Footnotes2Plato Podcast Rudolf Steiner Conference at Harvard Divinity School
It marks roughly a hundred years since his death this past spring, and Harvard is hosting this gathering to bring scholars, philosophers, and anthroposophists together to discuss Steiner’s work—its enduring relevance and its many challenges. I’m genuinely looking forward to it. It’s somewhat surprising to see a full conference on Steiner at Harvard Divinity School, because his work presents significant difficulties for academic researchers and philosophers. This isn’t only because he challenges scientific materialism—many of us do that—but because he also offers an extraordinarily detailed alternative, both theoretically and practically. He helped initiate Waldorf education, which has become the largest independent school movement in the world, as well as biodynamic agriculture and other initiatives that continue to bear fruit for individuals and communities today. At the same time, his view of the cosmos and the human place within it is quite foreign and even shocking to the refined intellectual sensibility common in contemporary academia. Even those who question materialism often hold far vaguer spiritual views. Steiner, by contrast, is very specific about the nature of the spiritual world and the activities of spiritual beings.
Much of what he says rests upon and emerges from his claimed clairvoyant capacities. Very few of us would claim such capacities ourselves, and many are deeply skeptical that they could be real at all. Steiner did, however, develop and systematize various methods for cultivating these powers of perception. Some of these practices he derived from his own insight; others he inherited from the broader history of esoteric and spiritual disciplines. Among them are meditative techniques like the nightly review, undertaken before sleep as a preparation for the life review that, he says—and many other esoteric and religious traditions affirm—will occur after death. The exercise is simple in form but demanding in practice: just before going to sleep, one relives the day backwards, attempting to recall in as much detail as possible everything that occurred. The idea is that, as incarnate beings, our consciousness is wound into time by the daily rotation of the Earth, the monthly cycles of the Moon, and the yearly orbit around the Sun. We become dizzy and forgetful as a result of these astronomical rhythms. By quietly rewinding our day each night, we begin to cultivate memory as an organ of perception, preparing ourselves for the more intense reversal that will come after death, when, as Steiner and many esoteric traditions hold, we relive our lives from the standpoint of those with whom we interacted. In that tableau, our biography becomes a heaven, a hell, or something in between, depending on how we treated others. We re-experience our actions from the perspectives of those we affected. The nightly review is thus a kind of rehearsal for death, training a form of memory that is not merely autobiographical in the narrow sense, but attuned to our embeddedness in multiple cycles of life and repeated incarnations.
The idea of reincarnation has a long pedigree across both Eastern and Western traditions—in the West from Pythagoras and Greek philosophy to strands of Jewish mysticism and early Christian thinkers like Origen, who entertained some form of transmigration of souls. Today, however, reincarnation is often regarded by contemporary intellectuals as, at best, “woo-woo,” if not outright embarrassing—despite serious research programs like the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, where Ed Kelly and colleagues continue the work of Ian Stevenson, taking evidence for reincarnation very seriously. Steiner’s work more or less blows the lid off our modern materialist imagination, asking us to take such ideas seriously and to situate human existence within a far broader temporal and spiritual horizon than the secular West is used to considering.
Harvard Divinity School is, of course, a natural place to raise questions about meaning, ultimate significance, and the spiritual dimensions of existence. But Steiner is not simply doing theology or speculative metaphysics; he is trying to cultivate experiential modalities that would allow us to intensify our consciousness so as to come to know reality beyond the limits of the sense-bound, abstraction prone intellect. There is a lot of contemporary talk about the “expansion” of consciousness, yet, as Owen Barfield argues in his account of the evolution of consciousness, what we now call modern, secular, more or less materialist ego-consciousness is itself a contraction from a more porous, participatory mode of experience characteristic of primal peoples. Our current form of consciousness emerges through a process of differentiation and inwardization that has won a strong sense of individual selfhood and freedom, but at the cost of alienation—from nature, from one another, and even from ourselves.
From an anthroposophical standpoint, the further evolution of consciousness is not simply a matter of expansion in the vague, New Age sense. It is better described as an intensification and recollection: recovering what has been lost—our participatory attunement to a living cosmos—while preserving the hard-won achievement of individual freedom and clear self-awareness. Barfield, an anthroposophist and close friend of Tolkien, Lewis, and the other Inklings, speaks of “original” and “final” participation. Original participation is a kind of unconscious participatory union with the surrounding world, lacking a strong sense of individual autonomy. Modernity has gained autonomy but largely severed participation. Final participation, as Barfield envisions it, would reunite us with the world as conscious co-creators—what Tolkien calls “sub-creators”—without dissolving our distinct spiritual individuality back into a undifferentiated world-soul. In Steiner’s view, evolution aims precisely at deeper individuation: a more free and self-conscious participation in the spiritual life of the cosmos.
In my presentation at Harvard Divinity School, I’ll be exploring how Whitehead’s cosmology and metaphysics can help build a bridge between contemporary scientific and philosophical discourse, on the one hand, and some of Steiner’s more esoteric claims, on the other. Whitehead offers an academically rigorous way of overcoming the bifurcation of nature and reintegrating value, purpose, and experience into our understanding of the universe, which can, I think, make Steiner’s project more intelligible to those formed within modern scientific culture. The conference will be live-streamed for anyone who would like to tune in (I link to the conference site above). If you happen to be in the Boston area, I’d encourage you to attend in person. And after the event, I’ll share a recording of my remarks.
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