Reading Steiner by Jon McAlice There are many people who feel Rudolf Steiner is difficult to read. They find his language heavy, too Germanic, dated. He neglects to use conventional terminology in a conventional manner. “I now know what Jon McAlice anthroposophy is,” said one young woman in a fit of exasperation. “It’s when you take all the ideas you thought you understood, mix them up until they no longer have any relationship to one another or what they once meant, then spew them out again!” She was in her second year of a Waldorf teacher training and had already completed a full course of studies at a German university. She was intelligent, very idealistic, and had just made a significant discovery about Rudolf Steiner’s work. She later confessed the source of her frustration: Until I seriously began to read Steiner, even the most challenging philosophical writings had been easy for me to understand and interpret. Their conceptual frame of reference was conventional; I could interpret their writings based on my own conventional education. Steiner’s frame of reference is not conventional. His ideas don’t stand still. They don’t let themselves be stored in neat boxes, which can later be compared with one another. Unless I think his thoughts with him, they don’t make sense.
Steiner said much the same thing about his work: It is often overlooked that anthroposophy is not an abstract theory, but must be truly alive. True life is the essence of anthroposophy’s being; if it is forced to be theoretical, it is not a better but rather a worse theory than the others. Anthroposophy only becomes theoretical when one makes it into a theory, when one kills it. This is not taken often enough into consideration: Anthroposophy is not only different from other world views, it must be taken in differently. One first recognizes and experiences this difference through the different way of assimilating it.1
He would return to this theme repeatedly during the last year of his life, emphasizing 1) that anthroposophy was in its essence a living reality and, 2) that the way one became acquainted with, embraced and allowed this path to live within one was a key factor in coming to an experience of this living essence. 1 Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts
Without a sense of the living nature of the anthroposophical path and how the way you journey along this path can either allow its teachings to come to life within your being or leaves them lying cold and dormant within the intellect, reading Steiner can indeed be unbearable. Unless, of course you are content to let his work accompany you through life like a casual acquaintance who is able at times to call your attention to things you would not have otherwise noticed. You can then read him at your ease, gleaning those thoughts which appeal to you as you might glean chestnuts in autumn from an Italian mountainside. These can be stored away and shared with friends when they come to visit. Anyone who embarks on a serious reading of Steiner’s work soon discovers that he is in a class by himself. He asks of the reader what few other writers require. You cannot read Steiner the way you might approach Noam Chomsky, for instance. Chomsky will look at a social or political phenomenon, use examples to illustrate what from his perspective are essential aspects of it, develop an argument based on these illustrations, then draw a conclusion based on his arguments. In the end, you can choose to agree with him or not, depending on whether you hold his premises to be valid and his argument logically conclusive. Reading Chomsky is an exhilarating intellectual endeavor. Reading Steiner, the intellect is but the springboard to a completely new experience of reality. As with every human experience, it can only have meaning if the individual is fully present in the experienced encounter. A critical scholarly approach to Chomsky’s work provides insight into the philosophical foundations of his logical arguments, the sociological underpinning of his world view, and the ethics of his conclusions. When Steiner’s work is approached from this perspective, you only achieve what Steiner warned against: a theoretical analysis of anthroposophy; the dead shadow of a living reality. Autopsies can only be performed on corpses. There is, however, a growing corpus of literature exploring the parallels between Steiner’s work, that of his contemporaries, and that of those who came after him. There are studies tracing the roots of his thinking back to the work of his predecessors, primarily Goethe and the German idealists. There is unquestionably a place for this kind of comparative historical commentary. Rudolf Steiner was after all a real person, who lived during a specific period of time and as such his work represents one facet in the historicity of human thinking. A butterfly is only a being of light as long as it is free easter–spring issue 2016
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