Challenged with bringing the Word of the Mysteries to the public, Rudolf Steiner introduced the fact that reality can never be definitively defined to our everyday conscious lives.
When I was in art school, I participated in a project where my future wife and I were to teach painting to forty fourth-grade children in an underprivileged area. Our costs were being covered by a foundation. There was no museum nearby. The children had never even visited a museum or seen a real work of art in their entire lives. Their experience of pictures came from television. The only materials they’d ever used were wax crayons in kindergarten. And these were also the only materials that were made available to us. As for us, we were in the middle of our studies, filled with artistic and anthroposophical ideals.
When I was asked to write this article, and I began to think about Rudolf Steiner’s tasks as a teacher—his task to speak about the reality of the spirit in Central Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century—I was reminded of my time working with these fourth graders.
At no time in world history or in the emergence of various cultures were people so far removed from concrete spiritual experience and knowledge as at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Steiner was faced with the question: How can I teach something to someone who has no experience or language related to the topic?
The German language in which Rudolf Steiner worked is plastic and malleable, but still able to produce elaborate systems. He took up the German language at the time right after the great philosophical systems, whose echo still provided the means to create a bureaucracy of the spirit. Intellectualism, the misuse of concepts deprived of their reality, was at its height. As a response, the theosophical movement sought to fill the void with Indian concepts, which, however, remained impenetrable to Western thought, along with a large amount of sentimental superstition. Nietzsche, fighting against his time, fell into derangement. The shadows of nationalism darkened the atmosphere, and the only champions of light were found in the labor movements. Unfortunately, they also eventually led to a darkening, for instance, in the Russian Revolution. The vocation of carrying the Word of the Mysteries to the public—without betraying it—could not have seemed more hopeless.
Rudolf Steiner’s response, his moral imagination, was incredible. He sought to pave a path that would lead out of the abstractions of German idealism into reality and, at the same time, would lead through the pictorial sensoriality of Goethe’s poetry and science to a reunion of the spirit with the perceptible world. It was not a drawn-out master plan. He had a series of moral intuitions, strung together like pearls on a string, that led him to produce a worldview with both a language and a praxis.
A great teacher in thought, deed, and word, his work is everything that academicized German-speaking and Central European culture wasn’t and still isn’t. His work is the beginning of a counterculture that subsequently joined the avant-garde and kept the bourgeoisie at bay. It is not a rigid system and cannot be reduced to a mere system or methodology. (There’s not even such a thing as the “Goethean method.” As we read in Goethe, the method itself is always determined anew in accordance with the specific object under observation). Steiner’s work evades definitions because reality cannot be finalized. His work doesn’t postulate theses or hypotheses because it shifts thinking into the things themselves and always allows cognition to follow perception. It is an empirical science of the invisible, a paradoxical enterprise that does not aim to produce a pile of books, theories, or bits of knowledge, but practical work and a new language, in order to make it possible to even contemplate spirit in the first place.
“Whoever wants to express what is truly visionary must work in contradictions . . . .” 1 he said in one of his lectures on art. Contradictions are the only way to evoke the intangible. As a teacher, he preferred to speak in images, both in his written texts and lectures; the images themselves are not the ultimate meaning of his words, but they evoke this meaning as a kind of echo. His concepts are like circles in the sand—they provide an outline for a moment but lose their edges with the next wave, open up again, and then, perhaps, dissolve entirely. There’s no place for abstractions in his work. What may appear abstract in his work is only a limit in our imaginative capacities. As students, we can only understand him if we also think in images, in music, in poetry. The concepts are only like climbing holds on a climbing wall; as we continue, we leave them behind us. Thinking becomes clear as thought rises above language, above the words and their limited temporal meaning. Cognition wrestles itself free from language. It’s a type of instruction that would have expressed itself as poetry or perhaps sculpture in earlier times. It’s untamed, generous, more like what I can learn from listening to the thunder of a storm than sitting in the halls of a university.
As a teacher, Rudolf Steiner is brazen. He never flatters. He tames the horses of thinking, lets them ride before us in continuous circles, and is himself completely immune and indifferent to popularity. In an unyielding Michaelic gesture, he refuses to descend; he speaks clearly, in the language of the other person, but it requires the will of the student and a wish for self-development to enter into what is being said. His teaching doesn’t work as mere information; it only makes sense when we reach for it and penetrate it ourselves. In the words of one of his spiritual forefathers, Johann Gottlieb Fichte: “With these words, I . . . want to be regarded as silent and gone, and you, yourself, now take my place. Henceforth, let everything that is to be thought in this assembly be thought and be true only to the extent that you, yourself, have thought it and recognized it as true.”2
Steiner is the teacher of beginning. He hammers away at a culture that he clearly understands but must resist. For him, there are no “good old days.” With that, he’s close to Nietzsche. There’s also no limit to cognition, no moralizing prescriptions, no reason to participate in a culture that we don’t want to participate in. Steiner never wanted to be accepted as a teacher. He didn’t seek a position at a university, in a museum, or in the academy. He is an opener of the way, an uncompromising trailblazer who dares to go to the ends of the Earth to drink his fill at the ocean of the world and look the Midgard Serpent in the eyes. Rudolf Steiner was a warrior teacher; as such, he remains a son of his time, light years ahead.
This year, we bring you a series of articles titled “Rudolf Steiner as…” to honor the 100th anniversary of Rudolf Steiner’s death. These articles are sometimes essays, sometimes simply thoughts or reflections—always an aspect of his being.
Translation Joshua Kelberman
Footnotes
- Rudolf Steiner, “Sensory–Suprasensory: Spiritual Knowledge and Artistic Creativity,” Vienna, June 1, 1918, in Art and Theory of Art: Foundations of a New Aesthetics, CW 271 (Hudson, NY: SteinerBooks, 2021).
- Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Science of Knowing: J. G. Fichte’s 1804 Lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre (New York: SUNY Press, 2005).
