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

Shanghai Women - 1920s and 30s

Love Lane in central George Town is so called, they say, because in former times it was the district in which Chinese businessmen were inclined to keep their mistresses. Today it is a fashionable street of terraced ‘link’ houses full of boutiques, tea houses and coffee shops, many with a nostalgic theme invoking the romance of this former era. The present author is staying in a cheap hotel just around the corner and not far from the Sunrise Sweetheart Café, a venue famous for ladies of easy virtue. It is in many of these shops and cafes on Love Lane - such as the very commodious number 41, the entrance of which is pictured below - that one can find reproductions of posters, advertisements and calendars from the golden era of Shanghai fashion, the 1920s and 30s – Chinese nostalgia. This ‘Out of Phase’ post is accordingly dedicated to the same. George Town is not all Chinese temples.

It was the fashion designers of Shanghai who transformed female attire and the Chinese female image under the Chinese nationalist Republic during the 1920s and 30s. After the turmoil of the revolution in the 1940s these same designers shifted to Hong Kong and Singapore and other outposts of Chinese culture, such as George Town, but by then the transformation they started had been complete. The attire of the Chinese woman had been changed forever. Chinese women were brought into modernity. The communists tended to regard the new fashions as ‘Western imperialism’ and, ironically, female attire after the revolution reverted to older, utilitarian, and hence more conservative styles. This regression into dowdiness reached its peak during the catastrophic Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 70s. In more recent times, the increasingly open policies of the People's Republic have re-embraced the fashion revolution of the early XXth century, which is to say they have rediscovered style and good taste and the great sartorial revolution of the 1920s and 30s is at last widely acknowledged in mainland China.

At the centre of the Shanghai style is the garment called the cheongsam. This is a single-piece, tight-fitting full-body dress that became the characteristic garment of the modern Chinese woman. Contrary to claims that it was an importation of Western styles, its roots are in older Chinese garments and so is a continuation, or a modern adaptation, of distinctly Chinese traditions. The genius of the Shanghai design houses was to create a modern garment that is as Chinese as it is modern. Either way, the Moaists frowned upon it as bourgeois while, conversely, it has been a symbol of the anti-communist pro-capitalist Chinese, a badge of modernity and liberation. Here is a picture of the typical modern cheongsam:

Here is a picture of traditional women's attire - the forerunner to the modern cheongsam - from the period immediately before the Shanghai design houses reinvented the garment in its modern form:   

As still prevails in Islamic attire, the traditional Chinese garment was designed to completely obscure the female form and allowed no naked skin to be visible at all. The modern cheongsam, in contrast, is tighter fitting, accentuates the waist, makes a virtue of the feminine form, celebrating female beauty, and shows bare arms. The original Shanghai cheongsam is full length and goes down to the feet; later versions became knee length or three-quarter length.

The liberation of the female form from the dowdy sacks of past styles was then embraced and celebrated in Chinese popular culture. Women in the cheongsam began to appear in advertising and in items of popular visual culture such as wall calendars. Some examples:

Images from that golden era - China in the 1920s and 30s - are now highly collectible and are regarded as the finest fruits of early Chinese modernity. The blossoming of China, later interupted by the Moaist revolution, is on display in these images. They show the Chinese creating their own distinctive modernity. A similar blossoming occured in Japan too. These were closed societies, long insulated from modernity. Then - often with trauma and upheaval - they belatedly decided to embrace modernity on their own terms. This, finally, is what such images as these are really about. They are not just 'nostalgia' and even less are they 'soft porn'. They are a record of how the oriental genius came to terms with the realities of the modern mode, and even more so, confidently set out to forge a modernity of its own. 

There are many modernities. In some cases it is a mode imposed by European civilization upon others. The Chinese, like the Japanese, were never going to be content to receive modernity passively like that. After resisting modernity for a long while, when they finally opened their societies to the new modern world they were determined to do so in their own way, with their own aesthetic values. They were never going to be mere imitators. They were going to appropriate and transform. Insofar as these images show a Westernized sensibility, it has been appropriated and transformed.

Below readers can find a selection of pictures from the Shanghai golden era - advertising posters, calander girls, erotica - images that adorn the shops and tea houses of George Town, setting the high-point and standard of modern style in Chinese women's attire and conventions of beauty.

It is worth adding here that the Chinese (Asians in general) continue to have fine taste and that Asian women are undoubtedly among the best dressed in the world. This has been very noticeable to this present writer on his travels. The Indian/Hindoostani world has been nowhere near as succesful in creating its own modern aesthetic. Hindoo women remain beautiful in traditional attire but on the whole have not made a succesful transition to modern dress. There has been no equivalent to the modern cheongsam in India. (And Indian men, let it be said, are almost uniformly badly dressed, whereas the Asian gentleman's appropriation of the business suit has been entirely succesful.)

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black