Sifting through Steiner

Rudolf Steiner

Reading the great Germanic polymath, Rudolf Steiner, is, by any measure, a challenging experience. His formal literary output is prodigious and includes a very healthy array of weighty philosophical tomes, most of them written early in his career, while the collection of transcripts of his lectures – covering the first two decades of the XXth century up to his death in 1925 – is truly vast and spans an astounding spread of topics. His complete works run to some twenty or more volumes. So in terms of sheer quantity, the boast of having “read Steiner” is a feat in itself. Reading even ten percent of Steiner is a task of several years, at least. More to the point, though, the content is especially challenging on several levels. Herr Dr Steiner is perhaps best described as an “esoteric philosopher” - to put it kindly - and much of his thinking is very esoteric indeed. Ordinary, unsuspecting folk are likely to encounter Dr Steiner through his education movement (Steiner or Waldorf Schools) or perhaps through alternative medicine (Anthroposophical Medicine) or organic farming (biodynamic agriculture) or curative homes for handicapped children, or one of many branches of the arts, or sundry cultural initiatives that are extensions of Steiner’s work, but when they first open up a book by Steiner, or more likely wade into some of his lecture transcripts, they are confronted by an intellectual world that is not only unusual or even eccentric but is, frankly, bizarre. Steiner has been, and remains, a very influential figure in modern European culture, but the intellectual foundations of his influence are strange and dense and obscure and, for most, inaccessible.

In the estimation of the present writer, who is unashamedly interested in things that are out of phase, this is something that recommends him. There are surely few thinkers who are quite so out of phase, so at odds with the pedestrian and the standard, the accepted and the prevalent, as Rudolf Steiner. Reading Steiner will certainly twist one’s world-view out of a settled complacency and remove one from the dry, comforting world of familiar ideas. His capacity to step out of the structures of modern, materialist, scientistic thought and to see the world through a very different paradigm is one of his great accomplishments, and something that betokens his genius. It is for this that the present writer has ventured into Steiner’s works at regular intervals over a period of some thirty or so years. Let it be clear: Steiner is certainly worth reading. There is really no one quite like him. He is an outstanding figure. One does not throw around the epithet “genius” too often, but there can be no question that Steiner was a genius, a man of quite extraordinary intellect, a figure of rare brilliance.

For all of that, however, he is a mixed bag. On the one hand his work is based on the very sound foundations of high German philosophy and a deep, penetrating acquaintance with the natural sciences. He made a significant contribution to epistemology in his doctoral thesis, later published as ‘The Philosophy of Freedom’. He was deeply conversant with Hegel, Kant, Schopenhauer, Schelling – the whole crew. He met Nietzche in person. As a young man – recognized for his brilliance – he was appointed as editor of the natural scientific works of Goethe. Independent of these studies, he shows remarkably original insights into an impressive range of fields in both the sciences and the arts: medicine, architecture, dance, music, sculpture, astronomy, painting, pedagogy. One can read volumes of Steiner without once encountering anything derivative.

On the other hand, much – but not all – of Steiner is infected with a highly eccentric strain of theosophical thinking even murkier and more unwholesome than that of Madam Blavatsky. This, moreover, rests not upon the foundations of Dr Steiner’s unquestionable intellectual gifts but upon loose and reckless claims of seership and “clairvoyance” and “the investigations of spiritual science”. Wedded to Steiner’s considerable and unique corpus of scientific and philosophical insight is a vast theosophical construction – dubbed ‘Anthroposophy’ – complete with Atlanteans, epochs, ages, reincarnation and complex hierarchies of spiritual beings. Further, in contrast to Blatavskean theosophy, this construction has had grafted onto it a strangely gnostic Christianity, a veritable casserole of old heresies and a host of new ones which, again, have as their sole authority Steiner’s claim to be a seer with direct access to the spiritual realms. The entire ensemble is decidedly fantastic, to say the least. This is not to say that, even then, his genius does not sometimes shine through. As baroque concoctions of gnostic Christo-theosophy go, Anthroposophy is intriguing and unusually cogent, but it is, all the same, a relic of an age when the Theosophical Society, theosophical occultism and clairvoyance were intellectual fashions. To contemporary readers this aspect of Steiner now seems unaccountably bizarre. Side by side with his brilliant philosophical and scientific insights one encounters an outlandish theosophical superstructure that goes well beyond the borders of credulity. There is the genius on the one hand, and the theosophical crank on the other. Steiner made a serious miscalculation. On the one hand he was far ahead of his time. He is now seen, rightly, as a visionary pioneer of organic farming, alternative medicine, holistic education, and much else. But he supposed that the theosophy that had become popular and respectable through the Theosophical Society was a path to the future. For a clairvoyant he showed a notable lack of foresight into the coming drift of the age. In fact, theosophy came and went as an intellectual movement and today seems spent and archaic. Steiner married his philosophy and science to it, and today that decision serves him ill.

‘Married’, in fact, is the right word in this context. One must ask, as did some of his contemporaries, how such an astute and brilliant mind as Steiner’s ever became entangled with the spiritizualizing gibberish of theosophy? The present author has pondered this question many times. Steiner’s works are replete with startling insight. There is no greater exponent of the Goethean sciences. One is surprised and delighted again and again by his understanding of nature, his capacity to think ‘outside the square’, as the saying goes. But then, it is all marred by the theosophy – or Anthroposophy – by which he frames it. How did this happen? How did such a sublime body of thought become so enmeshed in a web of theosophical nonsense? To read Steiner one must confront this problem. The gems are mired in a mountain of dross. How did this happen? What went wrong?

The answer is that he was swept along by two fashions of his day. One was the theory of evolution, which he embraced enthusiastically and of which he then gave an extended spiritual interpretation. Many other people of his day did the same, but perhaps none so thoroughly and comprehensively as Steiner. In much of his writings, and even more so in his lecture transcripts, everything is seen through the lens of evolution. It is evolution this and evolution that. The other fashion, as already noted, was theosophy, but it is important to note that his embrace of this took a particularly personal form. His second wife, Maria von Sivers, was a keen theosophist, and a key member of the German Theosophical Society. When he met her not only did he find a new companion – and one who actively assisted his work in many fields – but he also found a ready-made audience for his ideas. By his own account, his inclinations towards the spiritual were longstanding and deep. He claims that his clairvoyant powers were ripe at an early age. But, frustratingly, it was a dimension of himself about which he had to keep silent for fear of ridicule and misunderstanding. As it was, Goethe’s scientific theories were ridiculed by hard-nosed materialists. Steiner found it difficult to find an intellectual forum in which he could discuss them and be taken seriously. Maria von Sivers solved this difficulty for him. She inducted him into the Theosophical Society and there he found a receptive audience. For theosophy it was a coup. He was surely the most significant intellectual to ever join that organization. He did so in his search for an audience and – what must not be overlooked - for the love of a woman. 

The Theosophical Society, indeed, was full of intelligent, or if not intelligent then wealthy and important women. Much of its success in the sociological context of the late Victorian era and early XXth century was in that it provided a forum for women to engage with the discussion and digestion of the flood of new ideas exposed by the broader (but male-dominated) Orientalist movement. It was at an early encounter at one of Steiner’s public lectures that the then Frauline von Sivers asked him a question about the possibility of developing a fully esoteric understanding of Christianity. Steiner took to this task and eventually married the woman who had suggested it to him. With Maria von Sivers, he also married theosophy and all that it entailed, and thereafter the nature and tenor of his work changed dramatically. He openly declared his seership, quickly rose to be leader of the German Theosophical Society and gathered a following of sympathetic devotees. At length, he, Frau Steiner and his followers, split from the Theosophical Society proper – the catalyst being the Krishnamurti affair – and formed their own esoteric school, the overtly Christian Anthroposophical Society with its headquarters in Dornach in Switzerland. 

Dr Rudolf and Frau Maria Steiner 

In order to read Herr Dr Steiner today one must be aware of this background. In his early works one encounters the philosophical Steiner, then deeply embedded in the German philosophical tradition. One also encounters the Steiner who was the young genius who edited the natural scientific section of the Goethe archives. Both of these strands – philosophical and natural scientific – continue to be developed throughout his later work. He remained an unsurpassed master of German phenomenology and Goethean science. But beyond a certain date – the early years of the XXth century – it is important to realize that he is writing for and speaking to a different audience, and his outlook is now intermingled with his own idiosyncretic (and increasingly Christocentric) version of theosophy. Thereafter, he attempts a fusion, a grand amalgam, of these various influences – Schopenhauer meets Goethe meets Blavatsky meets the gnostic Jesus. 

Dr Steiner with a model of his first Goetheanum.

The first Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland. Steiner's masterpiece. The wooden building was destroyed by arson by German nationalists. 

In fairness we should note that while it is often difficult to disentangle this remarkable all-encompassing assemblage, the idea of freedom prevails throughout, and his work in various fields of the sciences and the arts is, in theory at least, independent of Anthroposophy. He was not a polemicist. He seems to have appreciated that some people might want the Goethe without the theosophical frame. He offers his ideas no-strings-attached. One does not need to be an Anthroposophist dedicated to nurturing the fifth post-Atlantean epoch to see the good sense in many of his ideas about teaching and pedagogy. Nor does one need to be anticipating the reappearance of the Christ-Being in the etheric realm to take advantage of biodynamic agriculture. In the best instances, Steiner kept his Anthroposophy and his Goethe somewhat separate. The agriculture course he gave to farmers, and his astronomy course, are examples. Both masterpieces of Goethean science, they are relatively free of clap-trap. In other cases, though, readers need to carefully separate the inter-mingled strands in order to disinfect his works of the material directed at an audience with a theosophical world-view. One needs to remove Frau Steiner, that is to say. To be frank, women of the Theosophical era often led very able men astray. Even today, perfectly sensible men can be intellectually hobbled by New Age women appealing to the supposed feminine virtue of intuition against the allegedly hardened masculinity of reason. In order to read Steiner it is necessary to divorce him from Maria von Sivers and imagine where he may have taken his genius if he had not married a theosophist. This, and some compensations for the over-played spiritual Darwinism. It is not always easy.  It requires judicious reading. One might need to mentally edit out every second paragraph. It is what makes reading Steiner such a challenge. 

STEINER'S BLACKBOARD DRAWINGS

In almost all cases, though, it is a challenge worth undertaking. Let us reiterate: Rudolf Steiner was a man of exceptional talents who has made a remarkable contribution to modern European culture. He planted valuable seeds. He was not a hack or a charlatan. It is a great pity - arguably one of the intellectual tragedies of the modern era - that he became entangled with the pseudo-spirituality of theosophy. He is a much diminished figure for this. But then, what else could he have done? Such a man, so out of phase but with so much to offer, needs to find a receptive audience somewhere if he is not to waste away in lonely obscurity. And who can blame a man for hitching his wagon to a supportive woman? And, in any case, it is surprising how often it is rewarding to persist with even the most bizarre of Steiner's utterances, to suspend disbelief, and follow his line of insight to its conclusion. The present writer can remember many occasions where his response to reading Steiner was to marvel at what an unexpected and downright weird yet strangely fresh and compelling point of view Steiner presented. Even the bizarre in Steiner makes its mark. 

Much of his scientific work is an extended extrapolation of traditional cosmology seen through the illuminating lens of modern science and deserves particular attention. At the core of it is his conception of the 'threefold man' which has its roots in Plato and other ancient and venerable traditions but which Herr Dr Steiner explores deep into the physical constitution of the human body. Indeed, this is the most impressive aspect of Steiner: while Jung and countless others proposed a bridge between modern science and spirituality in psychology - on the basis of a confusion of psyche and pneuma - Steiner found it rather in biology. This is a great accomplishment in itself, and this alone makes Steiner worth reading. The Steiner perspective is inherently alchemical in this respect. The physical sciences, the study of matter and life, is the place of the spirit. But readers must expect to have to sift Steiner's words as they go. It can be frustrating. Why does he pollute his genius with this rot? one keeps asking. The important thing is not to be put off by the task of sorting the wheat from the chaff. The wheat, when you locate it, is exceptionally high grade. 

One further point of appreciation. We live, according to Steiner, in what he calls a "consciousness soul age" and our spiritual constitution is quite different today than how it was in the past. This follows from his account of the 'evolution of consciousness'. Accordingly, yesterday's solutions will no longer suffice for tomorrow. This is rather over-cooked in much of Steiner, but the present writer has come to appreciate the wisdom of this general proposition much more than in the past. This is especially so in response to the raging popularity of what we might call 'neo-shamanism' and more generally 'neo-primitivism' in alternative spirituality circles today. See a previous post on this issue, 'The Primitive is not the Primordial', here. The spectacle of modern people taking up the primitive mode as a 'path' is a symptom of troubling times. Steiner, at least, knew that much. We cannot go back to a lost past. Modern man is made of very different stuff to the Stone Age shaman. The 'consciousness soul' of modern man - an entirely new arrangement of inside and outside - is a mode in itself, and a legitimate spirituality must find meaning in it. In this present age many paths which served people well in the past are closed or dead ends or else are full of specters and demons. We can only marched forwards, come what may. We cannot evade the consequences of the 'consciousness soul'. There is no way back. 

Yours

Harper McAlpine Black

Bouguereau Revisited

Blind Homer led by his Guide, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau. 

Anyone who was tutored in the history of art before, say, 1990 - as was the present author - would almost certainly have been subjected to the standard narrative regarding the beginnings of modern art. In this narrative a cadre of courageous, forward-looking innovators in France in the latter half of the XIXth century, collectively referred to as the "impressionists" (a loose term, in fact, embracing many disparate artists), stood up to the stuffy, backward-looking, bourgeois art establishment which until then had maintained a virtual monopoly on what could and could not be accepted as "art" through their control of academic schools and the public exhibitions called the "salons". These "impressionists" introduced new techniques, employed a new pallette of colours, painted outdoors (in contravention to the studio tradition) and embraced new subject matter - workers and ordinary people rather than myths and gods. Breaking the constraints of tradition they paved the way for the modern art which was to follow, heroes of the brave new world.

In this narrative, one figure stands out as the arch-villain, the artist who represented everything that was wrong with academic art, who embodied the old and obstructed the arrival of the new - William Adolphe Bouguereau. He was by far the most popular and esteemed painter of his age, acknowledged as the greatest of the salon artists, but was despised and reviled by the "impressionists".  In what became standard art history the name "Bouguereau" became a term of abuse, if he was mentioned at all. His fall from grace was spectacular and says much about the rise of modernism. At his death in 1905 he was famous throughout Europe and America. His paintings were hung in all major galleries and were the pride of public collections. They were eagerly purchased by the wealthy, commanding extraordinary prices. Yet by the 1920s - on the other side of the watershed that was the Great War - his reputation had been completely eclipsed by the modernists. His name no longer appeared in art books - except as the antithesis of "real" art; his paintings were removed from galleries, put into storage, or destroyed, or sold for a pittance. He became a mere footnote in the history of art. The progressive narrative prevailed. The "impressionists" and those who came after them, an endless succession of new styles - post-impressionism, expressionism, cubism, dadism, etcetera - had boldly torn down the art of tradition and were the advocates of "progress" who had made a new art for a new world. After that, several generations of students were taught to loathe and despise Bouguereau and everything for which he stood. 

It was only towards the close of the XXth century, when modernism's angst was finally exhausted, that Monsieur Bouguereau's fortunes began to wax once more. Collectors began to develop new interest in his work, some of his greatest paintings were rescued from storage and dank cellars, and several notable well-curated exhibitions reintroduced him to the public. The greatest traditional painter of the XIXth century had finally reemerged from obscurity. In large measure this was a response to the public's revulsion at the degeneracy of what had come to pass as "art". The "impressionist" adventure had ended with self-proclaimed "artists" smearing their own faeces on a canvas and offering at Southby's for hundreds of thousands of dollars. One of the characteristics of modern art is the artist's disdain for the public. In the end, the public's disdain for the artist won out and the traditional art of painters such as Bouguereau was back in vogue. From the 1990s onwards his paintings were fetching prices of two or three million dollars at auction, prices rivalling those of the works of the "impressionists". 

Much of the slander to which Monsieur Bouguereau had been subjected was re-examined too. It was not true that he had actively obstructed the "impressionists", and the fact that it was he, almost single-handedly, who opened the Academic schools to women students is completely overlooked. A sober assessment reveals that it was much more the case that the "impressionists" invented scurrilous lies about him and defamed him with viciousness and malice. The greatest lie was that he was nothing more than a commercial painter motivated by money. In fact, he was a deeply dedicated, serious painter who lived for his art. Towards the end of his life he said, "Each day I go to my studio full of joy; in the evening when obliged to stop because of darkness I can scarcely wait for the next morning to come." This is not the Bouguereau who was routinely dismissed as a shallow phony by the likes of Paul Gaugin. Bouguereau's biography is redeeming. He was a tireless teacher of hundreds of students (men and women) and laboured with patience and perserverance for the principles he valued until the day he died. The hostile propaganda to which he has been subject is feeble and without substance. When the slurs of the "impressionists" and the later modernists are recontextualized, Monsieur Bouguereau reemerges as an important artist, a painter of great stature in the Western oil painting tradition who, like Rembrandt, was wrongly maligned for nearly one hundred years. 

For the present writer and all who were indoctrinated with the modernist art narrative a reassessment of Bouguereau necessarily involves a degree of unlearning what they were taught. It requires a new openess to ways of seeing and thinking - and feeling - that they were trained to hate and avoid. One is often not cognisant of the orthodoxies to which one has been subjected and that constrain one's worldview within a particular frame. The modernist frame largely consists of misrepresentations of past eras. It can take a great deal of mental effort to push those frames aside and to reimagine the past free of the constraining narratives. This is what is required if one wants to view the work of Bouguereau with fresh eyes rather than the tired, cynical eyes of the heirs of "impressionism". 

Much the same effort is required if one wants to re-engage with the broad project of European orientalism without the vicious, cynical frame imposed by Edward Said and his Marxist post-colonialist followers. Much of our education, indeed, consists of a systematic denegration of the XIXth century: its politics, its art, its values, its endeavours. Modernity in general is built upon the negation of what came before it. It is a remarkably negative enterprise. The key term "deconstruction" says it all. Modern art "deconstructed" Bouguereau.  Ours is an age of deconstruction. It is by no means easy to think outside of such parameters. It is clear, though, that in the end this "deconstruction" yields nothing but a pile of dust, or in the case of art a canvas smeared in excrement. Similarly, post-colonial deconstructions of "orientalism" finally yield nothing but failed nation states, ideologies of hateful vengeance, armies of terrorist barbarians and hordes of refugees. 

*

* *

* * *

Bouguereau was a prolific artist. Some 820 completed paintings are known. Among them are many fine portraits and works concerning the familiar themes of academic painting in the neoclassical style, along with religious works, but also a surprising number of depictions of common workers contrary to the "impressionist" narrative that supposed that academic painters were indifferent to the labours of ordinary people. Here, for example, is the very fine Young Shepherdess, 1885:

And here is a painting of a young girl fetching water from a spring from the same period:

And another. The Spinner, 1873:

The standard narrative that says that the conventions of academic painting forbade the depiction of the lower classes and their occupations and only permitted portraits of the wealthy with their property is not only an exaggeration, it is simply untrue. Yet another example, The Beggars, 1890:

These depictions are, no doubt, idealised - but that is just to say that Monsieur Bouguereau did not indulge in the cult of ugliness that came to typify modern art. The modern worldview is bleak. It regards any preoccupation with beauty and nobility as "elitist": only the ugly is real. It is truly remarkable that such a destructive and degenerate world-view could ever take hold of a civilization. Bouguereau was unashamedly an artist who pursued beauty in the belief that beauty and truth are synonymous and he has been condemned accordingly. 

What is even more remarkable is that Bouguereau and his fellow neoclassicists have been subject to the deeply corrosive and hypocritical critique of the feminists who see nothing but sexism in his Victorian idealisations of the feminine. Bouguereau is best known for his mythological paintings, and nearly all of them feature the naked female form. It was his rendering of the female form, and flesh, that his contemporaries admired most about his work. In this he was unsurpassed. He is first and foremost a painter of the feminine. Some examples:

Biblys, 1884

The Bather

Pandora

The Oreads

No painter has been so dedicated to the feminine and capturing a female ideal of beauty as Bouguereau. What is remarkable is that, while feminists are vociferous in their condemnations of the artists of this "old style" and its values, we rarely hear a voice raised against the ugliness and excesses of modernism. This confirms that the agenda of such critics is purely negative. Their motives are essentially vandalistic. They are concerned with tearing down the old order. The brutality and barbarism of the new order is invisible to them. There is remarkably little incisive intellectual criticism of the modernist order and, for example, the dehumanization, mechanicization and dismemberment of the female form in the celebrated paintings of Picasso. E. Michael Jones makes this point in his damning study The Degenerate Moderns, where he writes:

“Picasso’s mutilations of the female body bespeak the modern version of human sacrifice; they presage simultaneously in a visual way the concentration camp, the abortion clinic, and the pornographic film, and may well have helped pave the way for all three.”

Yet the feminists are more concerned with "deconstructing" Bouguereau's ideal of female beauty. Such double-standards and hypocrisy is endemic in Whig intellectuality. There is a deep, irrational hatred of the old. The vandalism of the new gets a free pass, precisely because it is vandalism and in this it finds its value. 

For a major French artist of the XIXth century Monsieur Bouguereau painted surprisingly few paintings on oriental themes. He was not a traveller and he was surprisingly free of the lure of the exotic. This counts against the accusation that he was motivated by the market. There was high demand for depictions of the Orient and oriental subjects in France and Europe generally throughout the period in which he lived and painted. Had he wished Bouguereau could have catered to this demand very profitably. His interests were elsewhere and he pursued those interests regardless of his clientelle. There is, all the same, one series of paintings of an Algerian model that counts as an instance of oriental art. The young woman is shown selling fruit in one - the painting is known as the Merchant of Granada - and the other, with the same model, is known generically as Girl with Pomegranite. See below.

The rehabilitation of Bouguereau need not be uncritical. In his extensive ouevre there are undoubtedly lesser paintings and, on the whole, he is open to the charge of an unbecoming sentimentality beyond what one might expect in his era. There are certainly works by Bouguereau that are not to the present author's tastes - and equally there are modernist works that he prefers for that matter. But there is, all the same, an injustice that needs restitution: Monsieur Bouguereau has suffered an historical wrong. More than that, the modernist narrative that consigned his paintings to the storerooms of art galleries everywhere and removed his name from the text books needs to be challenged and situated in the broader history of cultural vandalism and self-harm that has beset European civilization since the early years of the XXth century and has degenerated into outright farce in our own times. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black