I live at 5th Avenue and West 16th Street in New York City and I often walk over to 7th or 8th Avenue for errands or appointments in Chelsea. Frequently my route there or back takes me along West 15th Street, in which case I pass by the Rudolf Steiner Bookstore at number 138 (a little east of 7th Avenue) and the New York branch of the Anthroposophical Society in America at the same address. I guess they’ve been there for about 30 or 35 years (I’ve lived in this area of Manhattan for 45 years).
I learned about Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), an Austrian
philosopher, social reformer, architect, and esotericist, when I did some
research on theater figure Michael Chekhov for a grad school project in
1985. Chekhov (1891-1955)—the nephew of
the famous playwright Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), a student of renowned acting teacher
Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938), and ultimately a respected actor,
director, acting teacher, and theorist in his own right—had met Steiner in the
1920s and began to adopt some of his concepts.
They influenced him greatly, both in his art and in his life, and he
incorporated them into his acting theories and training techniques.
In order to understand this aspect of Chekhov’s Technique, I
had to read up on Steiner. As you’ll see
shortly, Steiner’s beliefs are unusual, not to put too fine a point on it, so
it should come as no surprise that his name stuck with me long after I finished
that Michael Chekhov project (which was eventually published as “Konstantin
Stanislavsky and Michael Chekhov: Realism and Un-Realism” in The Players’
Journal in 2008; I also posted it on Rick On Theater on 2 May 2011). As it happens, I’ve been traveling pretty
much weekly from my apartment over to Chelsea and often take a detour on the
way back to stop at a store on 15th Street, so I’ve been seeing Steiner’s name
frequently lately, so, always on the look-out for interesting topics for ROT, I decided to write a post on him
while I’m between shows on which to report.
Steiner, of course, isn’t a renowned theater figure
himself—but since Michael Chekhov was fairly prominent on the U.S. theater
scene, I thought it would pass muster.
Chekhov isn’t very well known outside the worlds of theater and
movies—and I daresay his name’s not all that familiar even to folks in the
business—but he had some very prominent students and followers, including
Marilyn Monroe, Anthony Quinn, Clint Eastwood, Dorothy Dandridge, Yul Brynner, Beatrice
Straight, Patricia Neal, Sterling Hayden, Jack Palance, Elia Kazan, Robert
Lewis, Paula Strasberg, and Lloyd Bridges, and he received a 1946 Academy Award
nomination for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound
(1945). With that (tenuous) connection,
I figure Steiner fits my route-step criteria for the blog.
Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was actually born in Hungary,
then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
(His birthplace is now in Croatia.)
Both his parents had been in service to an Austro-Hungarian count, but
Johannes Steiner left the count’s household and went to work for the Southern
Austrian Railway and the family moved around Austria, largely near Vienna, a
lot. Rudolf Steiner claimed to have had
his first spiritual experience when he was nine: he believed that the spirit of
an aunt came to him from a distant town asking him to help her. Neither he nor his family knew at that time that
the woman had already died, and Steiner wrote later that he became palpably
aware of the existence of a spiritual world as real as the physical one. In his autobiography, Steiner said that later
he felt “that one must carry the knowledge of the spiritual world within
oneself after the fashion of geometry . . . [for here] one is permitted to know
something which the mind alone, through its own power, experiences.”
While he was still a youth, Steiner began studying
philosophy on his own, reading Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Johann Gottlieb Fichte
(1762-1814), and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854). At 15, Steiner experienced another spiritual
event. He believed that he’d come to understand
the concept of time, the precondition of spiritual clairvoyance in his view. He went on to study mathematics, physics,
chemistry, botany, zoology, and mineralogy at the Technical University of
Vienna starting in 1879, while auditing classes in literature and philosophy, even attending
lectures in philosophy at the University of Vienna. All along, the young student was being
deeply drawn to the questions of knowledge and self-awareness. A scholarship student, Steiner left the
institute in 1883 without graduating.
When he was 21, he frequently met a man, Felix Kogutzki, on
the train he took to and from his village and Vienna. The man, an herbalist (someone who collects
and prepares roots, plants, and minerals used to make natural remedies and
medicines), told him about nature, plants, and the spiritual world “as one who
had his own experience therein.” Kogutzki
introduced Steiner to a non-academic and spiritual understanding of nature.
In 1882, one of Steiner’s professors recommended him to the
editor of a new edition of the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
and, despite his lack of academic credentials, the former student was hired as
the natural science editor for the publication.
At the same time. from 1884 to 1890, the young scholar supported himself
tutoring the children of a wealthy Viennese merchant and writing science
articles for Pierer’s Encyclopedia.
Steiner eventually received a doctorate in philosophy from
the University of Rostock in Germany (1891), based on his submission of a
dissertation on German philosopher Fichte’s focal conception of
self-consciousness (das Ich, the I, the ego). The young scholar, however, had already begun
a writing career, following his editorial work on the Goethe collection, with
two books of his own about Goethe’s philosophy: The Theory of Knowledge
Implicit in Goethe’s World-Conception (1886) and, after the awarding of his
degree, Goethe’s Conception of the World (1897). Both books concerned epistemology, the study
of knowledge, and can be seen as the foundation of all Steiner’s later
work.
In 1892, Steiner published an expanded version of his
doctoral dissertation, Truth and Knowledge: Prelude to a Philosophy of Freedom (all dates are those of the original German
publication; I’m not giving the German titles of Steiner’s works unless there’s
good reason to do so, but obviously his writings were first published in German
before being released in translation) and in 1894, Philosophy of Spiritual
Activity or the Philosophy of Freedom (both
English-language titles have been used, along with Intuitive Thinking as a
Spiritual Path). The author was
sorely disappointed in the book’s reception, feeling that it was badly misunderstood. He was exploring epistemology as a route to
spiritual freedom, the philosophical basis of Anthroposophy, Steiner’s proprietary
philosophy (which I’ll be getting to shortly).
In the midst of his
burgeoning career as a writer and philosopher, during which he’d become a
part-owner, publisher, and editor in 1897 of Berlin’s Das Magazin für Litteratur,
where he published articles in support of French novelist Émile Zola (1840-1902)
in the infamous Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906) and his correspondence with Scottish-born
German anarchist John Henry Mackay (1864-1933), Steiner was introduced to the Theosophical
Society. The society, founded in New
York City in 1875 by Russian occultist Helena
Blavatsky (1831-91), promotes the claim that insight into the nature of God and
the world comes through direct knowledge, philosophical speculation, or a
physical process and encourages the study of Asian philosophies and theologies,
especially those of India. Theosophy,
from the Greek for ‘divine wisdom,’ is a philosophical system that stresses mysticism
and esotericism (adherence to a philosophical doctrine that can only be understood
by or is meant for a select few who have special knowledge or interest).
In 1899, Steiner
published an article in Magazin für Litteratur entitled “Goethe’s Secret
Revelation,” which discussed the esoteric nature of Goethe’s mysterious fairy
tale The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily (1795). The publication
led to an invitation by the Count and Countess Cay Lorenz von Brockdorff
(1844-1921 and 1848-1906, respectively) to speak on philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844-1900) at a meeting of Theosophists.
(In 1896, Nietzsche’s sister had asked Steiner to come to Naumburg to
help organize the philosopher’s archive.
Nietzsche was already mentally incompetent, but Steiner had previously
written Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom in 1895.) Steiner became a favorite speaker at the
Theosophist gatherings and this afforded him his first chance to speak openly
and directly about his notions of spiritual perception, the concept on which he’d
been working since his first spiritual experiences as a boy.
The attention
Steiner began to get because of these appearances didn’t sit as well with his
colleagues in conventional academia.
Some of his students rebelled and other scholars were bewildered to see
the formerly respected, if sometimes radical, philosopher and writer, a student
of science, turning into an occultist.
Only the Theosophists were receptive to his ideas. Though he had never
formally joined the Theosophical Society, he was appointed leader of the German
and Austrian branch of the group in 1904.
Mainstream
Theosophy was focused in drawing its methods and beliefs from Eastern
philosophies, but Steiner looked to European culture, seeking a spirituality
based on Western philosophical and esoteric traditions. He referred to his endeavor as “spiritual
science” and began to replace the terminology devised by Helena Blavatsky with
one of his own. Under Steiner’s
leadership, the German-Austrian section of the Theosophical Society grew as he
traveled extensively in Europe. The
further from the original Theosophy Steiner got, the more a rift between him
and the mainstream society grew and finally, in 1912 or ’13, the head of the
German-Austrian group formally split from the Theosophical Society and took a
majority of the section’s members with him.
They formed a new organization, the Anthroposophical Society.
Anthroposophy, a
name Steiner took from the title of a work of the Austrian philosopher Robert
von Zimmermann (1824-98), Anthroposophy in Outline published in
Vienna in 1882, comes from the Greek anthropos, meaning ‘man,’ and sophia,
meaning ‘wisdom’ or ‘learning,’ thus ‘human knowledge.’ (Steiner adopted the name von Zimmerman
coined but not the complete definition he crafted.) Steiner said the term should be understood to
mean “awareness of one’s humanity.” The
religio-philosophical teaching Steiner founded focuses on the spiritual aspect
of life and human nature and his new society was aimed at founding “new methods
of spiritual research on a scientific basis.”
Commentary in a pamphlet on the movement’s founder published
by the society states, “Anthroposophy is not a mere sum-total of ideas. It is a living power, which appeals to the
whole man, not only to his thinking.” Steiner
saw Anthroposophy as “the inwardly strengthened and practiced state of
consciousness, by which man can experience himself as citizen of a spiritual
world.” He later capsulized this concept
as “my consciousness of being Man.”
By 1913, Steiner’s
Anthroposophical Society expanded so much that the organization decided to
build a center for lectures, research, and performances—the Anthroposophical
Society had begun to present plays written by Steiner and Edouard Schuré
(1841-1929), French philosopher, poet, playwright, novelist, music critic, and
publicist of esoteric literature—and Steiner began construction on his first Goetheanum
in Dornach, Switzerland, where he’d moved that year and where he lived for the
rest of his life. Designed by Steiner
himself, the First Goetheanum, built largely of timber, was destroyed in an
arson fire on New Year’s Eve, 31 December 1922-1 January 1923. Steiner had just delivered a lecture and
opponents of the philosopher and his society, which included the Nazis, had
threatened to burn the building, causing a three-man guard to stand duty for
the previous 18 months.
Steiner set about
designing the Second Goetheanum immediately, but it wasn’t completed until
1928, three years after architect’s death.
Steiner went on to design 17 buildings, both organizational and
residential, in and around Dornach between 1908 and 1925. There’s no record of Steiner ever having
formally studied architecture, he was largely self-taught and was one the few important
architects never to have studied with another major architect.
After World War I
ended, Steiner began lecturing more widely and initiated a number of other
activities, including founding the first Waldorf School in Stuttgart, Germany,
in 1919. In 1923, Steiner also launched the
School of Spiritual Science, a center for research into and study of
esotericism as the core of the Anthroposophical Society. Though Steiner only taught the first lesson
of the School of Spiritual Science, the basic guide to esotericism, in his lifetime
(recorded in Johannes Kiersch, A History of the School of Spiritual Science:
The First Class [Forest Row, UK: Temple Lodge Publishing, 2006]), the
school continues today.
Steiner had worked
as a private tutor in Vienna and conducted a series of history and natural
science lectures at the Arbeiterbildungsschule (Workers’ Training School)
in Berlin, an educational program for working class adults sponsored by the
trade unions and social democrats. He
began forming his own ideas about education and child development, which he
eventually laid out in “The Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual
Science,” a 1907 essay. He wanted
schools to train not just the mind and intellect, but make room to educate the
will and the feelings. The intent,
according to Steiner, is to enable the children to become “free human beings”
by developing their “spiritual identities”—that which Steiner claimed he began
to discover from those early experiences when he was a boy.
Though
Anthroposophy was the principal philosophy behind Waldorf education, it isn’t
taught as such in any of the Waldorf Schools, which now exist all over the
world. (As I understand this, it’s like
a Christian school that teaches Christian principles and values, but doesn’t
actually instruct it’s pupils in Christian doctrine. For example, I went to a Quaker school and we
were expected to behave according to Quaker principles and values—no violence;
no intolerance; no rude language; courtesy to teachers, fellow students, and
visitors; neatly cut and groomed hair; leather shoes with laces, shirts with
collars, and no pants with “rivets”—jeans or corduroy jeans—but we never had
classes in Quaker religious beliefs.)
As you might
imagine, however, there are tensions inherent in this system. Though the schools don’t teach Anthroposophy
as part of their curriculum, by their very nature, there’s a dissonance with
some parents and teachers. Since one of
the fundamental Waldorf tenets is to provide a spiritual component to
education, secular teachers and parents who’re committed to secular schooling
can have a problem with this emphasis.
(Though Waldorf schools are non-sectarian, families with strong
religious beliefs of any denomination may experience a conflict because they
prefer to develop their children’s spiritual life in their own ways.) The Waldorf educational approach, while it
can serve as a shield against nonce concepts in pedagogy and educational fads,
can also be an impediment to useful educational innovations, including new
technologies (computers aren’t available to students until their early teens in
order to promote human interaction) and advances in testing and reporting methods.
There are three
Waldorf Schools in New York City and more around the state, not to mention the
country and abroad. Many of the schools
are strikingly designed and decorated, creating an exciting and stimulating
environment. Most evaluations indicate
that Waldorf Schools, both here and abroad, measure up educationally and
socially to standards of both private and public institutions. (Many Waldorf Schools are constituted as charter
schools. Most are elementary or primary
schools.) Waldorf teachers undergo a
separate training program taught by the Anthroposophical Society with
teacher-training facilities around the world.
I’m sure it comes
as no surprise, considering that Steiner had opinions, ideas, and theories on
just about everything (I’ve left out some, otherwise this post would be a
book), that he had thoughts on politics as well. Of all the topics in which he held forth,
politics was arguably the most volatile and he became a controversial figure
during and after World War I. German
civil society was in turmoil after the devastating defeat and then the
burdensome terms of the surrender. The
Weimar Republic (1918-33), the short-lived experiment in German democracy, was
weak and beset with troubles: the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859-1941;
reigned 1888-1918), hyperinflation, a Bolshevik-style revolution in 1918-19,
the Spartacist (communist) Uprising of January 1919, a contentious relationship
with the victorious allies, the rise of politically extremist factions from
both right (National Socialists) and left (Spartacists). Into this noxious mix, Steiner dared to venture
with solutions no group liked—often because they were too radical or futuristic
for the era.
Steiner laid out
his social-reform theories principally in 1919’s Toward Social Renewal. For one thing, he proposed a “Threefold Social
Order,” which the cultural, political, and economic segments of German society
would be independent of one another, arguing that an integrated social system
was unwieldy and inflexible, leading to disasters like the Great War. He also opposed U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s
idea of redrawing the map of Europe along ethnic lines rather than the
traditional and historical national boundaries.
The first idea was greeted as crackpot, but the second got Steiner
publicly branded a traitor to Germany.
In 1919, Dietrich
Eckart (1868-1923), then a founder of the German Workers’ Party, precursor of
the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, the Nazis, attacked Steiner as a
Jew (which he wasn’t), and in 1921, Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), the Führer of the
Nazi Party, which was growing in strength since its founding the year before,
attacked him as a “friend” of the Jews.
As they grew in strength, the Nazis and other German nationalist parties
went to war against Steiner and the Anthroposophists.
Indeed, Steiner had
published essays and articles even in his early career denouncing anti-Semitism
in all its manifestations. (Note the pieces he ran in Das Magazin für Litteratur in 1897 and ’98 in support of Zola’s criticism of the Dreyfus Affair, the notorious anti-Semitic prosecution of a French army officer.) But he also called for the total assimilation
of Jews into the larger cultures in which they lived, a position regarded by
some as anti-Jewish. To be fair,
however, Steiner generally believed that all racial, ethnic, nationalist, and religious
distinctions that divide society should be obsolete by the dawn of the 20th
century (thus liberating “free” humans from what we now call “identity politics”). The Anthroposophist leader therefore opposed
the Zionism of Theodor Herzl (1860-1904)—on the same basis by which he disapproved
of Wilson’s scheme of creating a Europe based on ethnically homogenous nations.
Nonetheless,
Steiner did sometimes fall into non- or quasi-scientific racial assumptions based
on historical (mostly 19th-century) tropes,
and these usages often got him labeled a racist. At times he touted the superiority of the
White European (or Germanic) culture, but at other times he wrote of race as
merely a physical manifestation that was inconsequential to a people’s
intellect or morality. Just as Anthroposophy
is aimed at developing each person’s individuality, he posited that physical
attributes such as race or ethnicity are simply part of that individuality,
along with their experiences and development.
Through his whole career, Steiner promoted the notion that people’s
fundamental spirituality is at the core of their common humanity and that all
forms of racism are anathema.
A fundamental tenet
of Steiner’s Anthroposophy is to use the methodology of science, meaning
principally natural science (the social sciences weren’t formally recognized as
academic subjects until the end of the 19th century), to the study and analysis
of humankind’s spiritual life. Hence
Steiner applied the term “spiritual science” (Geisteswissenschaft) to
Anthroposophy. Of course, detractors of
Steiner and his philosophy didn’t (and don’t) accept that spiritualism and
occultism, which is how they view Anthroposophy, even in Steiner’s hands, are
science at all.
Drawing on his
early focus on epistemology, the study of knowledge, Steiner concluded “that the
experience of thinking, rightly understood, is in fact an experience of
spirit.” His intention was to use his
training and experience in math, science, and philosophy to develop disciplined
and precise arguments for his theories regarding spiritual experiences and,
thus, make them acceptable as true research analogous to the hard sciences and
mainstream philosophy. For him, the
human spirit was a real, concrete entity that can be studied and analyzed like
the circulatory system or the mind, elevating spiritual science to the same
level as biology and the newly emerging field of psychology.
What Steiner was
aiming for in the end is the revelation that the spiritual world and the
natural world are two views of a single unit.
Our consciousness perceives them as separate, but as we develop our
thinking through both about the natural world (that is, through natural
science) and about the spiritual world (through spiritual science), we come to
see the hidden unity of our experiences.
Gaining knowledge will make us truly free to think not just received
thoughts, thoughts generated by our bodies or passed on to us by society, but
our own original and creative thoughts generated by our individuality.
I said earlier that
Steiner isn’t a major theater figure, and he isn’t. You won’t find his name listed in theater
reference books like the Cambridge Guide to World Theatre or in theater
history texts. But the founder of
Anthroposophy did have a connection to theater; indeed, the First Goetheanum
was built largely to provide a stage and auditorium for theatrical
productions. (The present Goetheanum has
a 1000-seat theater for performances.)
Among his many
interests and talents, Steiner worked in the visual arts. I’ve spoken of his architecture, but he also
created a 30-foot wooden sculpture with English sculptor Edith Maryon (1872-1924), The
Representative of Humanity (1922) that was meant to be displayed in
the First Goetheanum. It hadn’t been
installed at the time of the fire, so it is the only object left of that
building and now sits in the Second Goetheanum.
Steiner was also a
playwright, however, having composed four modern mystery plays that follow
the journeys of a group of characters through a series of lives (Steiner
believed in reincarnation, which I haven’t addressed): The Portal of
Initiation (1910), The Trial of the Soul (1911), The
Guardian of the Threshold (1912), and The Soul’s Awakening
(1913). (Mystery plays, a medieval
theatrical event, were enactments of Bible stories.) The plays reveal how spiritual development becomes
evident in karmically-connected people.
(Karma’s another of Steiner’s beliefs.) He had also previously directed plays by
French dramatist Édouard Schuré (The
Sacred Drama of Eleusis, 1907 at the Munich Theosophical Congress; The
Children of Lucifer, 1909). Steiner’s
plays are still performed around the world by Anthroposophical organizations.
The area in which
Steiner so strongly influenced Michael Chekhov, acting and actor-training, the
founder of Anthroposophy developed with his second wife, Marie von Sivers
(1864-1948). The two also devised new
methods of storytelling and poetry recitation.
(The last public lecture Steiner gave before his death was on acting and
speech.) According to a brochure for the
Chekhov Theatre Studio, Steinerian speech training “aims at awakening and
freeing living forces of speech and of developing its plastic movement and
musical element.”
Steiner and von Sivers also developed Eurythmy, “the
science of visible speech,” which makes perceptible what Steiner asserted were
the internal expressions and gestures of language and music, generated when the
spiritual world penetrates the soul. The
Chekhov Studio described Eurythmy as “based on the laws of movement which
underlie man’s capacity for speech and for movement, and linking them
together.” According to Steiner,
Eurythmy is neither dance nor
mime, but a new form of art, which brings to appearance in coordinated
movements the sound-quality of music and speech, When the human being speaks or sings he forms
with his breath the air around him.
Unseen gestures and movements accompany in us each sound and note. These hidden movements are the source of the
art of eurythmy. Thus it can be called
“visible speech” and “visible song.”
By 1923, Steiner had become increasingly frail and weak. He continued to lecture widely and work on his autobiography, Mein Lebensgang [My life’s path] (published uncompleted posthumously in 1925), and tour. He delivered his last lecture in September 1924 and died on 30 March 1925 in Dornach at the age of 64. The nature of his final illness has never been reported.
[I can’t tell if Rudolf Steiner was in the same league
as L. Ron Hubbard or Sun Myung Moon and if Anthroposophy was akin to
Scientology or the Unification Church—or if he was a charlatan and his
philosophy was cult-like. He had plenty
of detractors (aside, I mean, from Hitler and the Nazis) but he seems to have
been greatly respected by many, many people.
(Among the prominent Anthroposophists are writer Saul Bellow; painter
Joseph Beuys; actor, director, teacher Michael Chekhov; sculptor Edith Maryon;
playwright Édouard Schuré; conductor, composer, pianist Bruno Walter.)
[It seems clear that Steiner was very smart—he mastered
a large number of subjects, both academic and esoteric, and was accomplished in
several arts as well—and had a large ego. From my reading,
Steiner doesn’t seem to have set out to bamboozle anyone, even if you consider
his ideas specious. He seems to have
been entirely sincere in his beliefs and many of his ideas were more
impractical than crackpot.
[As I said above, I have left out some of the topics
that are part of Anthroposophy (I didn’t even attempt to go into Steiner’s
relation to Christianity and Christian beliefs—it’s not only very esoteric, but
Christianity isn’t in my wheelhouse), and even those that I have tried to cover
are over-simplified. Anthroposophy is
very complex and expansive, as I’m sure readers have seen, and I can’t say that
I have understood even most of it. The
language is often dense and hard to unpack, and like most philosophies, it’s
hard to pin down in digestible terms.
I’ve tried to give an overview of the philosophy, simplistic and
superficial though it may be, and trust that ROTters who are interested in
learning more will go out and find more detailed sources to satisfy their
curiosity.
[I plan to write a profile of Michael Chekhov for a future post on Rick On Theater. I don’t have a specific date selected for publication, but I hope it will be soon, perhaps in February. (I have two posts, “Psychological Gesture & Leading Center,” 27 October 2009, and “Konstantin Stanislavsky and Michael Chekhov: Realism and Un-Realism,” 2 May 2011, which deal with aspects of Chekhov’s acting theories, but neither article has much biographical detail. My new post will focus on the life of the actor, director, acting teacher, and acting theorist.)]
Dear Rick,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your effort, it's a pity you cannot read german.
You write "It seems clear that Steiner was very smart" and "Anthroposophy is very complex and expansive, as I’m sure readers have seen, and I can’t say that I have understood even most of it".
If you read something ann cannot grasp it- maybe ist your incompetence, but maybe the text is a case of "emperors new clothes?"
Let me help you a bit: Lets look at "Rhythmen im Kosmos und im Menschenwesen. Wie kommt man zum Schauen der geistigen Welt?" GA 350 p. 210
German original, as you can easily google from anthroposiphical sites:
Also sehen Sie, während wir beim Menschen vom Bauch zum Kopfe gehen müssen, von unten herauf, müssen wir bei der Pflanze den umgekehrten Weg machen. Die Wurzel der Pflanze ist mit dem Kopf verwandt. Wenn wir das bedenken, wird uns gewissermaßen ein Licht aufgehen über die Bedeutung der Wurzel. Denn die Kartoffel, die hat Knollen; das ist etwas, was nicht ganz Wurzel geworden ist. Man ißt also, wenn man viel Kartoffel ißt, vorzugsweise Pflanzen, die nicht ganz Wurzel geworden sind. Wenn man sich also beschränkt auf das Kartoffelessen und zuviel Kartoffeln ißt, kriegt man nicht genug in den Kopf hinein. Es bleibt unten im Verdauungstrakt. So daß es also so ist, daß mit dem Kartoffelessen die Menschen in Europa ihren Kopf, ihr Gehirn vernachlässigt haben. Diesen Zusammenhang sieht man erst, wenn man Geisteswissenschaft treibt. Da sagt man sich: Seit Europa diese Kartoffelnahrung immer mehr und mehr überhand genommen hat, seit der Zeit ist der Kopf des Menschen unfähiger geworden
My attempt at translation:
Now look, whereas in man we have to go from the stomach to the head, from the bottom up, we have to take the opposite direction in plants. The plant's root is related to the head. If we consider that, we will fully understand the meaning of the root. Because the potato, it has tubers; this is something which has not become root completely. If you eat many potatoes, you will preferably consume plants which did not become root completely. Thus, when you eat only potatoes and eat too many potatoes, you do not get enough into your head. It stays down in the digestive system. This is why, by eating potatoes, people in Europe neglected their head, their brains. This correlation becomes evident only when you do spiritual science. So you will conclude: Since potato consumption became rampant in Europe, since that time the head of man became more and more incapacitated.
Steiners works have nothing to do with science, and get more and more obscure later in his life. I dont see him so much as a racist- such views were, alas, very common at his times. I see him as a lunatic. Search for more quotes, many are quite funny- he suggests that moonlight must shine on farm animals butts, not their heads. Today, this is one of the prinicples used by Demeter farming.... Did you know that?
A final word about Waldorf schools: They are very different. Some are run by well meaning people. Other are run by people that will visit your house and check you have no TV, that you dont play soccer (because a ball is a symbol of the divine sun, and you dont kick that with your foot). Waldorf schools are frequent centers for outbursts of measels, because vaccination is bad to you karma (or so?). At least in germany, teachers at steiner schools are not required to have any formal training which is required for teachers working at state-run schools.
Take care.
Sir or Madam:
DeleteFirst, let me correct an assumption you have made: As it happens, I can read German. In fact, I'm working right now on a post that's a translation of three German newspaper articles which I'll be publishing shortly.
(I lived in Germany twice as a teenager and young man, as you can see from several autobiographical posts on this blog.)
By the way: I also read and speak French and have studied Russian extensively.
Second, though I thank you for your input, since you are anonymous by your choice, I haven't any idea what your standing is as a Steiner interpreter. You may be, for all I know, as deficient (or, as you choose to call me, "incompetent") as I am.
Third, I don't feel it's my place to pronounce someone's beliefs "lunacy," especially if they're followed by a fair number of others who seem sincere. Whatever I may feel privately is beside the point. (What you wish to say is entirely your choice, however.)
(I may have slipped a little in my profile of Aleister Crowley, but he was, nevertheless, a phenomenon.)
Thank you again for taking the time to comment.
~Rick