom), Steiner showed how it is vital to combine the correct thought with the object, to find the concept that truly corresponds to the percept. 

Nothing is better for a person, he said, than real insight into how things work in the world. The truth can never be as damaging as an untruth and to adhere to the truth is a solemn and holy act of worship. Have courage for truth, he urged; stand on the foundation of truth, even if it is harmful or embarrassing. 

It is essential “to develop the will to see things, to see how human beings are manipulated, to see where there might be impulses by which people are manipulated. This is the same as striving for the sense for truth. ….

This Consciousness Soul epoch (1413-3573), which according to Steiner lasts 2160 years, will continue until the middle of the 4th millennium. A crucial aspect of this epoch is for individuals to become conscious of themselves as spiritual beings and of their relationship to the worlds of spirit, nature and other human beings. This is something that only individuals can do in freedom; it cannot be done en masse, as a group... 

In this epoch the main challenge is for individuals to penetrate their mental life so that they can become the conscious masters of their thinking. The Consciousness Soul Age will be followed by the Age of the Spirit-Self, the first period in which the spirit of man will be developed, as distinct from the soul. The focus in that epoch will not be so much on individuals and thinking but on the development of new communities and a higher, more refined life of feeling...

The current coronavirus crisis in this 21st century since the time of Christ is taking place within this struggle for the corona (crown) of world power between China and America... 

From the early 1970s until today we have seen countless examples of this animalisation. In their paranoid overreaction to the coronavirus, governments have sought to reduce whole nations to sheep, locked up in domestic ‘pens’, unable to move freely until their ‘shepherds’ allow, and whole nations have meekly complied. 

Public social and cultural life has all but been sheared off and we wait dumbly for we know not what. Perhaps a vaccine that, like sheep, we shall all be required to take for purposes of “health and safety”, our vaccination records accessible on an implanted ID chip in our bodies, just as farm animals already have...

Meanwhile, as we are not in fact sheep but human beings, we can at least use this current imposed detention in our ‘pens’ to study, research, think and meditate, and try to understand what is going on, even though much of that research and study may have to be in the ahrimanic realm of the Internet (the inspiration for which, like almost all modern technology, came from that realm). 

We can take courage from the knowledge, a result of Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual research, that in this Age of the Consciousness Soul, in this 21st century of the Christian Era, and in this Michaelic Age, since the 1930s17 the Christ Being, the Divine Logos, has been visible to those who can perceive Him in the etheric mantle of the Earth, which is the realm of the angels. 

There He is borne by an angel, as in Palestine He was borne for just three years by a human being. Since the Ascension he has united Himself with the Earth. This can become a great source of strength and comfort to people in times such as ours.

Read the whole thing 

(Note: this essay is difficult, esoteric in a way different from my own frame of understanding - nonetheless, I regard it as full of deep insights.) 

Jung versus Steiner

It is striking that two of the most influential spiritual writers (and movement-leaders) of the early twentieth century - CG Jung and Rudolf Steiner - both lived in Switzerland at the same time, and not far apart - and saying many of the same things...

Yet, apparently (from what little was written or recorded) the two men cordially disliked and rejected one another. 

This mutual dislike is not difficult to understand; but it is unfortunate - especially for Jung; because Steiner's work contained the answer to Jung's insoluble problem of how to 'integrate' Modern Man, and to overcome his alienation. 

Jung was far more prestigious a person - by birth and education, and concerned to maintain his upper class social status. To him, Steiner must have appeared as what he mostly was (from the bulk of his writings and lectures); just another Theosophist; an upstart cultist, locked-into what Jung frequently described the typical errors of the Theosophical Society; that is, a false emphasis that led to modern Westerners, superficially and selectively, trying to copy knowledge and practices from a promiscuous brew of 'Eastern' religion and philosophy. 

Such an attitude from Jung would, I don't doubt, strike Steiner as both ignorant and snobbish; Steiner being older and from a working class Austrian background.  

Also Steiner was, by nature, a 'right man' who would never acknowledge that his ideas had changed or that he ever made an error - and so he never repudiated his usage of the vast body of standard, mainstream Theosophical Society-derived 'information' (identical with, and presumably derived from, Madame Blavatsky, and her successors) about Man and Cosmology, that quantitatively dominate Steiner's public discourses. 

Steiner, indeed, reacted very badly to any criticism, including thoughtful, informed and sympathetic critiques; almost never refuting it directly but instead engaging in irrelevant and blistering ad hominem rants to his loyal followers! Whereas Jung, despite being far moodier, more selfish and bad-tempered than Steiner in his personal relationships, displayed a kind of sublime indifference to his critics.

Yet, buried within this mass of errors, and arbitrary (and implausible) assertions concerning medicine, education, agriculture, and anything else that anybody asked him about - Steiner contains the insight which could have made coherent sense from Jung's almost random, and contradictory, insights.  

Steiner's early books that led to The Philosophy of Freedom, and his later remarks derived from these works - including some of his cultural and prophetic insights concerning the 'destiny' of modern Man and what would happen if this destiny was rejected, were exactly what Jung most needed to know. 

Jung - who lived with a sound mind until 1961, might even have found these ideas more lucidly expounded by Steiner's posthumous disciple Owen Barfield; e.g. in Romanticism comes of age (1944), or Saving the appearances (1957).  

The core problem that Jung needed to solve, and never did solve; was that his idea of an integrated and un-alienated Man was that of an earlier stage of human history, a child, a dreamer or a psychotic. This arose because Jung regarded a life dominated by the mythic collective unconscious as the ideal and answer. 

To solve this, Jug needed a true and sufficiently-complete set of basic, metaphysical assumptions; on which could be built practical advice. But Jung's metaphysics was incomplete.  

Jung's solution to modern Man' search for soul was therefore to engage deliberately with the collective unconscious, and to become conscious of its content; to seek there the unity and engagement that was lacking. 

This was correct as far as it went; but Jung's methods all involved an atavistic, regressive, sinking-down into the unconscious, and aiming to bring-back the findings. 

He advised seeking a half-way state between the modern consciousness and ancient un-consciousness; striving either to maintain awareness and memory during a descent towards dreams or psychosis; or else assembling an intermediate and symbolic discourse (or images, ideas etc.) to bridge between them. 

In Steiner/ Barfield terms, Jung only acknowledged Original Participation and the modern Consciousness Soul - but disregarded Final Participation. 

From Steiner/ Barfield's perspective; Jung was trying and failing, because it is not possible to reverse the direction of human developmental-evolution. It is not possible to return to something like the Classical-Medieval mindset; during which Man lived-in, and was satisfied-by, Public Systems of symbol, ritual, sacred text and picture mythic or legendary narrative, allegory and the like. 

Jung, in essence, was advocating that modern Man re-create (by acts of personal - and private - creativity) some such symbolic intermediary for himself; make his own 'private religion'. This is what Jung did himself, in his private notebooks, his sculptures and pictures. 

But Jung also stated that any such private spirituality nonetheless had universal significance; so long as it drew from the collective unconscious. 

What emerged was unsatisfactory - it alleviated to some partial and temporary degree the alienation and dis-integration of modern Man (i.e. it has symptomatic therapeutic value) - but the method was inadequate, just didn't work well enough. 

It did not suffice. 

Why? Because we cannot return with full consciousness and memory and control of our thoughts to the collective unconscious/ Original Participation. What Jung offered was - at best - an alternation between modern consciousness and a simulacrum of the more ancient mind - but not the actuality of the ancient mind. 

The intermediate state of active imagination was - in effect - a kind of lucid dreaming or dissociated semi-sleep state; and this state is both unstable ('metastable' tending either toward waking or sleep) and also insufficient as a solution to the problems of modern Man. 

It is trying to be simultaneously passive, spontaneous and-unconscious; and at the same time active, creative and conscious. These are opposite states - and can only be alternated or else 'averaged'.  

Hence Jung and Jungians can be observed to lack the hallmarks of wisdom, insight, discernment etc. which would characterize an integrated and unalienated person; and they lack the resources (or honesty) to explain this failure.    

Steiner/ Barfield's solution was a third state that Barfield termed Final Participation; in which integration and participation (i.e. escape from alienation) was attained in a new and qualitatively different kind of thinking*. 

This was conceptualized primarily as a learning experience; and the fullness and permanency of this state could be attained only in Heaven (or else after many further incarnations) - thereby explaining its own 'failure': i.e. why Final Participation could only be partial and temporary in this mortal life.  

Jung believed in a life after death, but never integrated this with his other ideas; which his why his ideas have been merely therapeutic - i.e. directed at making this mortal life less miserable and more fulfilling. 

Jung's concepts therefore underlie much of New Age spirituality - which operates at the level of consumption and lifestyle: a quantitative amplification of whatever ideology is already present (nearly-always mainstream leftist); but without the strength to have a qualitative impact; without providing a profound or powerful alternative and satisfying motivation for modern living. 

Therefore, I regard Jung as one of those sources that are harmful if pursued primarily: Jung will not lead anyone to The Truth. 

But, for those who have already grasped The Truth and who have a Romantic Christian attitude (ie. with personal intuitive discernment acknowledged as the basis of metaphysics); then Jung's work can be an exciting and valuable resource. Read selectively; Jung can even be seen as himself a proto-Romantic Christian. 

Jung's ideas are overall a mass of contradictions: wisdom and foolishness; insight and triviality; truth-seeking and self-serving dishonesty... 

But if approached in the properly critical spirit, we may discover there many helpful and inspiring formulations.  

*Note: By contrast, Jung's reports of his own experiences of the collective unconscious are perceptual. That is; Jung describes visions, conversations and dramatic scenarios between himself and persons or events. These have a 'hallucinatory' quality - i.e. they are subjective, private perceptions; outwith normal discourse and imperceptible to others. 

Further comment: If the reader is unclear about any of the terminology used above, I would advise doing a word/s search on this blog (search box located to the upper left corner of the opening screen) to get background or further explanation.