Rudolf Steiner Page 3
Whenever some anxiety suddenly evaporates—either through his efforts or of its own accord—he experiences a delightful sense of freedom, the feeling that Chesterton calls ‘absurd good news’. And this is not simply because the problem itself has vanished; it is because his relief gives him a sudden ‘bird's-eye view’ of his own existence, and he is overwhelmed by a sense of distant horizons. He realizes that he has been living in a kind of mental slum when he owns a palace. He sees that all the problems on which he wastes so much of his mental energy can be routed just as easily. He sees that his powers are far greater than he believed, and that all that has prevented him from realizing this sooner is this ‘mental microscope’ that traps him in boredom and triviality. In a paradoxical sense he is already free, already happy, and only a misunderstanding prevents him from realizing it.
What can we do about this? The basic answer was discovered by the modern psychologist Abraham Maslow. It was Maslow who decided to study the psychology of healthy people, and discovered that all healthy people seem to have regular ‘peak experiences’, delightful sensations of bubbling happiness and freedom. As he talked to his students about peak experiences, they began to remember peak experiences they had had in the past, but had forgotten about almost immediately. And as they began talking and thinking about ‘peak experiences’, the students began to have peak experiences all the time. It was merely a question of thinking about them regularly, turning the mind in that direction.
One more point. When Wilder Penfield was conducting his experiment on the cerebral cortex—with the patient still conscious—he discovered that, while the patient was experiencing a kind of mental film of his own childhood, he was also fully conscious of the room around him. This meant, in effect, that two streams of consciousness were flowing simultaneously, without mingling. This surprised him because he had always taken the view that consciousness is an activity of the nerve cells (neurons), a mere product of the brain. But if that was so, the two streams ought to have mingled, like a hot and cold tap flowing into the same bowl. This seemed to suggest that something was keeping them apart. If the brain is a computer, then it has a ‘programmer’ who stands above its activity. It could be said that Penfield has proved the existence of the soul.
Steiner spent his life fighting scientific ‘reductionism’—like the view that awareness is a mere brain activity, as burning is the activity of a fire. He taught that man possesses a ‘controlling ego’, which is the highest of his ‘components’. Half a century after Steiner's death, an American physician named Howard Miller was to arrive at the same conclusion on purely medical grounds.* It would be possible to devote a whole chapter to pointing out how many of Steiner's ‘occult’ insights have since been vindicated—or at least supported—by modern science.
The fundamental tenet of Steiner's teaching is that if we take the trouble to recognize the independent existence of the inner worlds of thought, and keep the mind turned in that direction, we shall soon become increasingly conscious of their reality. We are not, as Sartre believed, stranded in the universe of matter like a whale on a beach. That inner world is our natural home. Moreover, once we can grasp this truth, we can also recognize that we ourselves possess an ‘essential ego’, a ‘true self’, a fundamental identity that goes far beyond our usual feeble sense of being ‘me’.
* * *
*See my Frankenstein's Castle, Chapter 7.
Two
Childhood of a Visionary
RUDOLF STEINER was fortunate in the landscapes of his childhood. He spent his early years surrounded by magnificent prospects of mountains and green plains. Born in Kraljevec in Hungary (now part of Yugoslavia) on 27 February 1861, Steiner later felt it was of symbolic significance that he grew up on the frontiers of east and west. His father, a gamekeeper in the service of a count, left his job when he married, to become a telegraphist employed by the Southern Austrian Railway. He was placed in charge of the station at Pottschach when Steiner was two. It was a boring life, being part of the gigantic official machinery of the Austro-Hungarian empire. But for his eldest son, it had the advantage of being as idyllic as Wordsworth's Lake District.
He was fortunate in another way. All small boys are fascinated by what their fathers do; and the electric telegraph operated by Johann Steiner was the latest and most exciting of nineteenth-century inventions. Invented a mere two decades earlier by Samuel Morse (who also devised morse code), it was the first mechanical instrument to eliminate distance, and make it possible for Vienna to speak to Berlin, London to New York. Even the railway had only recently replaced the coach as a means of travel. So although Steiner grew up in a small country town, he was surrounded by the latest modern technology—in twentieth-century terms it was like being born next to a launching site for space probes. He was later convinced that it was the combination of these two influences—the beauties of nature and the latest modern technology—that created his unique temperament, the blend of the scientist and the visionary.
Steiner's family were Catholics, and he was baptized a Catholic. Although he says very little about the religion of his childhood in the Autobiography, it is a reasonable guess that it played a vital part in his inner life, and helps to explain why the figure of Christ plays such a central role in his later philosophy.
When Steiner was eight, the family moved again, to Neudörfl, near the border with Lower Austria. This had the considerable advantage of being an hour's walk away from the town of Wiener-Neustadt, in Austria, only twenty-eight miles south of Vienna, where Steiner would later acquire his education. The scenery was less impressive than at Pottschach—the Alps were now on the horizon—but there was compensation in the beautiful woods that surrounded the village. The family was poor, and in summer, Steiner used to go for long walks and return laden with strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries, which formed an important addition to the dinner menu. He even walked to a mineral spring half an hour away with a large clay jar, and returned with a gallon of the sparkling liquid to wash down the noonday meal.
It sounds an idyllic existence; but in reading about it, we have to take into account the sheer dullness of living in the middle of nowhere; life was so quiet for the villagers that they all assembled at the station whenever a train drew up. What a brilliant young mind needed was mental stimulation. And this came into Steiner's life through a volume on geometry, lent to him by the assistant teacher at his school. Bertrand Russell, in his own autobiography, describes how his earliest mental awakening came through reading Euclid, and it is important to grasp that by temperament Steiner was closer to Russell than to Madame Blavatsky. He says:
That one can work out forms which are seen purely inwardly, independent of the outer senses, gave me a feeling of deep contentment. I found consolation for the loneliness caused by the many unanswered questions. To be able to grasp something purely spiritual brought me an inner joy. I know that through geometry I first experienced happiness.
When he speaks of ‘many unanswered questions’, Steiner is not referring to great universal problems—like where space ends—but to quite down-to-earth questions that consumed him with curiosity. For example, there was a textile factory close to their house, and its raw material arrived by rail. Steiner was able to see the material when it arrived, and again when it left, but he was never allowed into the factory to see how it was transformed from one stage to the other. This was the kind of thing that fascinated him. There was always a strong practical streak in Steiner. If he had been born in America, he might well have become another Edison rather than a ‘spiritual teacher’.
It is also interesting to note the way he speaks of geometry as ‘something purely spiritual’. He means that it belongs to a world of the mind, which is independent of the world of the body. But surely it is a misuse of language to call this ‘spiritual’? Here a passage in Arthur Koestler's autobiography may help us to grasp the central point. Koestler admits that he suffers from ‘Chronic Indignation’ as some people have chronic indigest
ion. He describes how one day he was sitting on a park bench reading an account of Arab atrocities against Jews in Palestine, and how he experienced the familiar rush of adrenalin into the blood, and the desire to get up and do something violent. At this point, he opened another book about Einstein, and read a sentence that said that the General Theory of Relativity ‘led the imagination across the peaks of glaciers never explored before by any human being’. He suddenly saw Einstein's famous formula—E=MC2—‘hovering in a kind of rarified haze over the glaciers, and this image carried a sensation of infinite tranquillity and peace. The martyred pioneers of the Holy Land shrank to insignificance.’
This is clearly what Steiner experienced as he became absorbed in geometry.
I said to myself: the objects and events seen by means of the senses exist in space. This space is outside man; but within him exists a kind of soul-space, which is the setting for spiritual beings and events. It was impossible for me to regard thoughts as mere pictures we form of things. To me they were revelations of a spiritual world seen on the stage of the soul. To me, geometry was knowledge which man himself apparently produces, but its significance is completely independent of him. Of course, as a child I could not express this clearly to myself, but I felt that knowledge of the spiritual world must actually exist within the soul as an objective reality, just like geometry.
Here we have the essence of Steiner's thought. He is saying: If we can develop this capacity to turn to this peaceful, tranquil world of mental objects, we can gradually develop the ability to see more and more distant horizons in this inner world. When I settle down to read a book, I have moved into the mental world, but only into its backyard; my mental horizon remains limited. If the book fascinates me and moves me deeply, I leave this backyard, or ante-chamber, and move deeper and deeper into the mind space inside me. As I do this, I have a strange sensation which could be compared to gliding. It is as if the mind had managed to rise above the turbulent air of daily trivialities, into a peaceful, cloudless realm where it can glide silently, gently rising and sinking with air currents. No one who has ever experienced this sensation can forget it. It seems to promise a completely different kind of life, no longer tied to the ‘thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to’. There is a breathtaking sensation of freedom, and a sense that this is a foretaste of what human existence might become.
What becomes very clear from Steiner's autobiography is that he knew this instinctively. Living in this peaceful environment, watching the seasons change the trees from brown to green, he was able to retreat into the regions of the mind in a way that would be difficult for a modern city dweller. His teacher introduced him to music—he played piano and violin—and taught him to draw. From the village priest he learned about the politics of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and the passionate desire of Hungarians to be allowed to speak their own language and develop their own culture. The same priest gave him a basic knowledge of astronomy, teaching him about eclipses of the sun and moon. Steiner was also profoundly moved by church rituals. Yet his father was a freethinker, so he was confronted by this stimulating contradiction between the world of belief and the world of scepticism. When his father and the assistant station master of a nearby village sat under the linden trees in the evening, they argued incessantly about politics; the young Steiner listened with fascination, observing with amusement that whenever one said Yes, the other said No. Like a tree, his mind was putting down deep roots, seeking instinctively for the nourishment it needed to grow. Science, politics, religion, music—all were absorbed. And when the doctor from Wiener-Neustadt told him about Goethe, Schiller, and Lessing, it was a revelation of yet another new world. By the age of ten, life had become a series of discoveries. Few children can have had the opportunity to develop as gently and naturally as Steiner, absorbing nourishment like a tree.
At the age of eleven, it was time to go to secondary school. Faced with a choice of ‘gymnasium’, with its classical education, or the ‘realschule’, with its emphasis on science and technical training, his parents decided on the technical school; they hoped that in due course he would become a railway engineer. This meant daily journeys to Wiener-Neustadt—by train in the morning, and back to Neudörfl on foot in the evening, when there were no suitable trains. ‘Shades of the prison house began to close.’ The noisy modern city bewildered him, and for the first year at school he did badly. Then, as he began to adjust to the new pace of life, the old voracious appetite for knowledge reawakened. He had a sense that the world was full of a million things he wanted to know, so he read without any specific sense of direction. But at least he had an extraordinary persistency. His headmaster had written a book about physics, in which he tried to explain the attraction and repulsion between planets—and all other physical bodies—in terms of a universe packed with billions of atoms, all constantly banging into one another. From Steiner's account, it sounds as if his headmaster simply failed to grasp the Newtonian theory of gravitation; at all events, young Steiner found it all very stimulating, although he was baffled by the mathematics. When he heard the name of Immanuel Kant, Steiner saved up and bought a copy of The Critique of Pure Reason and, totally unprepared by any philosophical training, spent his days trying to master its abstruse arguments. Because he found history classes so boring, he separated the Critique into sections, hid them inside his history book, and read them in history lessons. He made up by reading his history direct from the textbooks, and received a mark of ‘excellent’.
Fortunately, Kant's philosophy did him no harm. Other German men of genius have been shattered by it; the poet Kleist and the philosopher Fichte were both convinced that Kant's teaching proves that we can never know anything for certain, and had to wrestle with despair. Steiner, with peasant common sense, treated it purely as a stimulating intellectual exercise, and revelled in it. In the same way, he gulped down a nine-volume History of the World, and received top marks in the history class.
Steiner was a natural ‘autodidact’. He says that his school lessons passed in a kind of dream, but as soon as he began to read what he wanted to read, his mind woke up, and he experienced a sense of ‘full consciousness’.
By the time he was fifteen, he was so obviously brilliant that he was given the job of tutoring fellow students—not only from lower classes, but from his own. So Steiner was introduced to his life's work of teaching from an early age. He amused himself by playing a game of intellectual hide-and-seek with one of his teachers, Josef Mayer, who taught literature. Steiner somehow discovered that Mayer was an enthusiastic admirer of the philosophy of Johann Friedrich Herbart, an educationalist and psychologist whose views would cause him to be classified today as a ‘positivist’ (i.e. a kind of materialist). (Herbart has much in common with the twentieth-century thinker John Dewey.) All Steiner's instincts were anti-materialistic. So in his essays, he began expressing views that were opposed to Herbart, without ever mentioning him by name. One essay concluded: ‘Such a person is psychologically free.’ Mayer looked ironically at his fifteen-year-old pupil and said: ‘There is no such thing as psychological freedom.’ ‘Yes, there is,’ replied Steiner, ‘There is psychological freedom, but there is no “transcendental freedom” in ordinary consciousness.’ Mayer said sternly: ‘I think you have been reading philosophy. You had better stop—it only confuses your thoughts.’ Relations between them, Steiner admits, continued to be strained.
When Steiner was eighteen, he began to attend the Institute of Technology in Vienna. The railway company seems to have been extremely obliging, and agreed to transfer his father to a station—Inzersdorf—sufficiently close to Vienna for Steiner to make the daily journey.
By this time, Steiner had confronted the question that was to be the starting point of his philosophy. The science he loved so much told him that man was an animal, and that animals are machines. This idea revolted him; all his instincts rebelled against it. It contradicted all those strange moods of delight that he had so often experienced among woods an
d mountains, and which told him that man has the potentiality of becoming a god. One of his closest schoolfriends in Wiener-Neustadt infuriated him by professing to believe that man is a wholly material being, and that all his thoughts can be explained in terms of brain chemistry. One day, Steiner accompanied his friend to the railway station in Vienna, and as the train was about to pull out, tried to express all his detestation of materialism in one passionate outburst. ‘You maintain that to say “I think” is merely a result of brain and nerve-processes. You believe that only these processes are real. You think the same thing applies when you say “I see”, “I walk”, and so on. But please note that you never say “my brain thinks”, “my brain sees”, “my brain walks”. If you really believe in your own theory, you should change the way you express yourself. The fact is that you are lying when you say “I”. But you cannot help but follow a healthy instinct that contradicts your own theory. Your actual experience is quite different from the ideas you dream up in your theory. Your very consciousness proves that your theory is a lie.’ At that moment, the train pulled out. As Steiner walked back, he experienced twinges of conscience at trying to refute materialism in this crude manner. But what mattered was not just to give philosophically convincing proofs, but to express his total conviction that the human ‘I’ is a concrete reality. That conviction was the foundation upon which he built his immense structure of ideas.