American Philosophy and Rudolph Steiner

George Bernard Shaw, an Irishman, supposedly said that the British and Americans are divided by a common language. In American Philosophy and Rudolph Steiner we encounter a variant of this theme as we investigate a European and Americans divided, or in some cases brought together, by common and uncommon philosophies. On adding this title to my book review list I braced myself for another, potentially-challenging foray into Steiner's ever-complex and profound cosmology, fearing I would remain divided from his philosophy by the language used to express it. Fortunately, my apprehension was mostly allayed as I began to realize that contributors to this volume had done a commendable job in comparing Steiner's philosophy with that of his American contemporaries in relatively plain, or at least understandable, language. Thus, most of the contributors make Steiner's world, or should I say "cosmic," view of human spiritual and intellectual reality surprisingly clear, or at least as clear as that of the philosophers with whom he is compared. Perhaps, one learns to appreciate Steiner more through repeated exposure and approaches from different angles.

These angles are circumscribed by the seven contributors to this volume who ruminate on the intersections between the philosophy of Steiner and that of Ralph W. Emerson, Henry Thoreau, C. S. Pierce, William James, Josiah Royce, A. N. Whitehead, John Dewey, and feminist thought. A significant theme of American Philosophy is that Steiner has mostly been ignored by modern, mainstream philosophers despite his profound contributions. I also detected awareness among many of the contributors, some relative newcomers to Steiner's work, that it was time to address this omission, as the volume aims to do. Steiner in such seminal works as Philosophy of Freedom and Riddles of Philosophy, sees the intellectual history of philosophy as a manifestation of the evolution of consciousness with all its many implications for spiritual growth and awareness of that intangible "something more" that brings meaning and morality to existence and fosters the desire to search for deeper realities. In this regard, Robert McDermott, the volume's editor, and one of the contributors, points out that "the difficulty with Steiner's disclosures from the perspective of a more conventional philosophical position is simply that he bequeathed too much information…that runs against, or falls outside, our usual way of knowing." Likewise "the dominant schools of American philosophical and religious thought have continued to generate analyses and arguments on the same level of thinking as gave rise to the general poverty of contemporary western thought." The chapter on Emerson is particularly succinct and interesting, perhaps because his view of intuition as the "indwelling divinity of each human being" was so convergent with Steiner's view that "truth that comes to us from without always bears with it the stamp of uncertainty. We want to believe only what appears to each of us inwardly as truth." Such inner knowing satisfies the spirit. As Emerson said, it was an "amazing revelation" that God dwelt in his own heart. These themes are continued in the chapter on Thoreau where we are reminded that Steiner wrote a book on Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path and that he was a "modernist…committed to the search for universal principles and ideas, rather than a postmodernist who questions the very notion of a universal and unifying truth…" Like Thoreau, Steiner held that "there are multiple spiritual lessons to be gained through paying attention to the natural world." Likewise both were, or could be labeled, Unitarian-leaning, "post-Christians" which I take as subscribing to a philosophy akin to what William Irwin Thompson called "post-religious spirituality." Paralleling the concept of "something more" Steiner spoke of student-teacher "heart connections" and "the activity of hidden forces" which again recognises the importance of intuition. The chapter concludes that Steiner's habit of "providing total accessibility and tireless response to all who asked something of him" would have crushed the reclusive Thoreau. In comparing Steiner with James and his famous Varieties of Religious Experience, there are important differences. James wrote as an observer, whereas Steiner held "experience as authoritative." Steiner also stressed the transformative, evolution of consciousness implications of experience. In this regard Steiner held that mystical/spiritual experience was nearly ordinary in pre-Christian times, and is only considered extraordinary today due to the "radical transformation of consciousness wrought by modern Western rational and scientific consciousness." Nevertheless, James coined the notion of the "wider self" and "something more" and believed that empirical investigation might penetrate such intangibles and so expose the limits of conventional science. Skipping the long and [for me] slightly turgid chapters on Pierce and Royce we come to comparisons of Whitehead and Steiner both of whom "saw as central the task of reconciling science and religion… by developing a scheme of thought in which one can see the harmony of both types of truth." Whitehead also regarded subjective experience as authoritative and affirmed a kind of monism, "a pluralistic panexperientialism" although Whitehead did not use this term explicitly. For both, "divine influence in the world" was necessary to account for novelty. Importantly like Steiner, Whitehead recognized the reality of supersensory perception: i.e., for sensory perception to occur, the mind must prehend the body…in order to receive the data it transmits from the outer world." "This prehension of the body is not itself sensory perception" [rather, say I, a species of self awareness]. Whitehead's "scheme of thought" allows support for some of Steiner's "occult" notions. Including "conscious telepathic or clairvoyant perception" whereby "conscious perceptions" are given directly, that is received "apart from the sense organs." Contra Descartes, Whitehead denies the solipsistic subjectivist principle that "we have no knowledge of the existence of other actualities" [implying that no other actual entities exist!!]. Whitehead wryly notes that "Philosophy is the self conscious correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity." In other words philosophy can overcome this subjectivist illusion. Like Steiner, Whitehead held that "the soul as a whole knows, and this means that knowing [or thought] is not divorced from feeling." An outcome of such philosophy is, in Steiner's words, that "a soul that harbors feelings of reverence and devotion …receives intelligence of facts in its environment of which it had hitherto no idea." Dewey learned the notion of organic unity from reading Huxley and sought to overcome the knowledge-value, quantities-qualities or objectivity-subjectivity split. He held that regarding "all experience of worth" as inherently cognitive was an "intellectualist fallacy" which implies that science could only understand" the outside of nature" not the inside, accessible to experience. In short he "set himself against the materialistic, deterministic science" of the 19th century, regarding reductive analysis as "abstractions from the whole" and cultures that tear them from context as "insane." For all his concerns about scientism, Dewey's, concepts of knowledge v. value were rather simplistic in comparison with Steiner's view that deeper knowledge comes from a non-dual integration of these realms. This view is brought into focus in the final chapter on feminist thought which addresses Steiner's distinction between dualism and the unity of "dynamic monism" where "subjectivity and objectivity cohere in spiritual perception." Steiner's concepts of thought are central to his philosophy and hopefully to philosophy in general. He saw thought, not as Kant did, as a means to record reality, but as a way to create or complete it, a spiritual activity that he equated with freedom. Such paths may lead to the conscious transformation of common into uncommon spirituality, and common into uncommon philosophy. If indeed the west is suffering from a poverty of thought in too many intellectual circles, the world may benefit from such transformations and come to regard them as desirable shifts in the evolution of consciousness.