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Title: ANTHROPOS ANARCHOS Author: Tarjei Straume Language: en Topics: spirituality, anarcho-anthroposophy Source: https://www.uncletaz.com/anthranark.html
What is anarcho-anthroposophy or anthroposophical anarchism? There is a
lot of disagreement going around about who have the right to call
themselves anarchists and who don't. In such discussions the claim has
occasionally been made that dialectical materialism is the only
acceptable belief for anarchists.
This excludes every religious coloring, including Tao anarchism,[1] the
philosophy of Gandhi,[2] and Christos Anarchos.[3] Although all
anarchists reject the Communist dictatorship of the proletariat, there
are a few who cling to an almost mandatory atheism. There is little room
for spiritual freedom in their utopia. This is an important point of
departure when we are going to approach Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy
as a branch of anarchist philosophy.
Even though Steiner was a declared enemy of economic liberalism, he
appears to be a libertarian individualist with special sympathies for
rabid egoists like Max Stirner and Benjamin Tucker. Because of his
spiritually oriented world view, he displayed a certain distaste for
Marxism. This was in spite of, or perhaps precisely because, Steiner
himself had his roots in the proletariat, and never became a wealthy
man. It was his conviction that what he had to offer the working class
was a liberation of each individual through self-consciousness, while
the socialists lulled the workers to sleep with their materialistic
propaganda and their dictatorial party platforms.
"Rudolf Steiner was a child of poor people," writes Christoph
Lindenberg. "He never made big deal out of his parents' poverty; he
usually only mentions in passing the humble conditions he gew up in. But
one time, during a discussion in 1919, when a person who knew poverty
only through what he had heard, began to lecture about how low-paid
postal employees lived, Steiner burst out: 'I have learned to understand
the proletarians by living with them myself, by having grown out of the
proletariat, by having learned to starve with proletarians.'"[4]
Rudolf Steiner was born on February 27 1861 in Kraljevec, a small
bordertown on the island Murr in Hungary (later Yugoslavia, then
Croatia), and grew up in Austria. After the breakup from the
Theosophical Society, he founded the Anthroposophical Society in 1913 in
Dornach, Switzerland, where he died in his study on March 30 1925.
"Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science" is very comprehensive
and constitutes the background for Waldorf schools, the theory about the
Threefold Social Order, biodynamic farming, alternative medicine, and an
obscure New Age religiosity that has influenced a number of poets and
authors. Many anarchists find such a supersensible conception of reality
difficult to digest, especially because Anthroposophy is the most
misunderstood of all "New Age" varieties.
The core of anthroposophical philosophy is thoroughly anarchistic. This
is not so easy to discern, because Rudolf Steiner's basic view can be
very challenging to get to the bottom of. Most anthroposophists choose
what appeals to them and suppress the rest. Most overlooked of all is
the anarchism. This is why we have seen so many authority-loving and
power-hungry bourgeois anthroposophists who have not discovered that
they are sitting on a revolutionary megabomb.
Rudolf Steiner's works comprise over 340 volumes in the German original.
Most of these consist of short hand transcripts from his approximately
6000 lectures. This work can mainly be divided into two groups: First
his written philosophical works from the 1880's and the 1890's, among
these his pioneering "The Philosophy of Freedom" (1894), which he
claimed 30 years later would survive all his other works, and which lays
the foundation for esoteric (spiritual-philosophical) anarchism.
The second group of his works consists of everything he communicated
after the turn of the century, i.e. from 1900 until 1925, and which
makes up over 90 per cent of anthroposophical literature.
Steiner's critique of Marx and Engels and their dialectical materialism
has a central place in anarchist anthroposophy. This dialectical
materialism did not only exert its influence on Communism, but in a
camouflaged manner also on latter-day capitalism (because of its
relationship to social Darwinism). In addition, it has been a strong
factor in socialist-anarchist thinking and is therefore the main reason
for the tension between atheist-collectivist anarchist thinking on the
one hand and freedom-individualistic anarchism on the other.
When evaluating Steiner in the light of the history of anarchism, it is
necessary to put special weight upon his major philosophical work The
Philosophy of Freedom. It is only the second group of Steiner's
communications, i.e. his books and lectures after the turn of the
century, that are often ridiculed or are experienced as offensive
because of their controversial character. This was when he had decided
to speak up openly about the supersensory knowledge he had acquired as a
result of his inborn highly unusual states of consciousness.
Anthroposophical literature originating from the period 1900-1925
requires a spiritual orientation, or cast of mind, where every concept
of faith in the traditional sense is sacrificed in favor of results
yielded by scientific research, while at the same time powers of
cognition with religious characteristics beyond the intellect are
applied. It is very difficult for someone who does not possess this cast
of mind to accept Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophically oriented spiritual
science. Steiner encourages trust in terms of an open and at the same
time critical mind, but he cautions very strongly against regarding his
person as an authority or his communications as authoritative. The
cultivation of Rudolf Steiner as an authority among super-bourgeois and
subservient anthroposophists is, ipso facto, in violation of the
principles of freedom inherent in Anthroposophy.
We are here in touch with the most vulnerable paradox for
anthroposophists with regard to critical objections. The whole thing is
about an enormously rich body of knowledge which is the result of Rudolf
Steiner's occult research. Steiner emphasizes expressly on repeated
occasions that nothing must be accepted on authority alone in our time.
Everything must be scrutinized and verified empirically. How is this
possible, we must ask, when the research itself requires supersensory
organs, powers, and abilities that Rudolf Steiner alone and nobody else
did or does possess?
This objection is so weighty and sensible that most bourgeois
anthroposophists get cold feet when they are confronted with a problem
of this nature. They either explain it all away by denying the paradox
completely, or they renounce any identification with Steiner's
representation, especially in the religious field. Anthroposophy leads
not only to anarchism, but also to esoteric Christianity and to
Buddhism. Because of this, the tragicomical situation arises when in
public debates, one frequently gets clearer and more accurate
descriptions of Anthroposophy from atheist or Christian opponents than
from the anthroposophists themselves, who do everything in their power
to explain away and befog the whole thing.
With the fact in mind that the undersigned considers himself an
anarcho-anthroposophist, an approximate response to the objection
mentioned above may be in order. In the first place, it should be
pointed out that although Steiner did not want to be regarded as an
authority, he did accept that many viewed him as a guide or light
bearer. Immediately following the turn of the century, he published his
observations from the so-called Akasha Chronicle in a magazine of his
own that he called Luzifer-Gnosis, or The Light Bearer's Wisdom. He
pointed out that the prostrate propensity among most people to submit
themselves to authorities of all kinds represents a serious obstacle to
the development of freedom in our time. It is understandable, therefore,
that many anthroposophists don't understand the difference between a
guide and a source of information on the one hand, and an authority on
the other.
One question arising here is to what extent anarchists should permit
themselves to have guides at all. We are living in a complex
entanglement of mutually dependent relationships, and as long as each
individual evaluates freely the credibility and sensibility of every
single source, there is no question of authority. For an anarchist,
therefore, Steiner can be as relevant as Bakunin, Proudhon, Stirner, or
Tolstoy.
As guide, Steiner claimed that anybody could expand the abilities he or
she already possessed. To this end, he published a series of books with
detailed exercises and advice. There are yet many reasons to believe
that Steiner may have overestimated his contemporaries in several
fields.
Steiner thought the claims he presented as occult facts could be
followed up and tested to a certain extent without advanced claivoyance,
or "initiation." Inner experiences cultivated with sharpened powers of
thought, observations of external phenomena that most people overlook,
historical documents, etc. - all this could be used to affirm or
invalidate Steiner's communications. When one developed real occult
abilities later, e.g. by working with the guide's communications, one
could do one's own research as well, also in unknown territories.
Epistemology is the science about the origin and boundaries of human
knowledge, and which methods we use to reach it. It is a branch of
research that traditionally belongs to the realm of philosophy.
Steiner's doctoral thesis, which was published in Weimar in 1892 with
the title, Truth and Knowledge: An Introduction to "The Philosophy of
Freedom," presents an epistemological critique of Kant. With German
idealists like Fichte, Schiller, Hegel, Goethe, and to a certain degree
also Nietzsche, editing of Darwin, plus critique of Bacon, Newton,
Copernicus og Galileo as his point of departure, Steiner wished to
establish a solid epistemological foundation for everything he
communicated after the turn of the century, first as Theosophy, later as
Anthroposophy.
In The Philosophy of Freedom, Steiner challenges the dualists and argues
that a realistic epistemology must lead to an unequivocal monism. The
most influential dualist in the German speaking world was Immanuel Kant,
who divided existential reality in two by alleging that a reality
existed which could not be experienced and which would forever have to
remain hidden from human powers of cognition. This type of dualism is
still making deep tracks in our culture and in mainstream philosophical
orientation. With dualism as our point of departure, we speak about "the
unknown," "the beyond," "God," "aliens," etc. Kant called this unknown
"the thing in itself" and postulated that the real essence of natural
phenomena was located in a hidden world that nobody had experienced or
could ever experience.
Steiner alleged that this beyond unknown was the product of sheer
superstition. He argued that the philosophical sciences could take only
one reality into consideration, namely the empirical one. This was what
he called monism. He found the most reliable point of departure for this
monism in Charles Darwin's natural science, which at that time was being
elaborated further by Ernst Haeckel. Furthermore, he had discovered that
Goethe's research in botanics, biology, anatomy, light, and color was
pioneering and demonstrated among other things that Isaac Newton's
theory of color had been a sidetrack. This monism still represents
cultural heresy in philosophy and in natural science alike.
The Philosophy of Freedom aims to demonstrate that monism is an absolute
presupposition for perfect, unencumbered spiritual freedom. If we shall
be capable of liberating ourselves completely from all coercion and
authority, internal and external, physical and metaphysical, we cannot
remain in a dualistic world that hides ghosts we can never approach. We
must call on monism's help to tear down those limitations that the
dominant dualistic culture has enforced upon human cognition like some
kind of occult permanent boundary.
In this way, monism wishes to enable the development of unencumbered
free will as well as the cognition that the potential of human
empiricism is unlimited. The Philosophy of Freedomhas as its goal,
therefore, to define the presuppositions for free action.
In order to develop the "free spirit," Steiner argued that one would
have to liberate onself from inner and outer tyranny alike. In the tenth
chapter, Freedom - Philosophy and Monism, Steiner defines the difference
between "naïve realism" and "metaphysical realism." Naïve realism is
bound by sensory authorities:
"The naïve man, who acknowledges as real only what he can see with his
eyes and grasp with his hands, requires for his moral life, also, a
basis for action that shall be perceptible to the senses. He requires
someone or something to impart the basis for his action to him in a way
that his senses can understand. He is ready to allow this basis for
action to be dictated to him as commandments by any man whom he
considers wiser or more powerful than himself, or whom he acknowledges
for some other reason to be a power over him. In this way there arise,
as moral principles, the authority of family, state, society, church and
God, as previously described. A man who is very narrow minded still puts
his faith in some one person; the more advanced man allows his moral
conduct to be dictated by a majority (state, society). It is always on
perceptible powers that he builds. The man who awakens at last to the
conviction that basically these powers are human beings as weak as
himself, seeks guidance from a higher power, from a Divine Being, whom
he endows, however, with sense perceptible features. He conceives this
Being as communicating to him the conceptual content of his moral life,
again in a perceptible way - whether it be, for example, that God
appears in the burning bush, or that He moves about among men in
manifest human shape, and that their ears can hear Him telling them what
to do and what not to do."[5]
Perhaps it may seem a little odd that Steiner puts so much emphasis on
such things as hands, eyes, ears, etc. in relation to inner images. In
the course of his years, he often spoke about the necessity of
developing "sensefree thinking," i.e. a more flexible kind of mental
activity that is less dependent upon the grey braincells. (It ought to
be taken note here of the fact that Anthroposophy views the brain as a
sense organ, so that thoughts are perceived by the brain just like
sounds are perceived by the ear.) Many of his utterances appear absurd
when they are approached with a thinking that is spellbound by the
physical brain because they aim to give the listener inner pictures that
do not reflect anything sensory, and thereby contribute to the
development of sensefree thinking.
The metaphysical realist does not think any more sensefree than the
naïve realist is doing. He only projects physical concepts to a
metphysical plane:
"The highest stage of development of naïve realism in the sphere of
morality is that where the moral commandment (moral idea) is separated
from every being other than oneself and is thought of, hypothetically,
as being an absolute power in one's own inner life. What man first took
to be the external voice of God, he now takes as an independent power
within him, and speaks of this inner voice in such a way as to identify
it with conscience.
"But in doing this he has already gone beyond the stage of naïve
consciousness into the sphere where the moral laws have become
independently existing standards. There they are no longer carried by
real bearers, but have become metaphysical entities existing in their
own right. They are analogous to the invisible "visible forces" of
metaphysical realism, which does not seek reality through the part of it
that man has in his thinking, but hypothetically adds it on to actual
experience. These extra-human moral standards always occur as
accompanying features of metaphysical realism. For metaphysical realism
is bound to seek the origin of morality in the sphere of extra-human
reality."[6]
Steiner argued that dialectical materialism made freedom impossible
because it enslaved thinking in a mechanical universe. He continues:
"If the hypothetically assumed entity is conceived as in itself
unthinking, acting according to purely mechanical laws, as materialism
would have it, then it must also produce out of itself, by purely
mechanical necessity, the human individual with all his characteristic
features. The consciousness of freedom can then be nothing more than an
illusion. For though I consider myself the author of my action, it is
the matter of which I am composed and the movements going on in it that
are working in me. I believe myself free; but in fact all my actions are
nothing but the result of the material processes which underlie my
physical and mental organization. It is said that we have the feeling of
freedom only because we do not know the motives compelling us."[7]
After that, Steiner confronts spiritualistic dualism. Today, this
variety is better known as religious fundamentalism:
"Whereas the materialistic dualist makes man an automaton whose actions
are only the result of a purely mechanical system, the spiritualistic
dualist (that is, one who sees the Absolute, the Being-in-itself, as
something spiritual in which man has no share in his conscious
experience) makes him a slave to the will of the Absolute. As in
materialism, so also in one-sided spiritualism, in fact in any kind of
metaphysical realism inferring but not experiencing something
extra-human as the true reality, freedom is out of the question.
"Metaphysical as well as naïve realism, consistently followed out, must
deny freedom for one and the same reason: they both see man as doing no
more than putting into effect, or carrying out, principles forced upon
him by necessity. Naive realism destroys freedom by subjecting man to
the authority of a perceptible being or of one conceived on the analogy
of a perceptible being, or eventually to the authority of the abstract
inner voice which it interprets as 'conscience'; the metaphysician, who
merely infers the extra-human reality, cannot acknowledge freedom
because he sees man as being determined, mechanically or morally, by a
'Being-in-itself'."[8]
The core in Rudolf Steiner's monism is the sovereign independence of the
single individual in thinking as well as in doing. The human being
itself and nothing else is the determining factor with regard to moral
behavior:
"The moral laws which the metaphysician who works by mere inference must
regard as issuing from a higher power, are, for the adherent of monism,
thoughts of men; for him the moral world order is neither the imprint of
a purely mechanical natural order, nor that of an extra-human world
order, but through and through the free creation of men. It is not the
will of some being outside him in the world that man has to carry out,
but his own; he puts into effect his own resolves and intentions, not
those of another being. Monism does not see, behind man's actions, the
purposes of a supreme directorate, foreign to him and determining him
according to its will, but rather sees that men, in so far as they
realize their intuitive ideas, pursue only their own human ends.
Moreover, each individual pursues his own particular ends. For the world
of ideas comes to expression, not in a community of men, but only in
human individuals. What appears as the common goal of a whole group of
people is only the result of the separate acts of will of its individual
members, and in fact, usually of a few outstanding ones who, as their
authorities, are followed by the others. Each one of us has it in him to
be a free spirit, just as every rose bud has in it a rose."[9]
Charles Darwin's theory of evolution holds a central position in Rudolf
Steiner's philosophy. For him, the moral development of the soul was the
most important aspect of evolution, and for this reson, he was confident
that human beings would develop their free spirits through the
experiences of life.
Steiner writes on:
"Monism knows that Nature does not send man forth from her arms ready
made as a free spirit, but that she leads him up to a certain stage from
which he continues to develop still as an unfree being until he comes to
the point where he finds his own self.
"Monism is quite clear that a being acting under physical or moral
compulsion cannot be a truly moral being. It regards the phases of
automatic behavior (following natural urges and instincts) and of
obedient behavior (following moral standards) as necessary preparatory
stages of morality, but it also sees that both these transitory stages
can be overcome by the free spirit. Monism frees the truly moral world
conception both from the mundane fetters of naïve moral maxims and from
the transcendental moral maxims of the speculative metaphysician. Monism
can no more eliminate the former from the world than it can eliminate
percepts; it rejects the latter because it seeks all the principles for
the elucidation of the world phenomena within that world, and none
outside it."[10]
Between 1890 and 1897 Steiner lived in Weimar, and at this time he
became interested in Max Stirner's radical individualistic-anarchist
writings. He had written a book about Nietzsche, but ended up preferring
Stirner's crystal clear thoughts and courage for freedom.
During the fall of 1898, when living in Berlin, Steiner became
acquainted with the Scottish-German poet and Stirner-biographer John
Henry Mackay and his friend Benjamin Ricketson Tucker. A very good
friendship developed among Steiner, Mackay, and Tucker.
Magazin für Literatur was banned in Russia because the editor Rudolf
Steiner was a friend of the anarchist John Henry Mackay. The situation
did not exactly improve when Steiner wrote in his column that he
regarded himself as an individualistic anarchist:
"Until now, I have myself always avoided using the words
'individualistic' or 'theoretical anarchism' to describe my world view.
Because I care very little for such labels. But if I, to the extent it
is possible to determine such things, should say if the word
'individualistic anarchist' can be applied to me, I would have to answer
with an unequivocal 'yes'."[11]
Mackay's theoretical anarchism had many features in common with The
Philosophy of Freedom. Steiner believed, however, that he had shown in
his book that thinking was a spiritual activity and that the human
spirit could create free actions only through a developed thinking. It
is probable that Mackay could not understand this concept of Steiner -
there was in fact nobody who understood it at that time - but he seems
to have been closer to Steiner in other areas.
Mackay had political ambitions with his theories, and he wanted
Steiner's support and cooperation. It was a time when Steiner presented
his ethical individualism as a political ideal, and it looks as if he
felt tempted to use his own philosophy as a platform for Mackay's
political dreams. His description of this episode in his autobiography
30 years later makes it clear that he experienced the inclination as a
temptation or spiritual trial:
"Through my experience with J.H. Mackay and Stirner, my destiny caused
me once more to enter a world of thought where I had to go through a
spiritual test. Ethical individualism, as I had elaborated it, is the
reality of moral life experienced purely within the human soul. Nothing
was further from my intention in elaborating this conception than to
make it the basis for a purely political view. But at this time, about
1898, my soul with its conception of ethical individualism, was to be
dragged into a kind of abyss. From being a purely individual experience
within the human soul, it was to become something theoretical and
external. The esoteric was to be diverted into the exoteric."[12] From
then onward, he decided to tread his own paths.
Bourgeois Steiner-biographers describe this period as a little sidestep,
as a passing flirt with anarchism, and they interpret the last quote as
a goodbye between Steiner and anarchism. This is where the
anarcho-anthroposophists protest. Because it is just as correct to
present Anthroposophy as the next stage in the evolution of anarchism
and to claim that Steiner is the one who makes anarchism a real
possibility with The Philosophy of Freedom. The
anarcho-anthroposophists' argument is, therefore, that the genuine
anarchism is to be found precisely in Anthroposophy, which is and
remains a heretical counter-culture and a rebellious dropout-society,
regardless of how various members of the fine-cultural super-bourgeoisie
wish to decorate the situation.
When one takes the anthroposophical theism into consideration, i.e. the
entire doctrine about the supersensory hierarchies, the Christology,
etc. that dominates the second part of Rudolf Steiner's comprehensive
life work, it may seem puzzling that he embraced Darwinism, which in
many ways has become the basic philosophy of modern atheism. When the
spiritual worlds, with all their gods, demons, departed souls, etc., lay
wide open for Rudolf Steiner from his earliest childhood, we must allow
ourselves to ask: Is it possible at all for a person like that to
appreciate atheism, to understand it?
Human freedom, the inviolable sovereignty of the individual - this was
Steiner's basic philosophical point of departure. It was precisely on
the premises of freedom that he praised Nietzsche, Stirner, and Tucker.
Steiner claimed, paradoxically enough for many people, that traditional
religious ideas in terms of theology and the like, belong to a bygone
age and must yield to self-dependent thinking, totally independent of
external or internal authority.
The paradox here is Steiner's considerable contribution to Christian
theology, which was, however, a result of special requests. Even his
theism is thoroughly anarchistic. The innumerable gods are man's
creators, but they have now withdrawn their authority so that we shall
become mature and self-dependent enough to make it on our own. The gods
are in other words anarchists. The free spirit in man, the anarchist
soul, is the goal and purpose of creation.
Steiner's theism may seem self-contradictory in relation to monism,
which takes only the empirical world into consideration. This was no
problem for the initiated occultist, considering the fact that all his
statements were based upon supersensory research. Traditional religion,
on the other hand, is dualistic because phenomena beyond man's empirical
potential become objects of blind faith.
Rudolf Steiner could never accept Marxism, which spread like fire in a
haystack at the turn of the century. Jens Bjørneboe did call himself an
anarchist, Marxist, and anthroposophist and is supposed to have claimed
that no contradiction existed between Steiner and Marx, but in that
case, he was thoroughly mistaken. Steiner criticized Karl Marx on many
points on different occasions, especially with regard to his
dialectical-materialistic interpretation of history.
When Steiner was working primarily with the idealism of freedom and
anarchism together with Tucker and Mackay, he wrote an article where he
critically confronted the problem of power: "Of all forms of power, what
is being striven for by social democracy, is the worst."[13] By "social
democracy" was meant the Communist ideology at that time.
Six months later, Steiner received a request from the administration of
Arbeiterbildungsschule in Berlin (founded by the Marxist Wilhelm
Liebknecht) to take over the history classes. He threw himself into the
task with great enthusiasm, in spite of the fact that the school could
only afford to pay him a fee that was so extremely modest that they
doubted he could accept the request.
In his autobiography, Steiner tells as follows: "I made it clear to the
directors that if I accepted the task I would present history according
to my own views of mankind's evolution and not according to the Marxist
interpretation as was now customary in Socialist circles. They still
wished me to give the courses."
"These people knew physical work and the results it produces. But they
had no idea of the spiritual powers that guide mankind forward through
history. That was why they so readily accepted Marxism and its
'materialistic interpretation of history.' Marxism maintains that the
only forces at work in history are material and economic, that is,
forces produced through physical work. Any 'spiritual, cultural factors'
are considered to be a byproduct arising out of the material-economic
sphere, a mere ideology.
"Added to this was the fact that for a long time the workers had felt a
growing eagerness for education. But the only means available for
satisfying this need was the popular materialistic literature on
science. It was the only literature slanted to the workers' outlook and
reasoning. Anything else was written in a style the workers could not
possibly understand. Thus the unspeakably tragic situation arose that
while the growing proletariat had an intense craving for knowledge, this
could be satisfied only through the grossest form of materialism."[14]
History was a "special child of sorrow" to Arbeiterbildungsschule. The
students became rapidly bored with the way the subject was taught, and
most of them ceased to attend - whereupon the lecturers usually gave up.
Steiner, however, made success with the students. Later on he went on to
lecture on German literature, on Indian, Persian and Arabic culture, on
the history of philosophy, chemistry, and the history of industrialism.
He also offered instruction in public speaking, and corrected all papers
submitted to him with such care that many of the students really
accomplished things which previously could never have been expected of
them.[15]
In his autobiography, Steiner explains the phenomenon in this way:
"It must be remembered that there are partial truths in the
materialistic ideas on economy which are absorbed by the workers through
Marxism as 'material history.' And these partial truths are just waht
can easily be understood by the workers. Had I simply ignored them and
taught history from an idealistic point of view, the workers would have
sensed that what I said was not in agreement with the partial truths
they knew.
"So I started from a fact that was understandable to my listeners. I
explained why it is nonsense to speak of economic forces dominating
history prior to the sixteenth century, as Karl Marx does. I also showed
that economic life did not take on a form that can be understood in a
Marxistic sense until the sixteenth century, and that this process
reached its climax in the nineteenth century.
"This made it possible for me to speak quite factually about the
spiritual ideals at work in the preceding epochs of history, and I could
show that in more recent times these impulses have weakened, in contrast
to the material-economic ones.
"Thus the workers gradually arrived at concrete ideas about the
spiritual impulses in history, religion, art and morality, and ceased to
regard them as mere ideology. It would have been useless to enter into a
controversy about materialism; I had to let idealism arise out of
materialism."[16]
After five years, the whole thing came to a close when the Party
leadership put an end to Steiner's tuition. He encountered strongest
opposition each time he spoke about freedom. "To speak of freedom seemed
extremely dangerous," he said thirteen years later. The socialist
leaders planted four of their members in a meeting with hundreds of
students where Steiner defended spiritual values, and these made sure
that he was driven out by making it impossible for him to continue. When
Steiner said, "If people wish socialism to play a part in future
evolution, then liberty of teaching and liberty of thought must be
permitted," one of the stooges sent by the party leadership declared:
"In our party and its schools there can be no question of freedom, but
only of reasonable constraint."
To this remark, Steiner added the following comment: "One must not
imagine that the modern proletariat is not thirsting for spiritual
nourishment! It has an insatiable craving for it. But the nourishment
which it is offered is, in part, that in which it firmly believes,
namely positivism, scientific materialism, or in part an indigestible
pabulum that offers stones instead of bread!"[17]
One of these students, Emil Unger-Winkelried, remembered Steiner as
teacher 30 years later: "For us students, especially us working class
students, he was an sacrifice-willing friend who taught at the workers'
school two evenings a week through approximately five years. A so
many-faceted gifted man like Steiner most certainly did not stay with
this tiresome teaching because of the lousy fee, but because it gave him
joy, and the students adored him."[18]
Bourgeois philosophy dominates anthroposophical culture to a remarkable
degree. This is an incredibly paradoxical phenomenon, because as we have
seen, The Philosophy of Freedomis nothing short of pure anarchism. In
this connection, something crucial about Rudolf Steiner should be
mentioned, namely that he never disavowed anything he had expressed
earlier. When he wrote in his magazine in 1898 that he was n
individualistic anarchist, it means that this is precisely what he was -
through his whole life!
In 1897, he met with his friends in the restaurant Zur Alten
Künstnerklause in Berlin, where he frequently ended up sitting far into
the morning hours. Max Halbe recalls "Steiner's external image, his
coalblack hair, his flashing black eyes, the hollow-cheeked face, the
skinny buttoned-up shape, kind of black in black altogether in the
strange mixture of adept and daemon."[19]
This description alone makes of Steiner a striking representative for
the black flag of anarchism. F. W. Zeylmans van Emmichoven's portryal of
his meeting with Steiner in 1920, when the man was almost sixty years
old, is almost neckbreaking:
"The eyes recede deeply under the shadow of the heavy brows. One might
say that these eyes are dark brown, but that would tell very little of
their true nature. How can we describe them? Sometimes they appear
unfathomable. One looks into them as into an abyss, standing dazzled at
the brink. At other times it is a depth like a dark night, when no stars
are visible, yet their presence is felt."[20]
Rudolf Steiner was himself never in the military, and when his
architectural masterpiece Das Goethanum was arsoned on New Year's Eve
1922 (probably by the hostile opponents of the movement) and burned to
the ground, he insisted that the misdeed should not be reported or
investigated. He spoke on several occasions about how spiritually free
people of the future will learn to refrain from reacting to evil or
infringements. He did not wish, however, to combine his ethical
individualism with a socio-political or moral set of rules.
Serious opposition against Rudolf Steiner and his work occurred early,
but the antagonism increased considerably after the first world war,
when Steiner spoke about social Threefolding. The strongest and best
organized opposition came from nationalist quarters, especially in
England and Germany.
Rudolf Steiner made himself guilty of a kind of cultural heresy that has
never been forgiven him, neither by his own time nor by posterity.
Principally speaking, this heresy is no different from e.g. Galileo
Galilei's efforts to demonstrate his vision of the planetary orbits
around the sun. Steiner wished that spiritual science, or Anthroposophy,
should achieve the status of an acknowledged science on par with
chemistry, botany, geology, etc. In his own time, he was met with direct
attacks, while posterity has stonewalled him with silence. He is not
only conspicuous by his absence in most philosophical, scientific, and
religious reference works, but also in most New Age bibliographies.
There is only one aspect of Steiner that has proven to be unassailable,
and that is his personal character. The collection of letters and other
documentation convey a portrait of an imensely good and warm human being
who in an unselfish manner made limitless demands upon himself. It
probably appears incomprehensible for many people that a man who argued
that a free spirit had to liberate itself even from the tyranny of
conscience could be a thoroughly good and selfless person. A major
argument against anarchism is that it will entail unencumbered evil and
egoism. Throughout his years, Steiner placed a lot of emphasis on laying
the foundation for the development of "moral impulses" and "moral
imagination." By this he meant that the really free spirit would gain
increasingly greater inner freedom by using the imagination for loving
and self-sacrificing actions. He believed in the best in humanity
because he had discovered this within himself.
This is where we find anarchism in its highest form.
Tarjei Straume
[1] Zen & taoisme, frihetlige filosofier fra øst, Gateavisa no. 146.
[2] Mahatma Gandhi - den myke revolusjonære, Gateavisa no. 149.
[3] i.e.. Christian anarchism (Christos Anarchos) Gateavisa no. 151.
[4] Die soziale Frage, GA #328, s. 167, Rudolf Steiner mit
Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten dargestellt von Christoph
Lindenberg.
[5] Die Philosophie der Freiheit 1894, GA #4: kap. 10:
Freiheitsphilosophie und Monismus.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kultur- und Zeitgeschichte 1887-1901, GA
31, p. 261.
[12] Mein Lebensgang, GA #28, ch. 28.
[13] Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kultur- und Zeitgeschichte 1887-1901, GA 31
[14] Mein Lebensgang, GA #28, ch. 28.
[15] Stewart Easton: Rudolf Steiner, Herald of a New Epoch, p. 101.
[16] Mein Lebensgang, GA #28, ch. 28.
[17] Geschichtliche Symtomatologie, 6. lecture, GA #185.
[18] Emil Unger-Winkelried, 1934.
[19] Max Halbe: Jahrhundertwende, Danzig 1942, p. 183.
[20] Journal for Anthroposophy #44, An Encounter with Rudolf Steiner, p.
24. Zeylman's book was published in Holland in 1932.