Journal for Anthroposophy Click image to order.

Revisioning Society & Culture

Douglas Sloan, Editor

“Classic” Articles From The Journal for Anthroposophy

Spring 2007 / Number 77

Single Copies: $15.00 / 2-Issue Subscription: $25.00

Excerpts from the Introduction by Douglas Sloan

This is the third special issue in the “Classics Series” of the Journal for Anthroposophy which have included articles from regular issues of the Journal for Anthroposophy published since 1965. Robert McDermott is the Series Editor.

Throughout his life, Rudolf Steiner stressed repeatedly that the most crucial task facing the modern human being is that of transforming our dominant ways of knowing the world. This emphasis is the red thread that runs through and connects all Rudolf Steiner's writings, lectures, artistic work, and practical endeavors. Rudolf Steiner spoke of this transformation of knowing as developing the capacity to obtain genuine knowledge of the spirit. He spelled out in great detail what this entailed and its concrete implications for all of life. The articles in this issue of the Journal point, each in its own way and with respect to a particular social/cultural concern, to the necessity of this fundamental transformation of our knowing capacities.

Articles contained in this volume are:

1. “Michael – Spirit of the Times” by Georg Kühlwind.
2. “Toward Meeting Evil with Consciousness” by Adeline Bianchi
3. “Joseph Beuys: The Protest Against Materialism's Deformed Image of Man” by Dieter Rudloff
4. “The Survival of Architecture” by Rex Raab
5. “The Spiritual Heart of Service: Self-Development and the Thinking Heart” by Cornelius Pietzner
6. “Working Together as an Aspect of Inner Development” by Christopher Schaefer.
7. “The Ideas That Destroyed Russia and the Ideas That Can Rebuild” by Clopper Almon
8. “From Consumer to Producer in the Spiritual Sphere” by Herbert Witzenman
9. “Choosing America as a Place for Incarnation or Immigration in the 20th Century” by Virgina Sease

The first article in this issue by Georg Kühlewind, “Michael — Spirit of the Times,” addresses directly this most important task of the modern human being: the transformation of our knowing through meditative self-transformation. “Never,” writes Kühlewind, “has such a stride been as urgent nor as possible as today.” It is urgent because, as we shall consider later in more detail, the prevalent materialistic consciousness of our age becomes increasingly destructive. The transformation of this consciousness is possible as never before because, since the end of the nineteenth century, the “cosmic intelligence” — the non-sensory source of world creation — has been available to human beings in a new way.

“Toward Meeting Evil with Consciousness,” by Adeline Bianchi, adds to our understanding of why the transformation of consciousness is so crucial in our time. When and if we allow ourselves even a modicum of conscious awareness, the manifestations of evil today can be overwhelming. And yet, Rudolf Steiner says that this awareness is necessary for in this and the following epoch of human evolution evil will become increasingly pervasive and powerful. It is the special task of human beings in our time to meet the growing presence of evil and begin the work of transforming it.

In his brief and insightful discussion of the influential German artist, Joseph Beuys, “Joseph Beuys — The Protest Against Materialism's Deformed Image of Man,” Dieter Rudoff shows how art is diminished by the assumption that we can have knowledge only of the quantitative and mechanistic. This, as he puts it, has had the effect of “reducing science to a one-dimensional rationalism” and “the breaking off of all connection with humanity, nature, and the cosmos, as well as cutting off art from the wellsprings of life.”

Another example of the critical importance of art, not as mere embellishment but as a carrier of qualities that can nurture and give expression to the wholeness of the human being, is provided by Rex Raab's article, “The Survival of Architecture.” The center of Raab's article is Rudolf Steiner's two Goetheanum buildings in Dornach, Switzerland, as the central research center for the work of anthroposophy in the world.

In his article, “The Spiritual Heart of Service: Self-Development and the Thinking Heart,” Cornelius Pietzner describes service to others as a path of spiritual development. He distinguishes service from charity. Charity as commonly conceived and practiced, he writes, is a one-way transaction, from the giver to the receiver. In service, the relationship between server and served is two-directional and, as a result, both server and served are fundamentally changed in the process. In order truly to serve, we must have the capacity to receive and to learn from the other. Service itself becomes a path of self-transformation.

In “Working Together as an Aspect of Inner Development,” Christopher Schaefer also explores the urgent task of self-transformation. He begins by noting Rudolf Steiner's observation that, in the future, anti-social forces stemming from a heightened sense of individuality will become ever stronger. Special efforts must therefore be made to develop social forces to counter and balance the anti-social. This, says Schaefer, requires two developments: first is the creation of new social forms and structures to foster and support the necessary new social relationships of equality and interdependence among human beings. Underlying this, and making it possible, is the second requirement, the development within ourselves of inner capacities for social life. Again, self-transformation is shown to be essential to social and moral development.

The possibility of a form of social organization that can support the fullness of human life in every dimension — political, economic, and cultural — is the subject of Clopper Almon's article, “The Ideas that Destroyed Russia and Ideas that Can Rebuild.” At first glance, this article might seem to be dated. It was written with reference to a specific world event — the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s. Since then, the hopes for the kind of meaningful social-economic reform in Russia that Almon saw as a real possibility have not been fulfilled. Moreover, many other important events of a social/economic nature have taken place since then — among them, for examples, the event of September 11, 2001, the two Iraqi wars, the rise and bursting of the technology investment bubble, the fall of Enron, and so forth. Yet, a closer reading of the article will reveal that these later events convincingly exemplify the crucial importance of Almon's case for “Ideas that Can Rebuild” — ideas that western society, as well as the rest of the world, have yet to understand and put into practice.

In his brief and profound article, “From Consumer to Producer in the Spiritual Sphere,” Herbert Witzenman reflects on our deeply entrenched, modern consumer consciousness, and on the desire, nevertheless, of many people — young people especially — to break free of the consumer mentality and instead to become productive contributors to society. As Schaefer and Almon also argue, the transformation of the consumer culture requires new social forms, but, as they also emphasize, it requires an inner transformation, the development of new capacities for knowing and acting in the world.

In “Choosing America as a Place for Incarnation or Immigration in the 20^th Century,” Virginia Sease explores the question, “Which spiritual beings are especially active in America, and what is their nature?” As we have noted in these introductory reflections, Rudolf Steiner stressed the crucial importance for modern people to transform their knowing capacities in order to be able to take up such questions. Virginia Sease identifies some of the main beings from Rudolf Steiner's findings and the particular qualities of their relationships to America. The reader will note that Virginia Sease does not simply assert the existence of these beings, but seeks to identify the nature and quality of their presence and functioning in the world, as their activity can be perceived and experienced, to start with, by our ordinary consciousness. We must “learn,” as she puts it, “to read the signature,” the outer manifestation of these beings in their effects on the world and in human affairs.

Everything depends, however, on the development of qualitative — spiritual — capacities of knowing. In the words of Rudolf Steiner, which Sease quotes: “To find living ideas, living concepts, living viewpoints, living feelings, not dead theories, that is the task of this age.” And that also may be one way of describing the crucial task of the cultural sphere in Steiner's conception of the Threefold Social Order. It is the primary function of the cultural sphere to provide the living knowledge of meaning, value, purpose, and qualities that can guide and set a context for the humane functioning of the political and economic spheres. The Threefold Social Order in this sense is especially relevant to America's influence, for both good and ill, in today's world, and has special relevance to this article on America. As Steiner warned after World War I: “The Anglo-American world may gain world dominion; but without the Threefold Social Order it will, through this dominion, pour out cultural death and cultural illness over the whole earth.” (see Lecture 4 of Rudolf Steiner's lecture series, The Mysteries of Light, of Space, and of the Earth) For those today who are convinced, and have weighty reasons for so thinking, that the Doubles have come overwhelmingly to the fore in present day America, Virginia Sease also reminds us of the particular spiritual realities with which we may still work in the hope that, in Abraham Lincoln's words, “the better angels of our nature” may yet prevail.

>> Place your Order by clicking here <<