Jeff, I would like to respond to some aspects of an earlier post of yours.
A fundamental question you were raising seems to be, how should people who find great value in Rudolf Steiner’s work respond to statements he made that we find to be false or biased in some fashion. By “respond” I mean not so much how should we respond internally, but externally, such as the example you gave of parents in a Waldorf school coming upon these comments and then approaching us. Or how should the Anthroposophical Society, for example, respond.
This is complex territory because of the incredible amount of rigor and nuance that I believe is necessary to even be sure we understand Rudolf Steiner. Be that as it may, for the purposes of furthering our discussion, here are seven statements that I think could perhaps guide us in responding responsibly on these matters. I would be very interested in what you all think of these. I have only drafted these today and am putting them out simply to advance the conversation, not because I consider them ready to be shared widely as a recommendation.
1. Anthroposophy, as a spiritual teaching, is in no way racist (by any reasonable definition of that word). It is and has been, rather, a major force in combatting racism and fostering human harmony all around the world—the same can be said of the many daughter movements flowing out of anthroposophy, such as Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, anthroposophical medicine, etc., etc.
2. Individual anthroposophists are all flawed human beings, however, who often mix their own biases and limited life experiences up with their work on behalf of anthroposophy. This is the unavoidable reality of a modern spiritual movement, which can only be addressed through an ongoing commitment to spiritual growth and development by each individual involved.
3. Rudolf Steiner himself was also a flawed human being and sometimes his writings and words bring to expression his own lack of experience, biases, or historical limitations. It is thus up to each individual to continually sift through the work of Rudof Steiner to find what is future bearing or true for them and to leave behind what is not.
4. Since anthroposophy is not a dogma or religion, this methodology has always been the case, with all of Steiner’s teachings and practical initiatives. And since no one can do this work for another individual, it is not the job of the Anthroposophical Society or any other organizational body to make an official statement or declaration disavowing one lecture, statement, concept or another. People must do this work for themselves.
5. What can and perhaps should be done is to simply acknowledge that Rudolf Steiner was himself a flawed human being, and by his own admission, subject to potential errors in his spiritual research. One could perhaps also acknowledge that there are certain statements made by him that many students of anthroposophy find to be troubling, and/or out of alignment with his primary teachings.
6. Most people who have studied this question in a rigorous fashion (including the Dutch commission), have come to the conclusion that while Rudolf Steiner certainly expresses biases on occasion, there is no evidence of ill will on his part toward people of color, nor any semblance of a doctrine of white supremacy in his teachings on race and culture.
7. From this standpoint, it would perhaps also be reasonable for the Anthroposophical Society and perhaps other key institutions to put out a statement unequivocally rejecting any attempt to interpret Rudolf Steiner’s work or statements as expressing some form of white supremacy.
Robert, thank you for taking the time to formulate these seven points and to offer them provisionally, as tools for thinking rather than as settled doctrine. I appreciate the seriousness with which you’re engaging this terrain, and I recognize that what you’re attempting is not a defensive maneuver, but an effort to articulate a responsible Anthroposophical posture in a very difficult area.
I’d like to respond by walking carefully through each of your points, not in order to dismantle them, but just to clarify where I still feel something essential is missing, especially when we imagine speaking to people who do *not* already love Steiner, trust Anthroposophy, or feel inclined to grant it interpretive generosity.
1. “Anthroposophy, as a spiritual teaching, is in no way racist.”
I understand what you mean here, and I agree that Anthroposophy, taken at its deepest and most universal level, does not require or support racism as a worldview. I also recognize the very real ways Anthroposophical initiatives have worked toward human dignity, reconciliation, and cross-cultural encounter.
However, I worry that beginning here places the system in the foreground rather than the experience of the person who has just encountered a disturbing statement. For someone encountering Steiner’s racial remarks for the first time, this assertion often lands less as reassurance and more as a pre-emptive framing: “Before we deal with what you just read, you should know that the system is sound.”
In almost any other domain, we would reverse the order. If a great scientist, philosopher, or educator were quoted as saying something empirically indefensible or overtly biased, we would first say: "Yes, that claim is wrong. There is no evidence for it. It rests on assumptions we now know to be false." Only then would we widen the lens to context, intention, or legacy.
I’m not sure Anthroposophy has yet learned how to do that "first move" cleanly and concretely. People are going to be not only reading Steiner's worst comments about the nature of the 'white mission' and the limitations of non-white skin, they are also going to be going online and finding plenty of examples of Anthroposophists justifying some ungrounded beliefs in the nature of 'race' and its inherent effect on individuals. It's all out there.
2. “Individual anthroposophists mix their own biases into their work.”**
This feels entirely right to me, and I think it names an unavoidable human reality. But it also raises a question that then presses back on Steiner himself.
If we take seriously that bias, temperament, culture, embodiment, and limited experience shape perception for every human being, then we have to ask: "how exactly does this operate in someone who repeatedly claims “exact perception,” “direct spiritual research,” and access to objective supersensible facts?"
In ordinary discourse, when a person speaks with extraordinary certainty, we naturally become more interested in examining how blind spots might be operating, not less. The stronger the claim to exactitude, the more pressing the question of methodological limits.
This is not an attack on Steiner. It is simply the same epistemic seriousness we apply everywhere else.
I've had non-white people look at me wide-eyed asking, "Is Steiner saying that he experienced these truths spiritually? Did he?"
I've had to find ways of going directly into their worry and shock without dodging it at all.
3. “Rudolf Steiner himself was also a flawed human being.”
I agree with this statement, but I want to underline that its force depends entirely on how far we are willing to let it go.
If “flawed” means merely “occasionally expressed himself awkwardly” or “used the language of his time,” then it does very little real work.
What people are encountering are not just awkward phrasings, but specific causal claims, often delivered emphatically, about race, culture, heredity, destiny, and even biological outcomes.
In other fields, when a thinker makes repeated claims of this kind that do not hold up, we don’t stop at “he was human.” We say: this was wrong, this rested on faulty assumptions, this reveals something important about how his thinking worked. We find it very significant to dive in and begin to understand made this certainty possible, and those deeper aspects could show up in other contexts.
That kind of analysis is still strangely rare when Steiner is the subject.
“Since anthroposophy is not a dogma, organizations should not disavow specific statements.”
I understand the impulse behind this, and I agree that no organization can or should do an individual’s inner work for them.
At the same time, when institutions invite the public into spaces explicitly founded on Steiner’s work, they are no longer dealing only with inner paths. They are dealing with trust, safety, and credibility.
Imagine a parent asking: “Do Anthroposophists believe this statement is true?”
A response of “You must decide for yourself” can easily feel evasive rather than empowering, especially when the statement in question concerns race, heredity, or human worth. One of the most painful things is when people set up to have conversation with a Waldorf teacher and the teacher simply isn't ready to even begin addressing Steiner's emphatic statements, spoken as coming from 'exact clairvoyance' and often directly tied to statements like, "Until humanity sees this truth, it will be impossible to move in a healthy direction."
They ask the teacher, "Do you believe Steiner on this??!" and often the teacher only has a mush of vague comments to make about inner work, individuality, and then shares other quotes from Steiner that sound wonderful.
5. “Steiner was subject to potential errors in his spiritual research.”
This point is important, but I think it needs to be brought out of abstraction and into lived reality.
What would it actually look like for Anthroposophy to say, plainly and without embarrassment:
“Here are places where Steiner was simply wrong.”
Not wrong in a moral sense, not wrong because of bad intentions, but wrong in the way great thinkers are often wrong, because perception is always shaped by context, expectation, embodiment, and inherited conceptual frames.
Until Anthroposophy can model this kind of clarity, people will continue to suspect that Steiner occupies a protected category where ordinary standards of evidence do not apply.
Like I've said, in all other realms of science, it is normal for students of a great researcher to be able to name both the insights and the errors or faulty lines of thinking in the person.
I would think this capacity would be 10 times more necessary for Anthroposophists to cultivate. Why? For one, in all those other domains, the 'great teacher' is pointing to phenomena that all of us can look at and begin to thinking deeply about. They are not saying, "You must trust me for now, and try to see that I am correct before you can verify this, maybe several lifetimes from now."
So when people are worried about Steiner's statements about the incredibly important mission that only white people can achieve for the next 1500 years, and when they see that he often is asking his students to work very hard at seeing how his statements are reasonable and do not contradict everyday observations, this is when we need to be able to speak plainly and directly to them.
6. “No evidence of ill will or white supremacy.”**
I agree that Steiner does not articulate a doctrine of white supremacy in the modern political sense, and I think it is important to say this.
But for many people, ill will is not the central concern. Harm does not require hatred. False causal claims, confidently stated, can wound regardless of intention.
When someone encounters repeated statements that seem to cluster around racial hierarchy, destiny, degeneration, or inherited capacity, what they are responding to is not a question of inner attitude, but of pattern.
This is where I think the conversation needs to move beyond reassurance and toward inquiry into how such patterns formed, and why Steiner’s certainty did not include safeguards against them.
7. “Reject interpretations of Steiner as white supremacist.”**
I support rejecting simplistic or weaponized readings of Steiner.
At the same time, rejection alone does not answer the deeper question people are asking, which is not so much: “Is Steiner a white supremacist?” but rather:
“How did a thinker of such depth come to hold these views, and what does that tell us about the limits of spiritual perception itself and/or the limits of his own self-knowledge?”
Until Anthroposophy can meet that question head-on, without retreating into context, intention, or system-defense, I think it will remain largely persuasive only to those already inside the house.
For me, the unresolved issue is not whether Steiner remains worth studying, loving, or working with, I believe he absolutely is. The issue is whether Anthroposophy can mature into a culture that treats him with the same honesty we grant Darwin, Freud, Einstein, or Goethe, figures whose greatness is not diminished by our ability to name where they were deeply wrong.
I don’t see this as a loss of reverence, but as a different kind of fidelity, one that allows Steiner to remain a living teacher rather than a figure subtly shielded from full human scrutiny.
I offer these reflections in the same spirit you offered your seven points: not as final answers, but as an attempt to keep the conversation grounded in reality, in ordinary human standards of knowing, and in the lived experience of those who are encountering these statements by Steiner for the first time. This will only be growing in numbers as time goes on.
Thank you so much for taking the time to respond so thoughtfully and helpfully to my 7 points. I am about to head off on a long road trip and I don’t feel I have the time to do justice to your thoughts, and it will be several weeks before I can do them justice. But I will share a few thoughts.
One thing I want to clarify is that my understanding of the anthroposophical path of research is that while it does involve the purification and the refining of the subjective elements of human nature Steiner never claimed one had to be perfect or free of all prejudice to conduct accurate spiritual scientific research.
“Objective truths” from this perspective are always colored to some degree by each person’s unique destiny, personality and karma. The eternal and the time-bound will always meet in the destiny of each person—thus even the masters, saints and great initiates have unique tasks in particular incarnations and unique limitations and one-sidednesses. The wisdom of all great teachers eventually becomes harmful and must be renewed in the course of time.
Thus, for me, Steiner’s research results can be 99% accurate and still be in need of clarification, elaboration AND metamorphosis. And without that clarification, elaboration and metamorphosis, some of those accurate things for his time and place, become untrue in our time and place.
For example, to the degree we take what Steiner said about white people and people of color in 174b as a statement of generic, collective tendencies of certain groups and cultures over a relatively short period of time, I don’t find it to be offensive or racist. But the moment we interpret him as saying ALL people of those races or cultures have these capacities, tasks or limitations, then I think we distort his meaning and make his statement into something monstrous and racist.
I realize how little of what you said I am actually addressing, so thank you for your patience Jeff.
Please just save these for later; I'm putting things on the table for when we can pick them up in dialog:
"But the moment we interpret him as saying ALL people of those races or cultures have these capacities, tasks or limitations, then I think we distort his meaning and make his statement into something."
To be clear, I'm not sure we want to say it is a misinterpretation to read what Steiner said as referring to ALL. He does not say that he is speaking in a very general sense. In other lectures, he will point out when he doesn't want to be taken as overgeneralizing. More importantly, he tells WHY and HOW white-skin and non-white skin form. He says that his research shows him that the formation of non-white skin IS an indication of the spiritual 'mechanism' he is teaching his audience; namely, if we see non-white skin we know that The Christ can't integrate there, and this goes for the next 1500. If we see white skin, we are seeing the exact indication of the capacity to integrate with the Christ. Steiner isn't saying that all white people are integrated with the Christ. Far from it. He is saying that his research explains why white-skin represents the capacity to integrate with the Christ and why non-white skin represents that inability to do so (until 3500 AD).
I just want to make sure we are not building a strawman or changing the goal posts accidentally as we try to pin-point the exact reasons that any human could read Steiner and feel worried, at the very least, and also a bit shocked at Steiner's reasoning, observation, and confidence.
"For example, to the degree we take what Steiner said about white people and people of color in 174b as a statement of generic, collective tendencies of certain groups and cultures over a relatively short period of time, I don’t find it to be offensive or racist."
I might be misunderstanding you here, but I have to be honest and say that shocked me. Again. I don't care if we call such statements racist or offensive. We obviously understand why a non-white person should be offended by them, right? If somebody said, "I've studied Anthroposophists and they are all mentally deranaged and incapable of careful thinking," we could take offense to that.
But, more importantly, we would want to know how a person could engage in such sloppy empirical observation and thinking, and with such confidence.
Robert, I really want to stress that when you are talking to me, I don't think we are talking about whether Steiner had hatred in his heart of if you or I should take offense to his comments about what non-white people aren't capable of. That is a side discussion, an important one, but it is not what I find most concerning.
But your claim above sounds as if you are saying that Steiner may have been basically accurate and on target if we are talking about collective tendencies of the various 'races' he was talking about at this time. It sounds as if you think that he was somehow capturing a collective tendency of white people to demonstrate a deep integration with The Christ (or at least the capacity to do that) versus a collective tendency of all non-white people not express such an integration. Or more so, according to Steiner words, the non-white people showed that, for the time being, they had no capacity to integrate with The Christ; hence, their skin being non-white.
Finally, regarding Steiner's talk about being an 'exact clairvoyant'. I will be able to show you countless direct quotations where Steiner either says directly or indirectly that his form of 'clairvoyance' should be understood as exact. Also, I can show many quotes in which he makes it clear that he only speaks of facts that he is utterly certain of after years and years of researching from many points of view.
Remember, one important aspect of this conversation is what you refer to as a necessary 'healing' between races. I stress that non-white people are increasingly going to find Steiner and find all the kinds of quotes I'm mentioning, and we must grapple with anything that blocks us from having genuine, direct, and specific responses.
I imagine I am not fully understanding what you mean. I know you have a trip to enjoy. So, just know, that I trust we will find the time to dialog and eventually really get sorted out the variables that are involved in this complicated and important conversation.
I found some time for a some quick clarifications:
My point about spiritual scientific research was that the complete accuracy that is possible does not preclude prejudices still living in the soul. When Steiner speaks or writes he is sometimes speaking or writing from pure spiritual scientific research and sometimes he is speaking or writing from other dimensions of his personality. He made it clear, for example, that his books arise from a very different source than his lectures—not a lower source necessarily but a different source—one that is deeply informed by the people sitting in front of him. He also made it clear that he had to constantly struggle to find the right words to clothe and explain his pure occult perceptions which also throws the door open to all kinds of misunderstandings, especially after one hundred years.
So, as I see it, we are not dealing with a simple matter of whether Steiner was right or wrong, but we are dealing in the first place with whether we even understand him. And this is right now the main focus of my own research—to be sure I really understand him—not whether I agree with him or not.
You seem to read Steiner’s statements in 174B lecture 2 far more categorically than I do. I see him saying that both the Slavic and the Asian people have a future task in the sixth post-Atlantean epoch that is not yet ripe, it has to wait for the central Europeans to get their act together, so that it can then unite with the best fruits of central European development.
Yes, Steiner refers to demonic tendencies in those cultures that are holding back from Western civilization but he also, in other places, speaks of the enormous demonic tendencies living in (white) Anglo-American cultures that have plunged too deeply into the material dimension of the Western impulse.
Unless one knows the full picture living in Steiner, namely that the English and Americans are battling Ahrimanic demons and the Slavic and Asian cultures of the East are battling Luciferic demons, we cannot fully understand the mission he was trying to get the Europeans to rise up to and embrace—an effort which more or less failed miserably, at least in the 20th century.
But these perspectives of Steiner are woven almost entirely of a certain kind of generalization that he was fond of when speaking from his Lion nature…generalizations that are based on spiritual insights but which are not by any means determinative for the life of individuals. For Steiner, the individual will or at least can always trump these general tendencies. Again, if this is not clear, his words become monstrous, and he knew this...I cannot make this point often enough.
Re skin color, I hear Steiner saying basically that white skin supports the soul’s striving to free itself from racial influence (which he associates with the Christ impulse) whereas darker skin tends to be associated with the soul still feeling a stronger bond with the group soul, whether cultural or racial. In the mixed racial American context, such statements have almost no meaning in my experience, and I am not sure they are useful at this point in time anywhere in the world. You and Matt seem to see these statements as arising from prejudice, perhaps...I mainly seem them as outdated and anachronistic now and in need of a profound refashioning to suit the realities of the present time.
What is useful, I think, is recognizing that different cultures and people and geographies have different tasks, different missions, that need to find a way to come into harmony, and for this harmony to come about we all need to free ourselves from a one-sided identification with our place, culture, gender, race, religion, etc. Steiner hoped the Europeans could lead the way in this effort, which I think was not unreasonable in his time.
Let me give an example. Why does Canada have such a different vibe than the US? Why does it tend toward a more natural and intuitive relationship to multiculturalism? Why so much less gun violence?
I think at least in part it is because the Canadians maintained their connection to the European folk souls whereas the US severed those connected more fully through the revolutionary war. This was because the US had and has the painful task to create a home for the worst aspects of the lower self of humanity to come to the fore and the to be transformed.
Rather than an abstract US driven league of nations or UN, Steiner was fighting for a European approach to multiculturalism or what I have called "maypole multiculturalism" that could have brought a powerful healing impulse to the world. Do we not witness the absence of this impulse strongly in our US centric world today?
Imagine a world, for example, in which mature european leaders were mediating the conflicts in Ukraine and Israel rather than Donald Trump--this can perhaps give us an idea of what Steiner was fighting for, I think.
Instead we have a tragic conflict between a form of abstract and marxist laden form of multiculturalism that cannot really bring about true change, as Ashvin pointed out, and the muscular backward looking populism of Donald Trump. This is the same difficult polarity of East and West that Steiner was trying to transform in his own day, only now on steroids.
I know I have yet to deal with your genuine concerns about all the people of color who have read Steiner’s statements on race and felt wounded and repulsed. So, thank you again for your patience.
Maybe we slow down and I can see if we are getting stuck in a certain kind if interpretive reading.
And maybe taking it out of such a charged topic can help us see the actual structure underneath the content.
Do you interpret the following two statements in a significantly different way:
Imagine reading a Steiner lecture and he says:
"The Fluva Owl is not able to fly during the day. Many owls prefer not to fly during the day, but the Fluva Owl is not able. Strange as it may sound, by a careful examination of the Fluva's unique foot structure, we understand why it does not have this capacity. And, more importantly, if we look at the evolution of this Owl, we can see why it is absolutely essential that it can not fly during the day at all."
versus:
"The Fluva Owl has a distinct disinclination to fly during the day. Compared to most owls, the Fluva has a much higher need to stay hidden during the day. We can understand this increased tendency by examining it's foot structure."
For me, the difference is that in the first case, Steiner is making a claim that the Fluva Owl does not have the capacity to fly during the day and he goes on to explain this. In the second case, he is saying that the Fluva Owl has a stronger disinclination to fly during the day."
In the first case, I wouldn't be surprised if somebody raised their hand and said, "Dr. Steiner, I see Fluva Owls flying during the day now and then. How can this be?"
Whereas, if Steiner had said the second statement, it is hard for me to imagine why somebody would say that. If Steiner has already made clear that they have the capacity and indeed do fly during the day, why would somebody feel it significant to simply repeat what he has said.
For me this captures the structure of what he is saying in 174b.2. And that's why I can understand why people would feel the need to question his claim that the formation of dark skin not only signifies the lack of a capacity but also explains why this lack is so important at this time.
If Steiner had only said, "You will notice that white people have slightly more capacity to integrate with the Christ" and if he had not then gone on to explain in detail why it is essential and important for non-white people to be held-back (just for the time being), then I wouldn't understand how anybody could interpret him to be saying there is a significant and important difference between white people and non-white people for the next 1500 years.
I'm not trying to set up a debate. I just feel we can at least ground ourselves in the difference between one kind of formal explanation versus another.
I'm not trying to push you in a corner, either. If you honestly read that lecture and think he is merely saying, "There is a subtle difference in the degree to which the Christ can be integrated", I'm all ears. I'll just need you to point me to which phrases you interpret in that way.
It is difficult for me, especially because he then goes on to explain the important consequences that this difference (between the race that is moving forward versus those being temporarily held back).
If he had only said, "White people have a unique mission because they have a bit of an advantage in integrating with the Christ", and hadn't gone on to detail why being 'held'back' is an important feature of non-white races, then I would fully share your interpretation of the lecture.
If Steiner had even just said, "These subtle differences will only continue for 100 more years," that would require a very different reading than his saying that this dynamic difference between white and non-white people will last for another 1,500 years.
Think of the difference in interpretation if he has said something like, "This difference between white and non-white people will become less and less pronounced so that by the year 3,500, it won't be noticible."
Compare that saying that this difference will only end if, in about 1500 years, white people achieve their mission and can 'impregnate' the other races with The Christ.
I don't think the lecture can be interpreted to suggest that this 'impregnation' is something that begins now and ends in 1500 years. In fact, Steiner goes out of his way to explain why it can only happen in 1500 years IF white people take advantage of what is unique about their natures at this time in evolution.
By the way, I strongly believe that even this part of our conversation connects to the parts you kindly remind me that you haven't yet taken up. When open-minded non-white people come across Steiner's explicit claims in this lecture, and if they hear an Anthroposophist say, "I read this as Steiner saying there is just a subtle difference taking place", their jaws drop open a bit.
If we believe Steiner is only talking about subtle shifts of emphasis, we absolutely need to be able to point directly to the specific phrases. Otherwise we will fall back into one of the typical escape routes, telling them that they should read other things he said, or they can't understand it because only specific Germans from specific places can understand what he means, or...
At the very least, even Anthroposophists like you and Ashvin who think Steiner is clearly only pointing to a subtle difference between white people and all non-white peoples, at the very least I imagine you should be able to see why other Anthroposophists and non-Anthroposophists read it as Steiner talking about something very distinct and very important. In that sense, I imagine your opening comments would be something like, "Yes, it really does appear as if Steiner is claiming there is a current important difference taking place, but, actually notice that he says...."
Something like that.
Take care and thanks again for the dialog. I know you might not be back for several weeks. No problem.
Thanks, Robert! I didn't receive a notification to this thoughtful response, so I'm just getting to it. I see Matt has made a response as well. I'll hopefully be able to put down some thoughts in a couple hours. I hope to continue this dialog. We are coming from creatively polaric positions and I think that bodes well! If we can tolerate misunderstanding each other for a bit :)
Thanks for these clearly articulated points, Robert! I know this is for Jeff, but I couldn't help but reflect and reply myself:
1. I agree about Anthroposophy not being racist. In fact, as I've said in these comment threads and elsewhere, I believe Steiner's teachings on ethical individuality and threefolding distinction between political equality and cultural freedom provide an extremely helpful way of working through some knots in current social conflicts about race and racism. However, I also know that historically, and believe at present, there are Anthroposophists who claim interpretations of Steiner's teachings that I cannot help but view as racist. My response to these tendencies is to defend a different interpretation of Anthroposophy that is, as you say, free of racism, in intent and implication.
2. See above.
3. Agree and well said.
4. This is why I am not a member of the Society, despite the fact that I have long sought out a spiritual "home." Institutionalization of new spiritual movements is important but fraught, and I have yet to figure out the best way of holding the tension between individual freedom and initiative, and organizational solidarity.
5. Agree.
6. I am not sure I could agree that there is "no evidence of ill will" or "any semblance" of white supremacy in his teachings. It seems more accurate to say there are at least a few recorded occasions when he spoke out of apparent disgust for nonwhites (eg, "negro novels" and other physiognomic remarks), and that there is at least the "semblance" (ie, "the outward appearance or apparent form of something, especially when the reality is different") of white supremacy in his understanding of racial evolution. If there were no semblance of such, no one would be having this discussion!
7. I agree and would like to see this sort of statement.
Thanks for your comments Matt. Can you elaborate a little bit on what you said about the Anthroposophical Society? Are you saying that you see the need for formal disavowals from the Society to give anthroposophy more academic credibility but you also see how it doesn’t make sense from the standpoint of the strong role of individual freedom in the movement? Or are you just saying that you can’t feel at home in a modern spiritual movement that has to make these kinds of tradeoffs???
I mean that my own Emersonian temperament and anarchistic tendencies have made it impossible for me to feel comfortable or like I belong to a "church," even one with as much room for individual initiative as the Anthroposophical Society. I much prefer the spontaneity and distributed agency afforded by emergent group projects (eg, Urphänomen), where there are no governing committees or hierarchies to even contemplate making "official statements" that are supposed to represent the views of everyone in the church. Of course, there are benefits to associating into organizations and forming institutions. I suppose I am just admitting my own limitations and preferences. Like you said, overcoming racism so as to bring about a politically just and culturally free society is not something that can be handed down from on high, whether by new legislation or committee statements. Those are important, but (at least when done well) they seem to me to be downstream of the inner work of individuals and their intimates.
Colin, I am very moved by your words, it is so profound what you have shared...you are bringing out something so very important and so easy to miss unless one is aware of the fuller picture Steiner gives of the white race and of the western inclining folk souls…which is the fact that, just as you say, they most embody the destiny of the prodigal son.
This creates the challenging, tragic, two-fold destiny of the West, one of great cultural advances along with unspeakable moral failures and intellectual blindness. The material leaning peoples and cultures of the west are thus also those most in need of a manifestation of God reaching right down to the physical, and into the forces of the earthly personality, as happened through the Christ event.
It is this perspective that underlies but is very easy to miss in 174b and throughout much of Steiner. Here for example is a little-known verse of Steiner from his earlier years that most people are unaware of, in which he states the tragedy in stronger terms, though still somewhat veiled:
A new dawning of the white race
Will manifest itself in earthly spheres
Only when the sages of this race
Feel the soul’s bond with the spirit,
And in them will take effect
A feeling of the shame
That blackens souls
When they seek to comprehend
Man’s being through material senses.
Later in his life he will point out that the sign of any genuine encounter with etheric Christ is that the whole soul will be permeated by the most profound sense of shame. Clearly, Rudolf Steiner himself had this experience.
As I see it, Jeff, we need to fashion a whole new narrative about race and culture that draws on Steiner’s eagle, lion and bull teaching but that breaks wholly new ground. One could also think of eagle, lion and bull as the blossom, leaf and root of a plant—the plant of anthroposophy—which is now entering the seed stage during which it must be either reborn in a new form or become a historical relic. I realize it may look like I am simply trying to defend or nuance Steiner within a relatively small circle, but I see this as simply the preliminary, soil tilling work necessary to receive the seed of a whole new inspiration coming from the future rather than from the past.
Just as through Pentecost the disciples gained a new power of speech able to bring the mystery of Christ experienced by the 12 to all people, so you could say we are entering the Pentecostal phase of anthroposophy and of esoteric Christianity more broadly speaking. If we do the right preparatory work, as I see it, through grace, some of us can begin to manifest this new power of the spirit and of language that will be able to reach any and every human being. I suspect many of us have glimmers of the emergence of these new capacities.
I will share more in the coming days. Again, I am so grateful for this dialogue.
One of the things that has come up for me over the years as I work with this topic, is the following:
Often we, Anthroposophists, will set up a subtle binary situation, as if there is a contradiction between the clarity Steiner explicates in 174b.2 and other quotes in which he clearly shows that humanity is a whole and that even white people have deep work to do regarding love.
This worries me because it seems to shift the focus and imply there is a duality where there isn't one.
What I mean is this: there is absolutely no contradiction between Steiner feeling very strongly that only white people can integrate with The Christ for the next 1500 years and that white people must be much more loving and gracious towards all people. Steiner isn't contradicting himself if he speaks to a deep and nefarious shadow within the white race and yet also claims that, for the foreseeable future, only the white race can integrate the leading evolutionary impulse.
I think I fully grasp why we might be inclined to always fall back upon quotes in which Steiner is clearly aware of shadow elements even in his favorite thinkers and cultures. My worry is that this comes across as if we might be saying, "Look, it probably isn't true to think that Steiner really was saying that only white people have the ability to carry forward humanity at this time because, look, he also said this and that."
If we can see clearly that there is absolutely no contradiction between the specific claim in 174b.2 and any other statements he made ('racism must end', 'white humanty must do better', etc), then, I believe, this is exactly what we must learn to explore and talk about if our goal is a healing of racial pain and confusion.
For context: anytime I speak of what I find to be clear in 174b.2, if other people reading this don't think I'm stating it accurately, please let me know.
I always try to read it (now and then) from the perspective of somebody who isn't already a student of Steiner but who is relatively intelligent and able to give it a fair shake. But, as we know, our own blind-spots can always play more of a role than we'd like. Thanks!
I want to begin by saying that I recognize how careful, serious, and ethically motivated your project is, and that I share what I take to be one of its underlying values: the refusal of both denial and simplistic condemnation, and the attempt to think Steiner’s legacy in a way that does not collapse into polemics. I read your post closely and watched both videos, and I found your Eagle–Lion–Bull distinction especially helpful, not as a rhetorical device but as a genuine attempt to hold together Steiner’s universal teachings, his historically situated cultural mission, and his very real human limitations within a single interpretive frame.
Anything within the Anthroposophical conversation that helps long-standing Anthroposophists think more nimbly, more honestly, and less defensively about Steiner’s racial and cultural claims strikes me as genuinely valuable.
My response here is not meant as a rejection of your method or your conclusions, but as a contribution from a slightly different angle, one that I hope might stand in dialogue with yours rather than opposition. I suspect our approaches may ultimately be complementary, but they may also speak to different audiences and face different limits.
One concern I want to raise, kindly but directly, is that this approach may limit its scope and resonance to a particular subgroup already within Anthroposophy, often those of us who are ourselves troubled by the increasingly nationalistic or ethnocentric tones that have been resurfacing in some Anthroposophical spaces. In other words, it seems especially compelling for centrist or left-leaning Anthroposophists who already love Steiner, but who are unsettled when we encounter the more explicit racial statements in his work and are looking for better ways to contextualize them.
I find that effort genuinely worthwhile. At the same time, I struggle to see how this approach can function as a healing contribution beyond that circle. For over fifteen years, I have been a person to whom non-white, inquiring prospective Waldorf parents have been sent, people who were initially excited about Waldorf education, but then encountered Steiner’s most specific racial claims and felt shaken or alarmed by them. In more than one case, people were sent my way after encountering Steiner’s explicit remarks about Black skin, white destiny, or the long-term future of non-white peoples, and asking how they were supposed to understand this.
One quote that regularly stops people cold is this:
“There is a biography of Schubert in which it is said that he looked rather like a negro.
There is not a grain of truth in it. He actually had a pleasing, attractive face.”
— *Karmic Relationships*, Vol. I
For people encountering Steiner for the first time, statements like this are not abstractions. They are direct encounters with language that carries deep injury, and they are often accompanied by Steiner’s own insistence that his perceptions arise from what he called *exact clairvoyance*. Telling such readers that they must meditate more, or that they cannot truly understand these statements unless they are German listeners in 1913, or that the statements “make sense” within a context unavailable to them, is rarely experienced as healing. It often feels like a request to suspend moral and experiential judgment in favor of trust, precisely where trust has already been broken.
This is where I think something still feels largely absent in the Anthroposophical conversation. Beyond contextualization, what seems urgently needed is a living inquiry into how blind spots necessarily participate in the formation of all knowledge, including in figures regarded as initiates or as directly experiencing “higher worlds,” and how they can sometimes be precisely what fuels intense confidence in being “exact.” Blind spots are not a moral failure; they are a structural feature of knowing. But Anthroposophy has not, to my eye, developed a robust way of speaking about this in relation to Steiner himself.
Related to this, I find myself wondering whether **we Anthroposophists**, like admirers of great scientists or philosophers, are able to point to simple or complex cases where Steiner was simply wrong. Not merely “a man of his time,” not merely “speaking situationally,” but wrong in ways that matter. Most people who deeply admire Darwin, Freud, Einstein, or Goethe can readily name both their breakthroughs and their errors. Are we, as Anthroposophists, comfortable doing this? Do we believe such errors exist? If not, why not?
Similarly, I wonder what it would mean for Anthroposophy to articulate a theory of the unavoidable limits and constraints of all forms of perception, including spiritual perception, a theory in which such limits are understood as natural and inevitable, not as failures or betrayals of truth. This seems especially important given Steiner’s repeated insistence that the initiate overcomes “lower tendencies” and attains a purified form of cognition. For example, Steiner explicitly claimed that an initiate must completely overcome boredom. And yet, shortly after making such claims, he delivered remarks like the following, referring to René Maran’s *Batouala*, the first novel by a Black author to win the Prix Goncourt:
“Recently I went into a bookstore in Basel and found an example of the latest publishing agenda: a Negro novel… It is utterly boring, dreadfully boring, but people devour it… if we give these Negro novels to pregnant women to read… a multitude of children will be born in Europe that are completely gray, that have mulatto hair, that look like mulattoes!”
— Dornach lecture, December 30, 1922
Not to mention that Steiner here explicitly suggests that reading such a “boring Negro novel” would cause white women’s babies to be born gray, with mulatto hair and mulatto features. I mention this not to sensationalize, but because these are precisely the kinds of statements that **we Anthroposophists** must be able to address warmly, concretely, and without evasiveness. I have read *Batouala*. I found it neither boring nor trivial. It is a historically and artistically important work, one that provoked outrage precisely because it exposed colonial brutality.
What troubles me is a mode of defense that appears to accept Steiner’s claim that such statements cannot truly be judged or understood outside of their original situational context. I fully agree that context matters. Situated speech matters. But there is a difference between contextual sensitivity and what can feel like a kind of magical exemption, as though once Steiner invokes situational speech, ordinary standards of intelligibility, responsibility, and error no longer apply. If Steiner had said “green marbles cannot roll uphill” to French listeners in 1917, we would not hesitate to say he was simply mistaken. Context alone does not convert false claims into true ones.
For me, the deeper and more interesting question is why Anthroposophy has found it so difficult to develop a culture of curiosity around Steiner’s blind spots, especially given how richly Anthroposophy understands the role of presuppositions, history, temperament, and embodiment in shaping perception. One possible reason is that Steiner himself rarely models this curiosity about his own limits. On the contrary, he often presents himself as having overcome misunderstanding precisely through initiation, and as speaking from a level of cognition necessary for humanity’s future survival. That posture makes later inquiry into error feel like betrayal rather than fidelity.
Personally, my own love for Steiner has deepened, not diminished, as I have let go of what I think of as a “Steiner Narrative,” one that subtly caused me to avoid my own shadow work by projecting completeness and certainty onto him. Steiner remains a great teacher for me, but no longer one who must be protected from the possibility of error in order to remain spiritually meaningful.
I offer all of this not as a dismissal of your work, but as a hope for further dialogue. I would be genuinely interested to hear how you imagine we, as Anthroposophists, might address people who do not already love Steiner, people who encounter his most explicit racial statements first, and who understandably ask: Do Anthroposophists believe Steiner was sometimes deeply wrong? If so, where? And how does that recognition live alongside genuine reverence?
I deeply feel the time is now for Anthroposophists to make a major shift regarding the entrenched “Steiner Narrative." It can't be done merely via the intellect. It is painful. I'm still in it in various ways. But, I can no longer see any Anthroposophical way forward that does not require some kind of inner pain/shock in realizing there might be a very different point-of-view from which (in which) we come to respect and work with Steiner and Anthroposophia.
With respect, and appreciation for the seriousness of your effort.
Thanks, Robert, for your wonderful presentation and thoughts.
I have not as yet read GA174 but want to throw in my two bits worth before I do so. It’s not very well thought through - but I am wondering if it is not a matter of the white race being in greater need. We have wandered furthest away down the avenue of intellectualism from spirit and soul.
The West having fallen into the abyss of matter and extreme egotism is in need of that Good Shepherd to go out and rescue us.
The White Man has burnt himself out in pursuit of the intellect and the self bound up with it – the life has been sucked out of us.
We are ash, with our life forces in decline and racing towards infertility.
New life and love are needed – we need a saviour!
The West begins to have a sense that it has gone too far.
That we are guilty.
That is the first step. The next is to call out and to learn that there is a way out.
That the help of a loving spirit is at hand and that there is a way forward in that what we have so thoughtlessly and greedily taken to ourselves can be offered in a wise and helpful way back to others. And this goes beyond merely money and goods.
Just to turn to the other rather than oneself is already huge.
We now become servants – washers of feet.
Christ brings the Father’s love to the lost sheep, sinners and tax collectors.
He doesn’t come for those who still live in and experience the Father’s love.
The fact that Christ comes and sits at our table is not a sign of our specialness, our goodness – but of our neediness.
St. John’s call goes out to all of us white men – and it is especially men- “Change Your Ways” - Repent!
However, that which the European culture has developed in relation to clarity of thinking, individual autonomy and freedom is of inestimable value and is not lost.
It is a gift we can bring and offer to all.
The European race has burnt itself out in the development of these capacities.
We don’t have the strength and vitality left in ourselves to take these forces into the future.
The only way to keep it is to pass it on – give it away
Our further path is to individually transition to being more at home in our etheric body rather than our physical body. To understand that the physical passes away.
But this is completely individual.
Those who do manage to attain this consciousness form a community that embraces all wherever they may be on the earth’s surface. In some occult literature this community is inaccurately called a race, which it is not as it does not come out of the blood.
Perhaps the white race is in greater need, but I hope we don't look away from how clear Steiner was in stating that it was the white races responsibility to integrate with The Christ *so that* all the non-white races could be 'impregnated' with The Christ around the year 3,500.
I sometimes worry we find creative ways to ignore the aspects that might be calling for our attention the most. But, that said, I don't disagree with you that there are probably ways of shifting the focus so that we attend more to ideas of lack related to white race.
I perhaps am a bit oversensitive to when it seems as if me and my fellow Anthroposophists refuse to look squarely at what Steiner did make quite clear.
Also, even to simply claim that we can observe core differences with regard to how 'races' are incorporating The Christ, requires a very sharp hitting of the brakes, I'd think. Can we do that? If so, how?
And even if most of us assume that surely Steiner himself would have been able to make such an observation, I'd say that this very blog is asking us to slow down and really consider why we might be making such an assumption.
Thanks for sharing your presentations on this topic, Robert. I find what you say to make a lot of intuitive sense. It's interesting because, in a certain sense, Steiner was having the same discussion immediately after the infamous "white skin" lecture. It helps to contemplate what he expressed immediately after for added context:
***
Stuttgart, 14th February, 1915
"I can easily imagine that someone may have drawn the conclusion from yesterday’s lecture that those people who belong to the national groups are only to receive their special mission in the sixth culture-epoch - because, as we saw yesterday, they belong to a time in which evolution takes a descending line, - are of less account than those who belong to groups in an ascending evolution. I repeat - I can easily conceive of someone's drawing this conclusion. In other words: I can easily imagine that from certain statements made yesterday someone draws conclusions as to values, impelled to do so through all sorts of emotions and feelings. This would be an example of just what I pointed out, namely, that what was especially said about these things at one place must be misunderstood in other places. Not that it is coloured in any way to suit a special place or people, but because it is not understood with the necessary objectivity, but with strong feelings and all sorts of national aspirations. Someone might then say that I had only used words to flatter Central European culture and that they who belonged to the Eastern European culture felt themselves deeply injured by what had been said. Well, my dear friends, if such a judgment is formed it only shows the entry of something that I discussed yesterday. I sought yesterday to point out how purely theoretical, abstract thinking must be transformed into direct experience, how what has formerly been only a matter of knowledge must be imbued with feeling and real experience. If someone were to form the judgment that has just been indicated he would only be judging theoretically, abstractly. For how would a concrete, living judgment sound in such a case? It would recognise that if what had been explained was true, then we were approaching a time when those who want to follow the advance of civilisation must no longer merge in merely national life. The peculiarity of the fifth cultural epoch was such as allowed of the fact that its members merged into a national feeling and again personally struggled out of it. The sixth and seventh culture-epochs will be of such a nature that those who wish to be merely national will lag behind the tasks of humanity. But this is just the reason for presenting the world conception of spiritual science, namely, that humanity struggles out of merely national feeling, out of what is not common human feeling. The conclusion to be drawn, therefore, from yesterday’s remarks is something quite, quite different. It is that the Central European national cultures have impulses in them that coincide with the great mission of the post-Atlantean culture, but that then cultures come which make it necessary for men to grow out of national impulses. And that it does not do for those who are the vanguard of later cultures to merge completely in their national experience, even in an exaggerated way, as is the case with the population of Eastern Europe. In other words: since this living in their nation shows that they have not yet comprehended their mission, they are directed to take into themselves what has been created as spiritual science, and so grow out beyond the national. Living understanding is also necessary there.
At the present time, however, so beset with passion and prejudice, one will have difficulty in finding what is necessary in order that men can take their full stand on the ground of spiritual science and its striving for true objectivity, for the purely human. We pursue spiritual science precisely in order to spread something over the whole earth that transcends all differences. Those therefore who come from all nations to spiritual science should be able to gain an objective understanding for the things set forth in the Lecture-cycle "The Mission of Folk Souls"; it should be studied by all anthroposophists. It has a special significance, too, for it was given years before this war (World War I) and cannot therefore be accused of originating from the atmosphere of this war. The point is not that what has been said in various places did not contain generally valid truths, the point is that one must comprehend that these truths are not tolerated everywhere. When I spoke here some months ago I pointed out that it is more or less easy for us in Central Europe to be objective, easier than for others. Why it is easier for us is set forth in that Lecture-cycle. All the deeper teachings received from our grave events show us that something must develop from all the various substrata of our present civilisation throughout the world that coincides with the aims of our spiritual science. In a certain respect one can say that these earnest events are a powerful pointer to the necessity of spiritual science in the world. They prove that this life of spiritual science must come. Naturally, therefore, the immediate feelings of a place can only be of secondary importance for us; our actual task is to bring into our soul-experience something that can be understood everywhere without causing offence, although there is prejudice in so many fields.
What we learn from spiritual science about the universally human in man is also a preparation for an objective view of all the conditions in which we are placed through earthly evolution. For the conditions in which we are placed is the soil, as it were, out of which we grow, and what brings about our growth are the impulses we receive through spiritual science. As a matter of fact we live in these differentiations extended over the earth with only half of our being, with our- physical and etheric bodies. We leave these behind on the earth when we enter another condition of consciousness that we can describe as sleep. With the ego and astral body we are then in the world which man otherwise enters when he goes through the portal of death, in the world where all earthly differentiations cease, in the world into which spiritual science teachings are to introduce us. Initiation knowledge protects us from giving any special preference to one or other of the Folk Spirits."
***
So we see that Steiner is trying to help us focus on a second-order element of this entire discussion, which is the difference between abstractly seeking the human universal (first-order, content level) and concretely bringing it to realisation through spiritual science (second-order, process level). And this is also the reason why many of these topics are so misunderstood. Because modern social movements seek the universal only abstractly. They seek the universal to justify the fundamental differences of national feelings, racial feelings, gender feelings, and so on. In other words, they start with fundamental division and then try to build a kind of purely abstract conduct of 'tolerance' between the races and nationalities. It is precisely this purely abstract intellectual approach that flattens all spiritual depth in the discussion and practically ensures that nothing can ever be solved, that the true human universal cannot be navigated toward in any concrete and transformative way.
Without a true depth-understanding of the human being, we can never quite grasp that there are two natures within ourselves which are sometimes opposed to one another. One is which belongs and identifies with the national, racial, cultural, and religious feelings. The other is that which seeks the human universal - the Spirit, which alone can bring the moral integrity needed for lifting above the forces that put souls within the layers of conditioning into opposition. Steiner makes it quite clear above. Whoever feels offended by his observations simply identifies with the lower nature - with that which belongs to race, culture, nation - and thinks about the topic from that already identified perspective. Whoever finds the Spirit in him that is doing the thinking about the topic, no longer identifies with these layers but sees in them a fertile and differentiated soil which follows a lawful gradient and must be gradually worked upon.
When it's said that the Christ impulse will be adopted only gradually in humanity and that is seen by us as a kind of discrimination, we are subtly rejecting that impulse in practice. At no point in history has something new been adopted overnight by the whole world. This is simply not how things work in evolution. It's an objective fact. We are now at a point where we can be fully conscious of these lawful evolutionary processes and understand them at a deeper level. It's simply a fact that not everyone will embrace the Impulse of freedom at the same time. But the key point is that this Impulse will be rejected, not because people deeply want to integrate the Christ, but Steiner has said that they're not eligible due to skin color or nationality, but out of antipathy for what integrating that Impulse implies and entails. There's nothing that stands between us and our higher being except ourselves. Those who refuse to seek their higher nature won't do it simply because they don't want to lose their comfortable and pleasurable identifications with the lower nature, which ironically manifest in the so prevalent accusations of "racism". If Steiner's observations were operating at the first-order content level, such accusations may be justified, but it is up to us to recognize the deeper second-order level from which they are being expressed.
I think you make a lot of great points here Ashvin and I like your framing of first and second order elements of discourse. Also the passage from the third lecture is great to bring in here, thank you for that. I am strapped for time now but look forward to more dialogue with you!
Since people unfamiliar with this context will stumble in here, for the record:
Steiner's words in the next lecture do not contradict his belief that non-white people can't integrate fully with the Christ at this time.
If it seems that they do, just think about how easy it is to have as much genuine love for an animal as for a family member.
There is no contradiction in noticing that a dog is not able to read (at this time) and also calling people out for being cruel or minimizing the beauty and importance of dogs.
Steiner was not contradicting himself.
Many of my fellow Anthroposophists will do whatever they can to make you believe that Steiner has said that there is no difference between a white person and a non-white person's capacity to integrate with the Christ. As you noticed above, when reading Steiner's words, nothing he said there contradicted his claims from the day before. He was being consistent.
The one positive thing I can say about distorting his words, in this context, is that I believe it often comes from a very strong desire to genuinely believe that Steiner couldn't have meant what he said. That's a good sign.
But we need to be honest and somewhat comfortable in addressing non-white people when they read what he said. Yes, he believed that. And we can go on to contextualize his life and work, and also point to his outstanding insights that can be taken up in profound ways of cultural and social healing.
Looking forward to listening to these. Are these videos also on YouTube, by chance? I ask because I could grab a transcript from there (it is much faster for me to read than listen to the videos, and I tend to digest the written word better than oral presentations).
I'm excited to hear another perspective on this subject. I'm aware that Steiner specifically makes clear why only a very small group of people can understand what he means in 174b-2 when he says that for the next 1500 years only white skinned people can integrate with the Christ in the way necessary if humanity is to make it successfully into the 6th epoch.
That said, before we simply agree with a flat statement that none of us can understand what that means, we might also open the space to think about that very claim.
I'm very open to many reasons why context matters. But I'm hoping to hear people talk about the reasons why, perhaps, Steiner is over-stating the case that only people from a very specific region and time can understand this massive difference between white-skinned people and all non-white peoples.
My hope is that conversations can take place that at least allow for the possiblity that Steiner is making some errors in reasoning when he makes such claims.
If he isn't capable of making such errors, I guess we just assume that we simply have no way of knowing what it means that non-white people must wait till around 3500 before they can receive the gift of The Christ.
I wonder if we have evidence that the small group of white Germans that he was speaking to were able to grasp it?
What would that kind of evidence look like?
For instance, can we find any evidence that Scaligero's work on race and blood proves that he understood Steiner fairly well. Since he was not part of the region or exact time as those listening to that lecture, should we take any of Scaligero's accuracy as a sign that he was reaching very similar spiritual understandings completely independent of Steiner?
Full disclosure: I think Scaligero's work reflects major cognitive blind-spots and presuppositins that don't hold up, many of the same ones that I see Steiner reproducing.
That said, more than anything, it'll be such a relief to find an Anthroposophical space in which we can, before anything else, see if we agree with Steiner's presuppositions regarding who can and can't understand his words.
Hey Jeff, thanks for your interest and thoughtful comments on this topic. Can you clarify whether you have made these comments after having watched my videos or before? If before, I would prefer to wait to respond until after you have seen and responded to what I have to say there.
The person who sent me the link wanted me to observe a section of the second video. I'll come back after seeing them both and then we can have a proper conversation. Thanks for sharing them, and please let us know when they are up on Youtube because I also will want to read the transcript.
Your comment is factually accurate yet inaccurate at the same time. You say:
"It seems more accurate to say there are at least a few recorded occasions when he spoke out of apparent disgust for nonwhites (eg, "negro novels" and other physiognomic remarks), and that there is at least the "semblance" (ie, "the outward appearance or apparent form of something, especially when the reality is different") of white supremacy in his understanding of racial evolution. "
The perception aspect that you refer to is as you say undeniably true, however when I read your comment I read also an unquestioned supposition. The specific part is where you say "he spoke out of apparent disgust for nonwhites". You state this as a fact and not as your interpretation of the perception (text). Somebody who reports speech does not automatically endorse the viewpoint being expressed. Being able to represent the perspective of a given worldview, say Hume, Locke or Kant does not mean I embody that worldview.
Cardinal Richelieu is reported to have said:
“If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to have him hanged.”
whilst Lavrentiy Beria of NKD fame gives another variant of the same idea:
"Show me the man, and I'll find you the crime."
Whilst it might not be neither your nor (Jeff Fs) intention, one way that some people might and do interpret a perceived fixation on the topic of race and racism is that you have a crime in mind and have found the 6 sentences needed to justify hanging the person. Do you want to hang Steiner and other Anthroposophists?
That's perfectly fair. I admit in that instance that I spoke out of sympathy for those who may have darker skin than me, found themselves drawn to anthroposophy, and then read Steiner's various remarks of that sort. As someone of European descent living on the North American continent, I do have a crime in mind, yes. Do I want to hang Steiner? No! Else I wouldn't drink so deeply from the well and defend him from cancel culture. Note that I did not mention this controversy about racial evolution in my Harvard talk. So I would not say there is any "fixation." But I admit this issue concerns me, and so I do feel the need to lay bare where my healthy (I hope!) common sense tells me he spoke from his all too human prejudices (we all have them), or from out of his wounded German folk soul, and not from his Christ-like nature.
My own personal take on 174a and 174b (which seems to be of particular importance to you) is that the central issue Steiner is encouraging us to confront is the problem of mendaciousness in society and a lack of interest in general for looking into the deeper causes of societies woes. He uses the events leading up to WW 1 to demonstrate this societal issue.
Now playing somewhat with our shared ideas. Could it be that the "apparent disgust for nonwhites" is the cheese for the mousetrap? I haven't thought it through in detail, but your generous answer and this article https://www.liberopensare.com/come-comprendere-i-segni-dei-tempi-terza-parte/ lead me to entertain the possibility. Perhaps 174a and 174b are particularly significant and lots more serious conversations need to be dedicated to these 2 extraordinary lectures.
Robert, I've had a chance to listen and then read through the transcripts of these expanded talks. Thank you for taking the risk of wading into this terrain and for trying to articulate a genuine middle path that refuses the pathologically polarized “culture war” frame and asks for something more human and more spiritually mature. I also appreciate the way I see you implicitly inviting us to speak more consciously out of the North American folk soul about these questions, rather than importing European formulations as though they were universally applicable. I say you do this implicitly, since I also must say I think on occasion you may revert to lumping Europe and the Americas together. Obviously a lot is shared culturally, but as you also note, racial divisions are no longer viable realities on the American continent. That feels especially important given the context of GA 174B, which you quote: Steiner is explicit there that his spoken remarks arise from the immediate impulse of time, place, and audience, and shouldn’t be treated as universally true. From my standpoint as an American, that contextualization is tremendously important. What Steiner goes on to say in 174B about dark skin and the Christ impulse does not merely feel dated or awkward to me. I cannot digest it cognitively as anything but demonstrably false and morally deformed. Whatever one makes of his larger Christology (and I make of it quite a lot), it is simply not true that the capacity for Christ-inspired love is blocked by melanin. That’s precisely the kind of statement that, in my view, must be named as spiritually untrue. I say this not only out of my Americanness but as a human being striving to partake in the work of further incarnating Anthroposophia into earthly life.
Holding the tension of opposites is always wise council. But I think there’s still a real danger in letting the middle path harden into a pair of convenient caricatures. You do helpfully note that the capitalist-populist MAGA pole and the socialist-progressive decolonial/anti-Western pole each represent something like 20% of the U.S. population. Most Americans don’t live at the extremes. A similar point applies to the polarity regarding the ontology of race. In practice, most people (including most scholars who get grouped under “postmodern critical race theory”) would say race is a social construct AND has real causal effects; there’s no contradiction there. So I think there’s still some work to do if the critique of critical theory is going to land with the kind of concreteness and fairness you’re rightly asking of others in their readings of Steiner. For my part, I don’t accept that race is merely a social construct, because I reject the premise that nature and culture are separable realities in the first place. As you suggested, I see race as a fluid, evolving phenomenon that was once more biologically and spiritually salient than it is today. Today racial identity is increasingly atavistic insofar as it tempts us to regress into generic group identities instead of engaging in the difficult but essential work of individuation.
I want to underscore something I hear you circling that I also try to hold in my work on these questions: there is an important difference between saying Steiner uttered racist comments and saying that Steiner is simply “a racist,” full stop. I don’t think “Steiner is a racist” is an apt or illuminating statement, but I do think he sometimes fell into the trap of speaking from a place of racial prejudice, as many people of his time did, and, frankly, as almost all of us do in different company in our own way. The task, as I see it, is neither apology nor cancellation, but truthfulness: to refuse denial and resist ideological capture while doing the harder and perhaps less immediately emotionally gratifying hermeneutic work of clear moral- and scientific-spiritual investigation. If anthroposophy as a cultural impulse is to be stewarded into the future, it has to be strong enough to say, without evasiveness, where the bull broke the china. Of course, it will require just as much strength to acknowledge where the eagle's insights, even if unpopular in the well-meaning but confused eyes of whatever the latest corporate-approved DEI fads are, remain true.
Just to re-iterate the point at issue for me in any attempt to deal with 174b: I'm glad that you brought in Steiner's profound words uttered in the early days of WW1 that remain so essential to proper understanding. Your threefold methodology of eagle, lion, and bull is extremely helpful. But you did not address the elephant. The Christ impulse is not the private property of any people, phenotype, or culture. What say you?
Thanks for your comments and for your closing question. I would prefer to deal with questions like this in a longer format where I can bring in more nuance but I see the necessity of speaking to the 174B matter a little bit now. My perspective at this time is as follows:
The idea that a darker skinned person (or a person with more melatonin in their skin) is less able to absorb the Christ impulse is exactly the kind of seemingly logical inference from his words in this lecture that I believe Rudolf Steiner would have found to be “monstrous.” I find it to be a monstrous thought and so do you and so do most people, for good reason.
In these lectures, however, as I see it, RS is not speaking about individual human beings (which is the main focus of his eagle teachings) but rather about collective realities, about generic tendencies that live in groups of people by virtue of their race and ethnicity. As we know from Rudolf Steiner’s eagle teachings, he did not believe that any individual was bound to the tendencies living in them through their race and ethnicity, but he did believe that these collective tendencies will continue to play a strong role in the historical process, since people’s capacity to free themselves from these tendencies is only gradually emerging in human evolution.
So, what I understand him to be saying is simply that lighter skinned people have a particular karma with (or generic tendency toward a strong engagment with) matter, which is both a positive and a negative. It can mean a natural ability to infuse matter with their individual spirit or it can mean a natural tendency to let material realities eclipse an awareness of spiritual reality.
In other places, Steiner focuses much more on the shadow side of this karma, but here he focuses more on the positive side, which I think he felt the need to do because of all the shame and blame pouring down on Central Europe at that time. I think he wanted to rouse the central Europeans in that particular place to their true sense of mission, to the dignity of the central European striving at its best.
If we heard an African-American preacher giving a sermon in which he told the congregation that their dark skin gives them a special relationship to the working of Christ in the depths of the earth (which I think it does quite honestly), and that they should try to live up to or realize this mission, would we find that to be racist? Certainly, it could be interpreted in a racist way, but I am not sure I would qualify such a remark as inherently racist.
I think if asked Steiner would have affirmed that every race and culture has a special and unique relationship to the Christ Impulse. But he also would have said that any given period of history, some cultures are called to play a stronger role in the exoteric shaping of history than others. This is the deeper point he is trying to make here I think, he is saying to the Europeans: don't lose touch with your unique mission at this moment in history!
It is interesting this regard to note that Steiner somewhat conflates here the Slavic people (a white skinned people) and the Asian people (a brown skinned people), in that he sees both as having the tendency (or mission as I would call it) to hold back from Western culture and materialism—to preserve something of the past spirituality of humanity for the future when it will merge with what comes from the West. So here he switches over to realities of spiritual geography rather than race, which is an overall source of confusion in these lectures, that I will try to clear up later in my short course.
Personally, I feel that Steiner goes a little too far in his focus on the shadow side of the Asian and Slavic tendency to hold back from the West. Yes, that tendency has a shadow side but it also has an important light side, which I don’t feel Steiner brings out with sufficient clarity here.
Just think, for example, of how Paul Kingsnorth’s critique of transhumanism in his new book (Against the Machine) is informed by his relationship to Orthodox Christianity. Here we see, I think, a real quality of conscience arising that is informed by this Eastern quality that Steiner characterizes in such a negative manner in this lecture. Or should we look at the work of Paramahamsa Yogananda in America with the same lens with which Steiner characterizes the retrogressive tendencies working in the Krishnamurti affair In Europe? I personally don’t think so.
It is important to remember that Steiner articulated something I call the “magpie principle,” namely, the idea that all people and all cultures and races have both a light and a shadow side. Where I think Steiner often erred (typically in private lectures like this or in offhand comments) was in comparing the light side of one culture to the shadow side of another culture without making the subtleties clear. This is where I think his lack of experience of other cultures plays a role, and this is where I think we can bring a balance to Steiner’s Lion and Bull teachings today.
He makes it clear, for example, in this lecture, that it is important that certain cultures hold back from the stream of western culture and materialism, but he tends, as I see it, to not fully honor the importance of this gesture in the whole context of world evolution, but tends to somewhat demonize it using derogatory terms. This is where I think his Lion and Bull nature do get the better of him sometimes. He felt so strongly the need to uphold the dignity of the Cainite, egoic impulse of the West and of the white people, but sometimes he takes it too far I think, at least to the ears of people like us living 100 years later.
Having said that, I am sure a mathematical analysis would reveal that the vast majority of his cultural criticisms were leveled at his own culture. That is something that is also easy to forget.
Thanks, Robert. This is a helpful answer. I do take seriously the fact that karma adheres to ethnic groups as well as individuals, and in different and continually evolving ways. To reiterate a point we both feel is important for understanding 174b, I think the cultural and spiritual dynamics unfolding in the Western hemisphere and in the US in particular (at least I know it here most intimately) are radically distinct from those of Central Europe a century ago. I suspect present day Europe is also now in quite a different situation compared to what Steiner felt he was addressing in 1915.
When I consider these questions about skin color and the Christ impulse from a US-centric perspective, looking at generic tendencies of peoples with lighter and darker skin tones, it feels evidently true not just a century ago but today that most white evangelical churches have by and large lost the plot entirely. Seems to me that, were Jesus to show up in our midst again today, these white churches, caught up in an idolatrous nationalist fervor and what the political philosopher William Connolly calls the "capitalist-evangelical resonance machine," would likely play the role of the Pharisees in condemning him as some kind of anti-American socialist blasphemer. Since Jesus probably had olive-brown skin, they'd no doubt also call ICE's tip line to have him deported. I don't mean to demonize an entire demographic, by any means. I simply raise this as a proportional counterpoint to Steiner's claim that dark skin houses demons that block the Christ. Maybe that made sense in Central Europe in 1915. I do not think it makes sense in 21st century America. The evidence, whether we consider individuals or generic groups, suggests the opposite.
I do not find it necessary to disavow Steiner as a spiritual teacher for these or other statements, even if I find them to be quite obviously racist (no matter what sort of esoteric spin we may want to give them). The prejudices he expresses in some of his statements to particular German-speaking audiences are hardly unique for that time and place. Racial prejudice is not a unique flaw of white people. All peoples have this tendency toward racial chauvinism. But this tendency to racial prejudice is distinct from the question of systematic white supremacist racism across US cultural, economic, and political institutions, which despite important advances since the 1960s is quickly being reversed under Trump. I don't mention systemic racism because I think DEI practices or race-based affirmative action in employment and education are any kind of solution--I think a lot of that is rather a symptom of the rot and only makes racial tensions worse. Steiner's eagle teachings on these questions are desperately needed, which is why I feel your method of distinguishing those from his lion and bull tendencies is potentially so helpful.
"I simply raise this as a proportional counterpoint to Steiner's claim that dark skin houses demons that block the Christ. Maybe that made sense in Central Europe in 1915."
You say that Steiner's specific claim might have made sense in Central Europe in 1915. Not to be pedantic, but I keep wanting to differentiate two implicit distinctions that seem to happen in this conversation. I'm sorry because I know I might be being very dense.
The typical orthodoxy in Anthroposophy would read your comment as saying something like, "At that time, in that context, Steiner's claim might very well have been true in an important way."
But I wonder if you 'makes sense', you mean something more like, "At that time and place, I can see how a well intentioned person could have just absorbed folklore beliefs and taken them as his starting premises in analyizing the world."
Obviously, the latter would be how I'd take 'making sense' if we are talking about the explicit claims Steiner made about how and why non-white people simply can't integrate with the Christ for quite some time.
I think I'm worried that the 'best' respnoses coming from within Anthroposophy are going to just be slight modifications on, "Be patient, don't assume we understand Steiner yet; There is still much wisdom we might extract from his claims that can appear to be plainly incorrect; and also remember that he was a man of his times."
I genuinely respect that stance in that I know it comes from good hearted places; but, I also see it replicating the very dogmatic tendencies that I think lived in Steiner and played some role in shaping some of the blind-spots that seem to have played a role in how his clairvoyance developed after 1902. Again, my assumption is that no matter what form 'clairvoyance' takes in the future of humanity, it will always have an important struggle with its natural and intristic (and always changing) blind-spots that shape it.
Hence, my deep worry that there is almost no interest at all in the Anthroposophical movement to make this (clairvoyant development) an important study. It's always the, "In some lifetime, you may be capable of really verifying or refuting The Initates claims."
Jeff, I mean basically what you mean, that Steiner's claim "makes sense" if I treat him as, well, not eagle or lion or bull but just as a human being. He is speaking to and for other German people as a German speaking person* in the early days of what was then the bloodiest nationalist war in human history. Germany was already being blamed for the war, with the public in England, France, and even the US increasingly placing all the blame on them. I can understand why he might say something so chauvinist and racist in that context, despite it standing in flat contradiction with many other admirably anti-racist statements in his books and public lectures.
*as you know he was born in what was then Hungary and is now Croatia, and it seems his critics were constantly calling his ethnic identity into question, even accusing him of being--gasp!--Jewish, etc. So perhaps, as a human being, he was also a bit anxious to show his allegiance to a folk soul that sometimes did not accept him as one of their own.
To say his statements "make sense" in this context is not to say I find any truth in them. I am just saying, as I think you are, that such statements function to humanize him.
Sometimes, I almost worry that my focus is so little on the question of if Steiner had ill-will towards non-white people. I don't see it.
After you read my formal response to the videos and this blog, I'd love for any feedback you have, especially push back if you think my emphasis on how this stuff seems to expose a major hole in Steiner and most of his students regarding not seeming to have any curiosity about how clairvoyance actually develops.
That said, I fully get what you mean now about seeing that he was also just a guy in a specific time who we can understand taking on some one-sided views. Thanks.
I'll be sharing my response after I finish both videos, but, Matt, one question for now:
I'll say more about this later, but I'm very grateful for how you framed several of the questions you're holding.
When you talk about Steiner saying it isn't 'universally true', I notice that I might be getting lost in several different meanings of 'universal'.
For instance, if Steiner gave a lecture about green marbles and he said, "The only people who will be able to understand me are people in this room today. Okay, having said that, I want you all to know that for the next 1500 years green marbles will not be able to roll uphill."
It sounds extreme, but I realize it really isn't that extreme in this context. What do we mean by not taking what he says as a universal truth? I can imagine that we want to be very sensitive to as much contextual information as we can gather, especially related to why Steiner might believe that only people in that room could understand him.
But if he is being very clear, repeatedly, as to the fact (his opinion) that green marbles can't roll uphill and he even repeatedly gives his opinion as to what causes green marbles to not have this capacity, I feel it might be okay for us to simply have a different point of view and even claim that he's just wrong about that.
Anyway, if you could just say a few words about what you meant by that term, it'll help me digest your comments and prepare my own.
Thanks for seeking clarification, Jeff. I take Steiner's meaning in context to be that, in the midst of world war pitting European nationalities against one another, it is not possible for him to speak in a way that would be understandable to all nations in the same way. When it comes to certain worldly issues, what is true for Germans in that moment will not be true for French people, even if they are all anthroposophists. He is clear that when he speaks out of the anthroposophical impulse, universally human truths can be heard. But this particular lecture was apparently spoken out of his sense of allegiance to German-speaking peoples, rather than out of an anthroposophical impulse. I think here of his admission in PoF that none among us is all individual or all genus. 174b is, at least in part, Steiner speaking as a member of a genus. I am able to withhold judgment about whether what he said to that particular group of people at that time is somehow "true" (in the sense that it is somehow appropriate for his/their group soul karma). I do not withhold judgment when speaking out of either my own sense of Americanness or my devotion to Anthroposophia: both compel me to reject the statement about skin color as false.
But do you see what I'm trying to get at between the distinction between legitimate tricky roles that context plays in how something can be understood versus specific claims like green marbels can't roll up hill or non-white people can't integrate with the Christ.
I'm having trouble expressing what i think is important as we take first steps in sorting out the area in which we obviously respect Steiner (or anybody) who is reminding us of the importance of context versus having the freedom to notice when an empirical claim can at least be pushed against with reason and observation.
I'm not saying we start by assuming Steiner was wrong about non-white people waiting behind until they are capable of integrating with The Christ. I'm saying we can't conflate two very different kinds of analysis from the start.
I sometimes hear fellow Anthroposophists suggesting (directly or indirectly) that we really have to hold off from assessing any claims Steiner makes until we can fully verify them ourselves. In my opinion, this creates a loop that will always feedback, at best, to a 'wait and see' type of approach that never takes actual steps forward in learning about Steiner's blind-spots and how they shaped his phenomenological experiences.
Much to consider, still working through Robert's after reading 174b-2.
I do want to ask you however whether "private property" is the term you wish to end with here? Such a strong association with the economic, and control of external circumstances...
Would "The Philosophy of Freiheit" better indicate the direction in which to find what Steiner is talking about here?
And is he saying that the "Christ impulse" can be the possession of any group at all?
Or that at the level of groups the support for the individual's search for the I AM is present or lacking?
"And is he saying that the "Christ impulse" can be the possession of any group at all?"
My repeated study of 174b-2 is that Steiner is saying that only people with white skin can individuate The Christ at this time. He isn't suggesting some kind of Group Incorporation of the Christ; or at least not directly. But he is saying that his vision of individuation is that, for the time being, only white skinned people can do this. And he then states very clearly why. And he even states why this is natural and positive that non-white skinned people must wait and then carry the next wave forward.
To be clear, I don't have the impression that Steiner is speaking from ill-will or hatred.
But I don't agree with his observations or with his reasoning in this lecture.
That said, I appreciate the way this lecture ties together all his other statements and makes what used to sound like paradoxes actually cohere internally.
When he talks about racism or racial thinking coming to an end, we can see how that does not contradict his claim here that this 'end' need not be understood as immediate. Also, hateful and obsessive views about race can come to an end today, and that does entail that non-white people can integrate with the Christ.
So I don't even see it as a contradiction for Steiner to say: "Hey, there is no room for racism anymore; and the reason why is that white humanity won't be able to achieve their mission if they obsess about race. They need to achieve their mission in about 1500 years so that they can then help 'impregnate' all non-white people with the Christ, at which point, the non-white people will assume the cutting edge of evolution."
I don't agree, but that is coherent and internally consistent.
The point of my question, "And is he saying that the "Christ impulse" can be the possession of any group at all?", is my view that no group as a group can take in the "Christ impulse" as a group.
The Christ Impulse is not a group thing. That's what I mean. Yet we keep trying to link what Steiner says about this group or that group to access to the Christ.
Other beings can and do work through groups (per 174b-2); Christ works only through individuals and through the creation of universal humanity.
Steiner's race point, or one of them (in the Workers talks), is that an effect of the largest organ of our bodies, the skin (he had a lot to say about physiology) is to receive or reflect warmth and light. I don't know if that's true, I don't have more than a crumb of his vision. He takes that on to assert that darker skin takes in more warmth and light -- and I think he sees more there than materialistic warm and materialistic light. Having this -- may I say "higher warmth" and "higher light" available from outside, an individual currently incarnated with a darker skin coloration doesn't have to create those from scratch, de novo, inside themselves. The so-called "white" person will have to do this, which will either force him/her to develop capacities for doing that, OR -- Steiner doesn't specify this, but it's common sense -- a given "white" person will have to live with diminished warmth and diminished light, whether lower or higher.
And as specifically to the Germans, the potential I AM bearers among the Europeans, he makes totally clear on many occasions that their great guide, Goethe, is scarcely known to them in his time.
To recap, I read RS saying white skin forces individuals who seek spiritual warmth and light to develop the inner capacity of warmth-light creation. Dark skin, he says, makes this development unnecessary, and they are able to hold onto previous qualities of community etc. which must be preserved for the next cultural age.
"To recap, I read RS saying white skin forces individuals who seek spiritual warmth and light to develop the inner capacity of warmth-light creation. Dark skin, he says, makes this development unnecessary, and they are able to hold onto previous qualities of community etc. which must be preserved for the next cultural age."
Okay, but I'd just stress that it seems his lecture 174b.2 gives us a more specific idea to react to and think about. And I don't think it contradicts what you are saying.
He is saying that white humanity has an important mission. This mission (to help 'impregnate' all the other races with The Christ around the year 35000) is only possible because only white people, at this time, can integrate with The Christ.
He even specifies and underlines this by explaining that non-white skin is showing us directly this lack of capacity AND that demons form in that context. He says that non-white people must be 'held back' until around the year 3500 and can only proceed forward if white humanity achieves its mission.
I need to stress that I don't see this as hateful talk. In fact, many Anthroposophists are quick to point out that reincarnation and cosmic evolution make racism nearly impossible. That's fine.
But, in the context of Robert's blog and videos, it seems that we are trying to face squarely the hardest and clearest parts of Steiner's claims. For me, that is his detailed explanation as to why only white people can integrate with the Christ for the next 1500 years.
No matter what other ideas we have about his challenges to white people and his deep wish for a living unity in humanity, it seems that this blog is asking us to find ways of working with the hardest and most direct aspects, the statements by Steiner that non-white people are going to continue finding, more and more often, as they come across his name and hear about Steiner schools or other aspects of the movement.
Many white evangelical churches in the US are convinced that the teachings of Christ are fully compatible with "capitalist populism" and Trump-style glorification of wealth and fame. I chose my phrase "private property" with due consideration of these factors.
My next door neighbors are believers in the "prosperity gospels" and based on flat, unverified claims by authority figures, they have no problem seeing their wealth as verification of their deep connection to Christ.
Over the last fifteen years I've spoken to many Anthroposophists who will use crime statistics to argue that Steiner's claims about non-white skin in 174b-2 can be approached and verified statistically.
I consider myself an Anthroposophist, but only in the sense of a very tiny trickling stream that is just surfacing above the water and is still miles apart from the main River.
But I believe this strongly. If it is true that Steiner's teaching have the capacity to play an important role in 'racial healings', this will have to be expressed in the direct and concrete ways that we Anthroposophists (not claiming that you identify that way, Matt) address their direct questions regarding the systematic way Steiner explains his vast view in that lecture and, of course, in other lectures with similar kinds of comments.
For 10 years Iived in a town with a wonderfully creative Waldorf School. I informally became the person that teachers sent non-white people to in town who were considering Waldorf for their children and then read these comments by Steiner.
At that time, there weren't teachers who really knew how to have these conversations outside of the usual, "Well, we have to understand him in context and work with his core books for years before we can truely even begin to grasp the meaning of those statements. In the meantime, here are other quotes and lectures you should read to see what he belived about education."
I would like to think that any Anthroposophist at this time can readily see why those well-intended responses are lightyears from the kinds of conversations necessarily.
Those were some of the most intense, moving, painful, and educational conversations I've ever had. I never once even implied that the people's worries were grounded in any kind of ignorance. I always led with my own reasons for thinking that neither Steiner nor his most enthusiastic student's seem to recognize that his experience, and theirs, is shaped by blind-spots, like every human beings. And, then, I would try to express why there might still be real value in exploring Waldorf. I did this by talking about the difference between the kind of pure phenomenology Steiner was capable of versus what he felt was an 'exact clairvoyance' that might require lifetimes to even begin to verify.
As people began to see reasons to value this discrepancy, some of them felt there might be room for them within a Waldorf community. But, as you might suspect, by the time we got to 2016, the pain in reading some of Steiner explicit claims was just too much to keep listening to me.
Anyway, more soon. Thanks for the dialog. I find this to be one of the most important Anthroposophical conversations there is. It includes all of my other interests and passions regarding the importance and possible dangers of Steiner's work and how we take it up.
I just want to say how grateful I am for this conversation, its very rich and helpful, many thanks to each of yuo for your thoughtful reflections. I hope to share some more thoughts soon. Until then have a great weekend everyone!
Jeff, I would like to respond to some aspects of an earlier post of yours.
A fundamental question you were raising seems to be, how should people who find great value in Rudolf Steiner’s work respond to statements he made that we find to be false or biased in some fashion. By “respond” I mean not so much how should we respond internally, but externally, such as the example you gave of parents in a Waldorf school coming upon these comments and then approaching us. Or how should the Anthroposophical Society, for example, respond.
This is complex territory because of the incredible amount of rigor and nuance that I believe is necessary to even be sure we understand Rudolf Steiner. Be that as it may, for the purposes of furthering our discussion, here are seven statements that I think could perhaps guide us in responding responsibly on these matters. I would be very interested in what you all think of these. I have only drafted these today and am putting them out simply to advance the conversation, not because I consider them ready to be shared widely as a recommendation.
1. Anthroposophy, as a spiritual teaching, is in no way racist (by any reasonable definition of that word). It is and has been, rather, a major force in combatting racism and fostering human harmony all around the world—the same can be said of the many daughter movements flowing out of anthroposophy, such as Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, anthroposophical medicine, etc., etc.
2. Individual anthroposophists are all flawed human beings, however, who often mix their own biases and limited life experiences up with their work on behalf of anthroposophy. This is the unavoidable reality of a modern spiritual movement, which can only be addressed through an ongoing commitment to spiritual growth and development by each individual involved.
3. Rudolf Steiner himself was also a flawed human being and sometimes his writings and words bring to expression his own lack of experience, biases, or historical limitations. It is thus up to each individual to continually sift through the work of Rudof Steiner to find what is future bearing or true for them and to leave behind what is not.
4. Since anthroposophy is not a dogma or religion, this methodology has always been the case, with all of Steiner’s teachings and practical initiatives. And since no one can do this work for another individual, it is not the job of the Anthroposophical Society or any other organizational body to make an official statement or declaration disavowing one lecture, statement, concept or another. People must do this work for themselves.
5. What can and perhaps should be done is to simply acknowledge that Rudolf Steiner was himself a flawed human being, and by his own admission, subject to potential errors in his spiritual research. One could perhaps also acknowledge that there are certain statements made by him that many students of anthroposophy find to be troubling, and/or out of alignment with his primary teachings.
6. Most people who have studied this question in a rigorous fashion (including the Dutch commission), have come to the conclusion that while Rudolf Steiner certainly expresses biases on occasion, there is no evidence of ill will on his part toward people of color, nor any semblance of a doctrine of white supremacy in his teachings on race and culture.
7. From this standpoint, it would perhaps also be reasonable for the Anthroposophical Society and perhaps other key institutions to put out a statement unequivocally rejecting any attempt to interpret Rudolf Steiner’s work or statements as expressing some form of white supremacy.
Robert, thank you for taking the time to formulate these seven points and to offer them provisionally, as tools for thinking rather than as settled doctrine. I appreciate the seriousness with which you’re engaging this terrain, and I recognize that what you’re attempting is not a defensive maneuver, but an effort to articulate a responsible Anthroposophical posture in a very difficult area.
I’d like to respond by walking carefully through each of your points, not in order to dismantle them, but just to clarify where I still feel something essential is missing, especially when we imagine speaking to people who do *not* already love Steiner, trust Anthroposophy, or feel inclined to grant it interpretive generosity.
1. “Anthroposophy, as a spiritual teaching, is in no way racist.”
I understand what you mean here, and I agree that Anthroposophy, taken at its deepest and most universal level, does not require or support racism as a worldview. I also recognize the very real ways Anthroposophical initiatives have worked toward human dignity, reconciliation, and cross-cultural encounter.
However, I worry that beginning here places the system in the foreground rather than the experience of the person who has just encountered a disturbing statement. For someone encountering Steiner’s racial remarks for the first time, this assertion often lands less as reassurance and more as a pre-emptive framing: “Before we deal with what you just read, you should know that the system is sound.”
In almost any other domain, we would reverse the order. If a great scientist, philosopher, or educator were quoted as saying something empirically indefensible or overtly biased, we would first say: "Yes, that claim is wrong. There is no evidence for it. It rests on assumptions we now know to be false." Only then would we widen the lens to context, intention, or legacy.
I’m not sure Anthroposophy has yet learned how to do that "first move" cleanly and concretely. People are going to be not only reading Steiner's worst comments about the nature of the 'white mission' and the limitations of non-white skin, they are also going to be going online and finding plenty of examples of Anthroposophists justifying some ungrounded beliefs in the nature of 'race' and its inherent effect on individuals. It's all out there.
2. “Individual anthroposophists mix their own biases into their work.”**
This feels entirely right to me, and I think it names an unavoidable human reality. But it also raises a question that then presses back on Steiner himself.
If we take seriously that bias, temperament, culture, embodiment, and limited experience shape perception for every human being, then we have to ask: "how exactly does this operate in someone who repeatedly claims “exact perception,” “direct spiritual research,” and access to objective supersensible facts?"
In ordinary discourse, when a person speaks with extraordinary certainty, we naturally become more interested in examining how blind spots might be operating, not less. The stronger the claim to exactitude, the more pressing the question of methodological limits.
This is not an attack on Steiner. It is simply the same epistemic seriousness we apply everywhere else.
I've had non-white people look at me wide-eyed asking, "Is Steiner saying that he experienced these truths spiritually? Did he?"
I've had to find ways of going directly into their worry and shock without dodging it at all.
3. “Rudolf Steiner himself was also a flawed human being.”
I agree with this statement, but I want to underline that its force depends entirely on how far we are willing to let it go.
If “flawed” means merely “occasionally expressed himself awkwardly” or “used the language of his time,” then it does very little real work.
What people are encountering are not just awkward phrasings, but specific causal claims, often delivered emphatically, about race, culture, heredity, destiny, and even biological outcomes.
In other fields, when a thinker makes repeated claims of this kind that do not hold up, we don’t stop at “he was human.” We say: this was wrong, this rested on faulty assumptions, this reveals something important about how his thinking worked. We find it very significant to dive in and begin to understand made this certainty possible, and those deeper aspects could show up in other contexts.
That kind of analysis is still strangely rare when Steiner is the subject.
“Since anthroposophy is not a dogma, organizations should not disavow specific statements.”
I understand the impulse behind this, and I agree that no organization can or should do an individual’s inner work for them.
At the same time, when institutions invite the public into spaces explicitly founded on Steiner’s work, they are no longer dealing only with inner paths. They are dealing with trust, safety, and credibility.
Imagine a parent asking: “Do Anthroposophists believe this statement is true?”
A response of “You must decide for yourself” can easily feel evasive rather than empowering, especially when the statement in question concerns race, heredity, or human worth. One of the most painful things is when people set up to have conversation with a Waldorf teacher and the teacher simply isn't ready to even begin addressing Steiner's emphatic statements, spoken as coming from 'exact clairvoyance' and often directly tied to statements like, "Until humanity sees this truth, it will be impossible to move in a healthy direction."
They ask the teacher, "Do you believe Steiner on this??!" and often the teacher only has a mush of vague comments to make about inner work, individuality, and then shares other quotes from Steiner that sound wonderful.
5. “Steiner was subject to potential errors in his spiritual research.”
This point is important, but I think it needs to be brought out of abstraction and into lived reality.
What would it actually look like for Anthroposophy to say, plainly and without embarrassment:
“Here are places where Steiner was simply wrong.”
Not wrong in a moral sense, not wrong because of bad intentions, but wrong in the way great thinkers are often wrong, because perception is always shaped by context, expectation, embodiment, and inherited conceptual frames.
Until Anthroposophy can model this kind of clarity, people will continue to suspect that Steiner occupies a protected category where ordinary standards of evidence do not apply.
Like I've said, in all other realms of science, it is normal for students of a great researcher to be able to name both the insights and the errors or faulty lines of thinking in the person.
I would think this capacity would be 10 times more necessary for Anthroposophists to cultivate. Why? For one, in all those other domains, the 'great teacher' is pointing to phenomena that all of us can look at and begin to thinking deeply about. They are not saying, "You must trust me for now, and try to see that I am correct before you can verify this, maybe several lifetimes from now."
So when people are worried about Steiner's statements about the incredibly important mission that only white people can achieve for the next 1500 years, and when they see that he often is asking his students to work very hard at seeing how his statements are reasonable and do not contradict everyday observations, this is when we need to be able to speak plainly and directly to them.
6. “No evidence of ill will or white supremacy.”**
I agree that Steiner does not articulate a doctrine of white supremacy in the modern political sense, and I think it is important to say this.
But for many people, ill will is not the central concern. Harm does not require hatred. False causal claims, confidently stated, can wound regardless of intention.
When someone encounters repeated statements that seem to cluster around racial hierarchy, destiny, degeneration, or inherited capacity, what they are responding to is not a question of inner attitude, but of pattern.
This is where I think the conversation needs to move beyond reassurance and toward inquiry into how such patterns formed, and why Steiner’s certainty did not include safeguards against them.
7. “Reject interpretations of Steiner as white supremacist.”**
I support rejecting simplistic or weaponized readings of Steiner.
At the same time, rejection alone does not answer the deeper question people are asking, which is not so much: “Is Steiner a white supremacist?” but rather:
“How did a thinker of such depth come to hold these views, and what does that tell us about the limits of spiritual perception itself and/or the limits of his own self-knowledge?”
Until Anthroposophy can meet that question head-on, without retreating into context, intention, or system-defense, I think it will remain largely persuasive only to those already inside the house.
For me, the unresolved issue is not whether Steiner remains worth studying, loving, or working with, I believe he absolutely is. The issue is whether Anthroposophy can mature into a culture that treats him with the same honesty we grant Darwin, Freud, Einstein, or Goethe, figures whose greatness is not diminished by our ability to name where they were deeply wrong.
I don’t see this as a loss of reverence, but as a different kind of fidelity, one that allows Steiner to remain a living teacher rather than a figure subtly shielded from full human scrutiny.
I offer these reflections in the same spirit you offered your seven points: not as final answers, but as an attempt to keep the conversation grounded in reality, in ordinary human standards of knowing, and in the lived experience of those who are encountering these statements by Steiner for the first time. This will only be growing in numbers as time goes on.
With massive respect,
Jeff
Jeff,
Thank you so much for taking the time to respond so thoughtfully and helpfully to my 7 points. I am about to head off on a long road trip and I don’t feel I have the time to do justice to your thoughts, and it will be several weeks before I can do them justice. But I will share a few thoughts.
One thing I want to clarify is that my understanding of the anthroposophical path of research is that while it does involve the purification and the refining of the subjective elements of human nature Steiner never claimed one had to be perfect or free of all prejudice to conduct accurate spiritual scientific research.
“Objective truths” from this perspective are always colored to some degree by each person’s unique destiny, personality and karma. The eternal and the time-bound will always meet in the destiny of each person—thus even the masters, saints and great initiates have unique tasks in particular incarnations and unique limitations and one-sidednesses. The wisdom of all great teachers eventually becomes harmful and must be renewed in the course of time.
Thus, for me, Steiner’s research results can be 99% accurate and still be in need of clarification, elaboration AND metamorphosis. And without that clarification, elaboration and metamorphosis, some of those accurate things for his time and place, become untrue in our time and place.
For example, to the degree we take what Steiner said about white people and people of color in 174b as a statement of generic, collective tendencies of certain groups and cultures over a relatively short period of time, I don’t find it to be offensive or racist. But the moment we interpret him as saying ALL people of those races or cultures have these capacities, tasks or limitations, then I think we distort his meaning and make his statement into something monstrous and racist.
I realize how little of what you said I am actually addressing, so thank you for your patience Jeff.
Warmly,
Robert
Please just save these for later; I'm putting things on the table for when we can pick them up in dialog:
"But the moment we interpret him as saying ALL people of those races or cultures have these capacities, tasks or limitations, then I think we distort his meaning and make his statement into something."
To be clear, I'm not sure we want to say it is a misinterpretation to read what Steiner said as referring to ALL. He does not say that he is speaking in a very general sense. In other lectures, he will point out when he doesn't want to be taken as overgeneralizing. More importantly, he tells WHY and HOW white-skin and non-white skin form. He says that his research shows him that the formation of non-white skin IS an indication of the spiritual 'mechanism' he is teaching his audience; namely, if we see non-white skin we know that The Christ can't integrate there, and this goes for the next 1500. If we see white skin, we are seeing the exact indication of the capacity to integrate with the Christ. Steiner isn't saying that all white people are integrated with the Christ. Far from it. He is saying that his research explains why white-skin represents the capacity to integrate with the Christ and why non-white skin represents that inability to do so (until 3500 AD).
I just want to make sure we are not building a strawman or changing the goal posts accidentally as we try to pin-point the exact reasons that any human could read Steiner and feel worried, at the very least, and also a bit shocked at Steiner's reasoning, observation, and confidence.
Take care,
Jeff
Hi Robert,
"For example, to the degree we take what Steiner said about white people and people of color in 174b as a statement of generic, collective tendencies of certain groups and cultures over a relatively short period of time, I don’t find it to be offensive or racist."
I might be misunderstanding you here, but I have to be honest and say that shocked me. Again. I don't care if we call such statements racist or offensive. We obviously understand why a non-white person should be offended by them, right? If somebody said, "I've studied Anthroposophists and they are all mentally deranaged and incapable of careful thinking," we could take offense to that.
But, more importantly, we would want to know how a person could engage in such sloppy empirical observation and thinking, and with such confidence.
Robert, I really want to stress that when you are talking to me, I don't think we are talking about whether Steiner had hatred in his heart of if you or I should take offense to his comments about what non-white people aren't capable of. That is a side discussion, an important one, but it is not what I find most concerning.
But your claim above sounds as if you are saying that Steiner may have been basically accurate and on target if we are talking about collective tendencies of the various 'races' he was talking about at this time. It sounds as if you think that he was somehow capturing a collective tendency of white people to demonstrate a deep integration with The Christ (or at least the capacity to do that) versus a collective tendency of all non-white people not express such an integration. Or more so, according to Steiner words, the non-white people showed that, for the time being, they had no capacity to integrate with The Christ; hence, their skin being non-white.
Finally, regarding Steiner's talk about being an 'exact clairvoyant'. I will be able to show you countless direct quotations where Steiner either says directly or indirectly that his form of 'clairvoyance' should be understood as exact. Also, I can show many quotes in which he makes it clear that he only speaks of facts that he is utterly certain of after years and years of researching from many points of view.
Remember, one important aspect of this conversation is what you refer to as a necessary 'healing' between races. I stress that non-white people are increasingly going to find Steiner and find all the kinds of quotes I'm mentioning, and we must grapple with anything that blocks us from having genuine, direct, and specific responses.
I imagine I am not fully understanding what you mean. I know you have a trip to enjoy. So, just know, that I trust we will find the time to dialog and eventually really get sorted out the variables that are involved in this complicated and important conversation.
Take care!
Jeff
Jeff, (and friends)
I found some time for a some quick clarifications:
My point about spiritual scientific research was that the complete accuracy that is possible does not preclude prejudices still living in the soul. When Steiner speaks or writes he is sometimes speaking or writing from pure spiritual scientific research and sometimes he is speaking or writing from other dimensions of his personality. He made it clear, for example, that his books arise from a very different source than his lectures—not a lower source necessarily but a different source—one that is deeply informed by the people sitting in front of him. He also made it clear that he had to constantly struggle to find the right words to clothe and explain his pure occult perceptions which also throws the door open to all kinds of misunderstandings, especially after one hundred years.
So, as I see it, we are not dealing with a simple matter of whether Steiner was right or wrong, but we are dealing in the first place with whether we even understand him. And this is right now the main focus of my own research—to be sure I really understand him—not whether I agree with him or not.
You seem to read Steiner’s statements in 174B lecture 2 far more categorically than I do. I see him saying that both the Slavic and the Asian people have a future task in the sixth post-Atlantean epoch that is not yet ripe, it has to wait for the central Europeans to get their act together, so that it can then unite with the best fruits of central European development.
Yes, Steiner refers to demonic tendencies in those cultures that are holding back from Western civilization but he also, in other places, speaks of the enormous demonic tendencies living in (white) Anglo-American cultures that have plunged too deeply into the material dimension of the Western impulse.
Unless one knows the full picture living in Steiner, namely that the English and Americans are battling Ahrimanic demons and the Slavic and Asian cultures of the East are battling Luciferic demons, we cannot fully understand the mission he was trying to get the Europeans to rise up to and embrace—an effort which more or less failed miserably, at least in the 20th century.
But these perspectives of Steiner are woven almost entirely of a certain kind of generalization that he was fond of when speaking from his Lion nature…generalizations that are based on spiritual insights but which are not by any means determinative for the life of individuals. For Steiner, the individual will or at least can always trump these general tendencies. Again, if this is not clear, his words become monstrous, and he knew this...I cannot make this point often enough.
Re skin color, I hear Steiner saying basically that white skin supports the soul’s striving to free itself from racial influence (which he associates with the Christ impulse) whereas darker skin tends to be associated with the soul still feeling a stronger bond with the group soul, whether cultural or racial. In the mixed racial American context, such statements have almost no meaning in my experience, and I am not sure they are useful at this point in time anywhere in the world. You and Matt seem to see these statements as arising from prejudice, perhaps...I mainly seem them as outdated and anachronistic now and in need of a profound refashioning to suit the realities of the present time.
What is useful, I think, is recognizing that different cultures and people and geographies have different tasks, different missions, that need to find a way to come into harmony, and for this harmony to come about we all need to free ourselves from a one-sided identification with our place, culture, gender, race, religion, etc. Steiner hoped the Europeans could lead the way in this effort, which I think was not unreasonable in his time.
Let me give an example. Why does Canada have such a different vibe than the US? Why does it tend toward a more natural and intuitive relationship to multiculturalism? Why so much less gun violence?
I think at least in part it is because the Canadians maintained their connection to the European folk souls whereas the US severed those connected more fully through the revolutionary war. This was because the US had and has the painful task to create a home for the worst aspects of the lower self of humanity to come to the fore and the to be transformed.
Rather than an abstract US driven league of nations or UN, Steiner was fighting for a European approach to multiculturalism or what I have called "maypole multiculturalism" that could have brought a powerful healing impulse to the world. Do we not witness the absence of this impulse strongly in our US centric world today?
Imagine a world, for example, in which mature european leaders were mediating the conflicts in Ukraine and Israel rather than Donald Trump--this can perhaps give us an idea of what Steiner was fighting for, I think.
Instead we have a tragic conflict between a form of abstract and marxist laden form of multiculturalism that cannot really bring about true change, as Ashvin pointed out, and the muscular backward looking populism of Donald Trump. This is the same difficult polarity of East and West that Steiner was trying to transform in his own day, only now on steroids.
I know I have yet to deal with your genuine concerns about all the people of color who have read Steiner’s statements on race and felt wounded and repulsed. So, thank you again for your patience.
Thanks Robert,
Maybe we slow down and I can see if we are getting stuck in a certain kind if interpretive reading.
And maybe taking it out of such a charged topic can help us see the actual structure underneath the content.
Do you interpret the following two statements in a significantly different way:
Imagine reading a Steiner lecture and he says:
"The Fluva Owl is not able to fly during the day. Many owls prefer not to fly during the day, but the Fluva Owl is not able. Strange as it may sound, by a careful examination of the Fluva's unique foot structure, we understand why it does not have this capacity. And, more importantly, if we look at the evolution of this Owl, we can see why it is absolutely essential that it can not fly during the day at all."
versus:
"The Fluva Owl has a distinct disinclination to fly during the day. Compared to most owls, the Fluva has a much higher need to stay hidden during the day. We can understand this increased tendency by examining it's foot structure."
For me, the difference is that in the first case, Steiner is making a claim that the Fluva Owl does not have the capacity to fly during the day and he goes on to explain this. In the second case, he is saying that the Fluva Owl has a stronger disinclination to fly during the day."
In the first case, I wouldn't be surprised if somebody raised their hand and said, "Dr. Steiner, I see Fluva Owls flying during the day now and then. How can this be?"
Whereas, if Steiner had said the second statement, it is hard for me to imagine why somebody would say that. If Steiner has already made clear that they have the capacity and indeed do fly during the day, why would somebody feel it significant to simply repeat what he has said.
For me this captures the structure of what he is saying in 174b.2. And that's why I can understand why people would feel the need to question his claim that the formation of dark skin not only signifies the lack of a capacity but also explains why this lack is so important at this time.
If Steiner had only said, "You will notice that white people have slightly more capacity to integrate with the Christ" and if he had not then gone on to explain in detail why it is essential and important for non-white people to be held-back (just for the time being), then I wouldn't understand how anybody could interpret him to be saying there is a significant and important difference between white people and non-white people for the next 1500 years.
I'm not trying to set up a debate. I just feel we can at least ground ourselves in the difference between one kind of formal explanation versus another.
I'm not trying to push you in a corner, either. If you honestly read that lecture and think he is merely saying, "There is a subtle difference in the degree to which the Christ can be integrated", I'm all ears. I'll just need you to point me to which phrases you interpret in that way.
It is difficult for me, especially because he then goes on to explain the important consequences that this difference (between the race that is moving forward versus those being temporarily held back).
If he had only said, "White people have a unique mission because they have a bit of an advantage in integrating with the Christ", and hadn't gone on to detail why being 'held'back' is an important feature of non-white races, then I would fully share your interpretation of the lecture.
If Steiner had even just said, "These subtle differences will only continue for 100 more years," that would require a very different reading than his saying that this dynamic difference between white and non-white people will last for another 1,500 years.
Think of the difference in interpretation if he has said something like, "This difference between white and non-white people will become less and less pronounced so that by the year 3,500, it won't be noticible."
Compare that saying that this difference will only end if, in about 1500 years, white people achieve their mission and can 'impregnate' the other races with The Christ.
I don't think the lecture can be interpreted to suggest that this 'impregnation' is something that begins now and ends in 1500 years. In fact, Steiner goes out of his way to explain why it can only happen in 1500 years IF white people take advantage of what is unique about their natures at this time in evolution.
By the way, I strongly believe that even this part of our conversation connects to the parts you kindly remind me that you haven't yet taken up. When open-minded non-white people come across Steiner's explicit claims in this lecture, and if they hear an Anthroposophist say, "I read this as Steiner saying there is just a subtle difference taking place", their jaws drop open a bit.
If we believe Steiner is only talking about subtle shifts of emphasis, we absolutely need to be able to point directly to the specific phrases. Otherwise we will fall back into one of the typical escape routes, telling them that they should read other things he said, or they can't understand it because only specific Germans from specific places can understand what he means, or...
At the very least, even Anthroposophists like you and Ashvin who think Steiner is clearly only pointing to a subtle difference between white people and all non-white peoples, at the very least I imagine you should be able to see why other Anthroposophists and non-Anthroposophists read it as Steiner talking about something very distinct and very important. In that sense, I imagine your opening comments would be something like, "Yes, it really does appear as if Steiner is claiming there is a current important difference taking place, but, actually notice that he says...."
Something like that.
Take care and thanks again for the dialog. I know you might not be back for several weeks. No problem.
Jeff
Thanks, Robert! I didn't receive a notification to this thoughtful response, so I'm just getting to it. I see Matt has made a response as well. I'll hopefully be able to put down some thoughts in a couple hours. I hope to continue this dialog. We are coming from creatively polaric positions and I think that bodes well! If we can tolerate misunderstanding each other for a bit :)
Thanks for these clearly articulated points, Robert! I know this is for Jeff, but I couldn't help but reflect and reply myself:
1. I agree about Anthroposophy not being racist. In fact, as I've said in these comment threads and elsewhere, I believe Steiner's teachings on ethical individuality and threefolding distinction between political equality and cultural freedom provide an extremely helpful way of working through some knots in current social conflicts about race and racism. However, I also know that historically, and believe at present, there are Anthroposophists who claim interpretations of Steiner's teachings that I cannot help but view as racist. My response to these tendencies is to defend a different interpretation of Anthroposophy that is, as you say, free of racism, in intent and implication.
2. See above.
3. Agree and well said.
4. This is why I am not a member of the Society, despite the fact that I have long sought out a spiritual "home." Institutionalization of new spiritual movements is important but fraught, and I have yet to figure out the best way of holding the tension between individual freedom and initiative, and organizational solidarity.
5. Agree.
6. I am not sure I could agree that there is "no evidence of ill will" or "any semblance" of white supremacy in his teachings. It seems more accurate to say there are at least a few recorded occasions when he spoke out of apparent disgust for nonwhites (eg, "negro novels" and other physiognomic remarks), and that there is at least the "semblance" (ie, "the outward appearance or apparent form of something, especially when the reality is different") of white supremacy in his understanding of racial evolution. If there were no semblance of such, no one would be having this discussion!
7. I agree and would like to see this sort of statement.
Thanks for your comments Matt. Can you elaborate a little bit on what you said about the Anthroposophical Society? Are you saying that you see the need for formal disavowals from the Society to give anthroposophy more academic credibility but you also see how it doesn’t make sense from the standpoint of the strong role of individual freedom in the movement? Or are you just saying that you can’t feel at home in a modern spiritual movement that has to make these kinds of tradeoffs???
I mean that my own Emersonian temperament and anarchistic tendencies have made it impossible for me to feel comfortable or like I belong to a "church," even one with as much room for individual initiative as the Anthroposophical Society. I much prefer the spontaneity and distributed agency afforded by emergent group projects (eg, Urphänomen), where there are no governing committees or hierarchies to even contemplate making "official statements" that are supposed to represent the views of everyone in the church. Of course, there are benefits to associating into organizations and forming institutions. I suppose I am just admitting my own limitations and preferences. Like you said, overcoming racism so as to bring about a politically just and culturally free society is not something that can be handed down from on high, whether by new legislation or committee statements. Those are important, but (at least when done well) they seem to me to be downstream of the inner work of individuals and their intimates.
Colin, I am very moved by your words, it is so profound what you have shared...you are bringing out something so very important and so easy to miss unless one is aware of the fuller picture Steiner gives of the white race and of the western inclining folk souls…which is the fact that, just as you say, they most embody the destiny of the prodigal son.
This creates the challenging, tragic, two-fold destiny of the West, one of great cultural advances along with unspeakable moral failures and intellectual blindness. The material leaning peoples and cultures of the west are thus also those most in need of a manifestation of God reaching right down to the physical, and into the forces of the earthly personality, as happened through the Christ event.
It is this perspective that underlies but is very easy to miss in 174b and throughout much of Steiner. Here for example is a little-known verse of Steiner from his earlier years that most people are unaware of, in which he states the tragedy in stronger terms, though still somewhat veiled:
A new dawning of the white race
Will manifest itself in earthly spheres
Only when the sages of this race
Feel the soul’s bond with the spirit,
And in them will take effect
A feeling of the shame
That blackens souls
When they seek to comprehend
Man’s being through material senses.
Later in his life he will point out that the sign of any genuine encounter with etheric Christ is that the whole soul will be permeated by the most profound sense of shame. Clearly, Rudolf Steiner himself had this experience.
As I see it, Jeff, we need to fashion a whole new narrative about race and culture that draws on Steiner’s eagle, lion and bull teaching but that breaks wholly new ground. One could also think of eagle, lion and bull as the blossom, leaf and root of a plant—the plant of anthroposophy—which is now entering the seed stage during which it must be either reborn in a new form or become a historical relic. I realize it may look like I am simply trying to defend or nuance Steiner within a relatively small circle, but I see this as simply the preliminary, soil tilling work necessary to receive the seed of a whole new inspiration coming from the future rather than from the past.
Just as through Pentecost the disciples gained a new power of speech able to bring the mystery of Christ experienced by the 12 to all people, so you could say we are entering the Pentecostal phase of anthroposophy and of esoteric Christianity more broadly speaking. If we do the right preparatory work, as I see it, through grace, some of us can begin to manifest this new power of the spirit and of language that will be able to reach any and every human being. I suspect many of us have glimmers of the emergence of these new capacities.
I will share more in the coming days. Again, I am so grateful for this dialogue.
One of the things that has come up for me over the years as I work with this topic, is the following:
Often we, Anthroposophists, will set up a subtle binary situation, as if there is a contradiction between the clarity Steiner explicates in 174b.2 and other quotes in which he clearly shows that humanity is a whole and that even white people have deep work to do regarding love.
This worries me because it seems to shift the focus and imply there is a duality where there isn't one.
What I mean is this: there is absolutely no contradiction between Steiner feeling very strongly that only white people can integrate with The Christ for the next 1500 years and that white people must be much more loving and gracious towards all people. Steiner isn't contradicting himself if he speaks to a deep and nefarious shadow within the white race and yet also claims that, for the foreseeable future, only the white race can integrate the leading evolutionary impulse.
I think I fully grasp why we might be inclined to always fall back upon quotes in which Steiner is clearly aware of shadow elements even in his favorite thinkers and cultures. My worry is that this comes across as if we might be saying, "Look, it probably isn't true to think that Steiner really was saying that only white people have the ability to carry forward humanity at this time because, look, he also said this and that."
If we can see clearly that there is absolutely no contradiction between the specific claim in 174b.2 and any other statements he made ('racism must end', 'white humanty must do better', etc), then, I believe, this is exactly what we must learn to explore and talk about if our goal is a healing of racial pain and confusion.
For context: anytime I speak of what I find to be clear in 174b.2, if other people reading this don't think I'm stating it accurately, please let me know.
I always try to read it (now and then) from the perspective of somebody who isn't already a student of Steiner but who is relatively intelligent and able to give it a fair shake. But, as we know, our own blind-spots can always play more of a role than we'd like. Thanks!
Thank you for this work, Robert!
I want to begin by saying that I recognize how careful, serious, and ethically motivated your project is, and that I share what I take to be one of its underlying values: the refusal of both denial and simplistic condemnation, and the attempt to think Steiner’s legacy in a way that does not collapse into polemics. I read your post closely and watched both videos, and I found your Eagle–Lion–Bull distinction especially helpful, not as a rhetorical device but as a genuine attempt to hold together Steiner’s universal teachings, his historically situated cultural mission, and his very real human limitations within a single interpretive frame.
Anything within the Anthroposophical conversation that helps long-standing Anthroposophists think more nimbly, more honestly, and less defensively about Steiner’s racial and cultural claims strikes me as genuinely valuable.
My response here is not meant as a rejection of your method or your conclusions, but as a contribution from a slightly different angle, one that I hope might stand in dialogue with yours rather than opposition. I suspect our approaches may ultimately be complementary, but they may also speak to different audiences and face different limits.
One concern I want to raise, kindly but directly, is that this approach may limit its scope and resonance to a particular subgroup already within Anthroposophy, often those of us who are ourselves troubled by the increasingly nationalistic or ethnocentric tones that have been resurfacing in some Anthroposophical spaces. In other words, it seems especially compelling for centrist or left-leaning Anthroposophists who already love Steiner, but who are unsettled when we encounter the more explicit racial statements in his work and are looking for better ways to contextualize them.
I find that effort genuinely worthwhile. At the same time, I struggle to see how this approach can function as a healing contribution beyond that circle. For over fifteen years, I have been a person to whom non-white, inquiring prospective Waldorf parents have been sent, people who were initially excited about Waldorf education, but then encountered Steiner’s most specific racial claims and felt shaken or alarmed by them. In more than one case, people were sent my way after encountering Steiner’s explicit remarks about Black skin, white destiny, or the long-term future of non-white peoples, and asking how they were supposed to understand this.
One quote that regularly stops people cold is this:
“There is a biography of Schubert in which it is said that he looked rather like a negro.
There is not a grain of truth in it. He actually had a pleasing, attractive face.”
— *Karmic Relationships*, Vol. I
For people encountering Steiner for the first time, statements like this are not abstractions. They are direct encounters with language that carries deep injury, and they are often accompanied by Steiner’s own insistence that his perceptions arise from what he called *exact clairvoyance*. Telling such readers that they must meditate more, or that they cannot truly understand these statements unless they are German listeners in 1913, or that the statements “make sense” within a context unavailable to them, is rarely experienced as healing. It often feels like a request to suspend moral and experiential judgment in favor of trust, precisely where trust has already been broken.
This is where I think something still feels largely absent in the Anthroposophical conversation. Beyond contextualization, what seems urgently needed is a living inquiry into how blind spots necessarily participate in the formation of all knowledge, including in figures regarded as initiates or as directly experiencing “higher worlds,” and how they can sometimes be precisely what fuels intense confidence in being “exact.” Blind spots are not a moral failure; they are a structural feature of knowing. But Anthroposophy has not, to my eye, developed a robust way of speaking about this in relation to Steiner himself.
Related to this, I find myself wondering whether **we Anthroposophists**, like admirers of great scientists or philosophers, are able to point to simple or complex cases where Steiner was simply wrong. Not merely “a man of his time,” not merely “speaking situationally,” but wrong in ways that matter. Most people who deeply admire Darwin, Freud, Einstein, or Goethe can readily name both their breakthroughs and their errors. Are we, as Anthroposophists, comfortable doing this? Do we believe such errors exist? If not, why not?
Similarly, I wonder what it would mean for Anthroposophy to articulate a theory of the unavoidable limits and constraints of all forms of perception, including spiritual perception, a theory in which such limits are understood as natural and inevitable, not as failures or betrayals of truth. This seems especially important given Steiner’s repeated insistence that the initiate overcomes “lower tendencies” and attains a purified form of cognition. For example, Steiner explicitly claimed that an initiate must completely overcome boredom. And yet, shortly after making such claims, he delivered remarks like the following, referring to René Maran’s *Batouala*, the first novel by a Black author to win the Prix Goncourt:
“Recently I went into a bookstore in Basel and found an example of the latest publishing agenda: a Negro novel… It is utterly boring, dreadfully boring, but people devour it… if we give these Negro novels to pregnant women to read… a multitude of children will be born in Europe that are completely gray, that have mulatto hair, that look like mulattoes!”
— Dornach lecture, December 30, 1922
Not to mention that Steiner here explicitly suggests that reading such a “boring Negro novel” would cause white women’s babies to be born gray, with mulatto hair and mulatto features. I mention this not to sensationalize, but because these are precisely the kinds of statements that **we Anthroposophists** must be able to address warmly, concretely, and without evasiveness. I have read *Batouala*. I found it neither boring nor trivial. It is a historically and artistically important work, one that provoked outrage precisely because it exposed colonial brutality.
What troubles me is a mode of defense that appears to accept Steiner’s claim that such statements cannot truly be judged or understood outside of their original situational context. I fully agree that context matters. Situated speech matters. But there is a difference between contextual sensitivity and what can feel like a kind of magical exemption, as though once Steiner invokes situational speech, ordinary standards of intelligibility, responsibility, and error no longer apply. If Steiner had said “green marbles cannot roll uphill” to French listeners in 1917, we would not hesitate to say he was simply mistaken. Context alone does not convert false claims into true ones.
For me, the deeper and more interesting question is why Anthroposophy has found it so difficult to develop a culture of curiosity around Steiner’s blind spots, especially given how richly Anthroposophy understands the role of presuppositions, history, temperament, and embodiment in shaping perception. One possible reason is that Steiner himself rarely models this curiosity about his own limits. On the contrary, he often presents himself as having overcome misunderstanding precisely through initiation, and as speaking from a level of cognition necessary for humanity’s future survival. That posture makes later inquiry into error feel like betrayal rather than fidelity.
Personally, my own love for Steiner has deepened, not diminished, as I have let go of what I think of as a “Steiner Narrative,” one that subtly caused me to avoid my own shadow work by projecting completeness and certainty onto him. Steiner remains a great teacher for me, but no longer one who must be protected from the possibility of error in order to remain spiritually meaningful.
I offer all of this not as a dismissal of your work, but as a hope for further dialogue. I would be genuinely interested to hear how you imagine we, as Anthroposophists, might address people who do not already love Steiner, people who encounter his most explicit racial statements first, and who understandably ask: Do Anthroposophists believe Steiner was sometimes deeply wrong? If so, where? And how does that recognition live alongside genuine reverence?
I deeply feel the time is now for Anthroposophists to make a major shift regarding the entrenched “Steiner Narrative." It can't be done merely via the intellect. It is painful. I'm still in it in various ways. But, I can no longer see any Anthroposophical way forward that does not require some kind of inner pain/shock in realizing there might be a very different point-of-view from which (in which) we come to respect and work with Steiner and Anthroposophia.
With respect, and appreciation for the seriousness of your effort.
Jeff
Thanks, Robert, for your wonderful presentation and thoughts.
I have not as yet read GA174 but want to throw in my two bits worth before I do so. It’s not very well thought through - but I am wondering if it is not a matter of the white race being in greater need. We have wandered furthest away down the avenue of intellectualism from spirit and soul.
The West having fallen into the abyss of matter and extreme egotism is in need of that Good Shepherd to go out and rescue us.
The White Man has burnt himself out in pursuit of the intellect and the self bound up with it – the life has been sucked out of us.
We are ash, with our life forces in decline and racing towards infertility.
New life and love are needed – we need a saviour!
The West begins to have a sense that it has gone too far.
That we are guilty.
That is the first step. The next is to call out and to learn that there is a way out.
That the help of a loving spirit is at hand and that there is a way forward in that what we have so thoughtlessly and greedily taken to ourselves can be offered in a wise and helpful way back to others. And this goes beyond merely money and goods.
Just to turn to the other rather than oneself is already huge.
We now become servants – washers of feet.
Christ brings the Father’s love to the lost sheep, sinners and tax collectors.
He doesn’t come for those who still live in and experience the Father’s love.
The fact that Christ comes and sits at our table is not a sign of our specialness, our goodness – but of our neediness.
St. John’s call goes out to all of us white men – and it is especially men- “Change Your Ways” - Repent!
However, that which the European culture has developed in relation to clarity of thinking, individual autonomy and freedom is of inestimable value and is not lost.
It is a gift we can bring and offer to all.
The European race has burnt itself out in the development of these capacities.
We don’t have the strength and vitality left in ourselves to take these forces into the future.
The only way to keep it is to pass it on – give it away
Our further path is to individually transition to being more at home in our etheric body rather than our physical body. To understand that the physical passes away.
But this is completely individual.
Those who do manage to attain this consciousness form a community that embraces all wherever they may be on the earth’s surface. In some occult literature this community is inaccurately called a race, which it is not as it does not come out of the blood.
Hi Colin,
Perhaps the white race is in greater need, but I hope we don't look away from how clear Steiner was in stating that it was the white races responsibility to integrate with The Christ *so that* all the non-white races could be 'impregnated' with The Christ around the year 3,500.
I sometimes worry we find creative ways to ignore the aspects that might be calling for our attention the most. But, that said, I don't disagree with you that there are probably ways of shifting the focus so that we attend more to ideas of lack related to white race.
I perhaps am a bit oversensitive to when it seems as if me and my fellow Anthroposophists refuse to look squarely at what Steiner did make quite clear.
Also, even to simply claim that we can observe core differences with regard to how 'races' are incorporating The Christ, requires a very sharp hitting of the brakes, I'd think. Can we do that? If so, how?
And even if most of us assume that surely Steiner himself would have been able to make such an observation, I'd say that this very blog is asking us to slow down and really consider why we might be making such an assumption.
I appreciate your comment very much.
Thanks for sharing your presentations on this topic, Robert. I find what you say to make a lot of intuitive sense. It's interesting because, in a certain sense, Steiner was having the same discussion immediately after the infamous "white skin" lecture. It helps to contemplate what he expressed immediately after for added context:
***
Stuttgart, 14th February, 1915
"I can easily imagine that someone may have drawn the conclusion from yesterday’s lecture that those people who belong to the national groups are only to receive their special mission in the sixth culture-epoch - because, as we saw yesterday, they belong to a time in which evolution takes a descending line, - are of less account than those who belong to groups in an ascending evolution. I repeat - I can easily conceive of someone's drawing this conclusion. In other words: I can easily imagine that from certain statements made yesterday someone draws conclusions as to values, impelled to do so through all sorts of emotions and feelings. This would be an example of just what I pointed out, namely, that what was especially said about these things at one place must be misunderstood in other places. Not that it is coloured in any way to suit a special place or people, but because it is not understood with the necessary objectivity, but with strong feelings and all sorts of national aspirations. Someone might then say that I had only used words to flatter Central European culture and that they who belonged to the Eastern European culture felt themselves deeply injured by what had been said. Well, my dear friends, if such a judgment is formed it only shows the entry of something that I discussed yesterday. I sought yesterday to point out how purely theoretical, abstract thinking must be transformed into direct experience, how what has formerly been only a matter of knowledge must be imbued with feeling and real experience. If someone were to form the judgment that has just been indicated he would only be judging theoretically, abstractly. For how would a concrete, living judgment sound in such a case? It would recognise that if what had been explained was true, then we were approaching a time when those who want to follow the advance of civilisation must no longer merge in merely national life. The peculiarity of the fifth cultural epoch was such as allowed of the fact that its members merged into a national feeling and again personally struggled out of it. The sixth and seventh culture-epochs will be of such a nature that those who wish to be merely national will lag behind the tasks of humanity. But this is just the reason for presenting the world conception of spiritual science, namely, that humanity struggles out of merely national feeling, out of what is not common human feeling. The conclusion to be drawn, therefore, from yesterday’s remarks is something quite, quite different. It is that the Central European national cultures have impulses in them that coincide with the great mission of the post-Atlantean culture, but that then cultures come which make it necessary for men to grow out of national impulses. And that it does not do for those who are the vanguard of later cultures to merge completely in their national experience, even in an exaggerated way, as is the case with the population of Eastern Europe. In other words: since this living in their nation shows that they have not yet comprehended their mission, they are directed to take into themselves what has been created as spiritual science, and so grow out beyond the national. Living understanding is also necessary there.
At the present time, however, so beset with passion and prejudice, one will have difficulty in finding what is necessary in order that men can take their full stand on the ground of spiritual science and its striving for true objectivity, for the purely human. We pursue spiritual science precisely in order to spread something over the whole earth that transcends all differences. Those therefore who come from all nations to spiritual science should be able to gain an objective understanding for the things set forth in the Lecture-cycle "The Mission of Folk Souls"; it should be studied by all anthroposophists. It has a special significance, too, for it was given years before this war (World War I) and cannot therefore be accused of originating from the atmosphere of this war. The point is not that what has been said in various places did not contain generally valid truths, the point is that one must comprehend that these truths are not tolerated everywhere. When I spoke here some months ago I pointed out that it is more or less easy for us in Central Europe to be objective, easier than for others. Why it is easier for us is set forth in that Lecture-cycle. All the deeper teachings received from our grave events show us that something must develop from all the various substrata of our present civilisation throughout the world that coincides with the aims of our spiritual science. In a certain respect one can say that these earnest events are a powerful pointer to the necessity of spiritual science in the world. They prove that this life of spiritual science must come. Naturally, therefore, the immediate feelings of a place can only be of secondary importance for us; our actual task is to bring into our soul-experience something that can be understood everywhere without causing offence, although there is prejudice in so many fields.
What we learn from spiritual science about the universally human in man is also a preparation for an objective view of all the conditions in which we are placed through earthly evolution. For the conditions in which we are placed is the soil, as it were, out of which we grow, and what brings about our growth are the impulses we receive through spiritual science. As a matter of fact we live in these differentiations extended over the earth with only half of our being, with our- physical and etheric bodies. We leave these behind on the earth when we enter another condition of consciousness that we can describe as sleep. With the ego and astral body we are then in the world which man otherwise enters when he goes through the portal of death, in the world where all earthly differentiations cease, in the world into which spiritual science teachings are to introduce us. Initiation knowledge protects us from giving any special preference to one or other of the Folk Spirits."
***
So we see that Steiner is trying to help us focus on a second-order element of this entire discussion, which is the difference between abstractly seeking the human universal (first-order, content level) and concretely bringing it to realisation through spiritual science (second-order, process level). And this is also the reason why many of these topics are so misunderstood. Because modern social movements seek the universal only abstractly. They seek the universal to justify the fundamental differences of national feelings, racial feelings, gender feelings, and so on. In other words, they start with fundamental division and then try to build a kind of purely abstract conduct of 'tolerance' between the races and nationalities. It is precisely this purely abstract intellectual approach that flattens all spiritual depth in the discussion and practically ensures that nothing can ever be solved, that the true human universal cannot be navigated toward in any concrete and transformative way.
Without a true depth-understanding of the human being, we can never quite grasp that there are two natures within ourselves which are sometimes opposed to one another. One is which belongs and identifies with the national, racial, cultural, and religious feelings. The other is that which seeks the human universal - the Spirit, which alone can bring the moral integrity needed for lifting above the forces that put souls within the layers of conditioning into opposition. Steiner makes it quite clear above. Whoever feels offended by his observations simply identifies with the lower nature - with that which belongs to race, culture, nation - and thinks about the topic from that already identified perspective. Whoever finds the Spirit in him that is doing the thinking about the topic, no longer identifies with these layers but sees in them a fertile and differentiated soil which follows a lawful gradient and must be gradually worked upon.
When it's said that the Christ impulse will be adopted only gradually in humanity and that is seen by us as a kind of discrimination, we are subtly rejecting that impulse in practice. At no point in history has something new been adopted overnight by the whole world. This is simply not how things work in evolution. It's an objective fact. We are now at a point where we can be fully conscious of these lawful evolutionary processes and understand them at a deeper level. It's simply a fact that not everyone will embrace the Impulse of freedom at the same time. But the key point is that this Impulse will be rejected, not because people deeply want to integrate the Christ, but Steiner has said that they're not eligible due to skin color or nationality, but out of antipathy for what integrating that Impulse implies and entails. There's nothing that stands between us and our higher being except ourselves. Those who refuse to seek their higher nature won't do it simply because they don't want to lose their comfortable and pleasurable identifications with the lower nature, which ironically manifest in the so prevalent accusations of "racism". If Steiner's observations were operating at the first-order content level, such accusations may be justified, but it is up to us to recognize the deeper second-order level from which they are being expressed.
I think you make a lot of great points here Ashvin and I like your framing of first and second order elements of discourse. Also the passage from the third lecture is great to bring in here, thank you for that. I am strapped for time now but look forward to more dialogue with you!
Since people unfamiliar with this context will stumble in here, for the record:
Steiner's words in the next lecture do not contradict his belief that non-white people can't integrate fully with the Christ at this time.
If it seems that they do, just think about how easy it is to have as much genuine love for an animal as for a family member.
There is no contradiction in noticing that a dog is not able to read (at this time) and also calling people out for being cruel or minimizing the beauty and importance of dogs.
Steiner was not contradicting himself.
Many of my fellow Anthroposophists will do whatever they can to make you believe that Steiner has said that there is no difference between a white person and a non-white person's capacity to integrate with the Christ. As you noticed above, when reading Steiner's words, nothing he said there contradicted his claims from the day before. He was being consistent.
The one positive thing I can say about distorting his words, in this context, is that I believe it often comes from a very strong desire to genuinely believe that Steiner couldn't have meant what he said. That's a good sign.
But we need to be honest and somewhat comfortable in addressing non-white people when they read what he said. Yes, he believed that. And we can go on to contextualize his life and work, and also point to his outstanding insights that can be taken up in profound ways of cultural and social healing.
Looking forward to listening to these. Are these videos also on YouTube, by chance? I ask because I could grab a transcript from there (it is much faster for me to read than listen to the videos, and I tend to digest the written word better than oral presentations).
yes I think I can get them posted there in the next day and will send you the link!
Ah, great. I'm looking forward to diving in as well!
I'm excited to hear another perspective on this subject. I'm aware that Steiner specifically makes clear why only a very small group of people can understand what he means in 174b-2 when he says that for the next 1500 years only white skinned people can integrate with the Christ in the way necessary if humanity is to make it successfully into the 6th epoch.
That said, before we simply agree with a flat statement that none of us can understand what that means, we might also open the space to think about that very claim.
I'm very open to many reasons why context matters. But I'm hoping to hear people talk about the reasons why, perhaps, Steiner is over-stating the case that only people from a very specific region and time can understand this massive difference between white-skinned people and all non-white peoples.
My hope is that conversations can take place that at least allow for the possiblity that Steiner is making some errors in reasoning when he makes such claims.
If he isn't capable of making such errors, I guess we just assume that we simply have no way of knowing what it means that non-white people must wait till around 3500 before they can receive the gift of The Christ.
I wonder if we have evidence that the small group of white Germans that he was speaking to were able to grasp it?
What would that kind of evidence look like?
For instance, can we find any evidence that Scaligero's work on race and blood proves that he understood Steiner fairly well. Since he was not part of the region or exact time as those listening to that lecture, should we take any of Scaligero's accuracy as a sign that he was reaching very similar spiritual understandings completely independent of Steiner?
Full disclosure: I think Scaligero's work reflects major cognitive blind-spots and presuppositins that don't hold up, many of the same ones that I see Steiner reproducing.
That said, more than anything, it'll be such a relief to find an Anthroposophical space in which we can, before anything else, see if we agree with Steiner's presuppositions regarding who can and can't understand his words.
Hey Jeff, thanks for your interest and thoughtful comments on this topic. Can you clarify whether you have made these comments after having watched my videos or before? If before, I would prefer to wait to respond until after you have seen and responded to what I have to say there.
The person who sent me the link wanted me to observe a section of the second video. I'll come back after seeing them both and then we can have a proper conversation. Thanks for sharing them, and please let us know when they are up on Youtube because I also will want to read the transcript.
Jeff, here are the links to the youtube recordings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTOiYw6ZwAI
https://youtu.be/ooR4cuzhSUI
Hi Matt
Your comment is factually accurate yet inaccurate at the same time. You say:
"It seems more accurate to say there are at least a few recorded occasions when he spoke out of apparent disgust for nonwhites (eg, "negro novels" and other physiognomic remarks), and that there is at least the "semblance" (ie, "the outward appearance or apparent form of something, especially when the reality is different") of white supremacy in his understanding of racial evolution. "
The perception aspect that you refer to is as you say undeniably true, however when I read your comment I read also an unquestioned supposition. The specific part is where you say "he spoke out of apparent disgust for nonwhites". You state this as a fact and not as your interpretation of the perception (text). Somebody who reports speech does not automatically endorse the viewpoint being expressed. Being able to represent the perspective of a given worldview, say Hume, Locke or Kant does not mean I embody that worldview.
Cardinal Richelieu is reported to have said:
“If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to have him hanged.”
whilst Lavrentiy Beria of NKD fame gives another variant of the same idea:
"Show me the man, and I'll find you the crime."
Whilst it might not be neither your nor (Jeff Fs) intention, one way that some people might and do interpret a perceived fixation on the topic of race and racism is that you have a crime in mind and have found the 6 sentences needed to justify hanging the person. Do you want to hang Steiner and other Anthroposophists?
That's perfectly fair. I admit in that instance that I spoke out of sympathy for those who may have darker skin than me, found themselves drawn to anthroposophy, and then read Steiner's various remarks of that sort. As someone of European descent living on the North American continent, I do have a crime in mind, yes. Do I want to hang Steiner? No! Else I wouldn't drink so deeply from the well and defend him from cancel culture. Note that I did not mention this controversy about racial evolution in my Harvard talk. So I would not say there is any "fixation." But I admit this issue concerns me, and so I do feel the need to lay bare where my healthy (I hope!) common sense tells me he spoke from his all too human prejudices (we all have them), or from out of his wounded German folk soul, and not from his Christ-like nature.
My own personal take on 174a and 174b (which seems to be of particular importance to you) is that the central issue Steiner is encouraging us to confront is the problem of mendaciousness in society and a lack of interest in general for looking into the deeper causes of societies woes. He uses the events leading up to WW 1 to demonstrate this societal issue.
Now playing somewhat with our shared ideas. Could it be that the "apparent disgust for nonwhites" is the cheese for the mousetrap? I haven't thought it through in detail, but your generous answer and this article https://www.liberopensare.com/come-comprendere-i-segni-dei-tempi-terza-parte/ lead me to entertain the possibility. Perhaps 174a and 174b are particularly significant and lots more serious conversations need to be dedicated to these 2 extraordinary lectures.
Robert, I've had a chance to listen and then read through the transcripts of these expanded talks. Thank you for taking the risk of wading into this terrain and for trying to articulate a genuine middle path that refuses the pathologically polarized “culture war” frame and asks for something more human and more spiritually mature. I also appreciate the way I see you implicitly inviting us to speak more consciously out of the North American folk soul about these questions, rather than importing European formulations as though they were universally applicable. I say you do this implicitly, since I also must say I think on occasion you may revert to lumping Europe and the Americas together. Obviously a lot is shared culturally, but as you also note, racial divisions are no longer viable realities on the American continent. That feels especially important given the context of GA 174B, which you quote: Steiner is explicit there that his spoken remarks arise from the immediate impulse of time, place, and audience, and shouldn’t be treated as universally true. From my standpoint as an American, that contextualization is tremendously important. What Steiner goes on to say in 174B about dark skin and the Christ impulse does not merely feel dated or awkward to me. I cannot digest it cognitively as anything but demonstrably false and morally deformed. Whatever one makes of his larger Christology (and I make of it quite a lot), it is simply not true that the capacity for Christ-inspired love is blocked by melanin. That’s precisely the kind of statement that, in my view, must be named as spiritually untrue. I say this not only out of my Americanness but as a human being striving to partake in the work of further incarnating Anthroposophia into earthly life.
Holding the tension of opposites is always wise council. But I think there’s still a real danger in letting the middle path harden into a pair of convenient caricatures. You do helpfully note that the capitalist-populist MAGA pole and the socialist-progressive decolonial/anti-Western pole each represent something like 20% of the U.S. population. Most Americans don’t live at the extremes. A similar point applies to the polarity regarding the ontology of race. In practice, most people (including most scholars who get grouped under “postmodern critical race theory”) would say race is a social construct AND has real causal effects; there’s no contradiction there. So I think there’s still some work to do if the critique of critical theory is going to land with the kind of concreteness and fairness you’re rightly asking of others in their readings of Steiner. For my part, I don’t accept that race is merely a social construct, because I reject the premise that nature and culture are separable realities in the first place. As you suggested, I see race as a fluid, evolving phenomenon that was once more biologically and spiritually salient than it is today. Today racial identity is increasingly atavistic insofar as it tempts us to regress into generic group identities instead of engaging in the difficult but essential work of individuation.
I want to underscore something I hear you circling that I also try to hold in my work on these questions: there is an important difference between saying Steiner uttered racist comments and saying that Steiner is simply “a racist,” full stop. I don’t think “Steiner is a racist” is an apt or illuminating statement, but I do think he sometimes fell into the trap of speaking from a place of racial prejudice, as many people of his time did, and, frankly, as almost all of us do in different company in our own way. The task, as I see it, is neither apology nor cancellation, but truthfulness: to refuse denial and resist ideological capture while doing the harder and perhaps less immediately emotionally gratifying hermeneutic work of clear moral- and scientific-spiritual investigation. If anthroposophy as a cultural impulse is to be stewarded into the future, it has to be strong enough to say, without evasiveness, where the bull broke the china. Of course, it will require just as much strength to acknowledge where the eagle's insights, even if unpopular in the well-meaning but confused eyes of whatever the latest corporate-approved DEI fads are, remain true.
Just to re-iterate the point at issue for me in any attempt to deal with 174b: I'm glad that you brought in Steiner's profound words uttered in the early days of WW1 that remain so essential to proper understanding. Your threefold methodology of eagle, lion, and bull is extremely helpful. But you did not address the elephant. The Christ impulse is not the private property of any people, phenotype, or culture. What say you?
Hey Matt,
Thanks for your comments and for your closing question. I would prefer to deal with questions like this in a longer format where I can bring in more nuance but I see the necessity of speaking to the 174B matter a little bit now. My perspective at this time is as follows:
The idea that a darker skinned person (or a person with more melatonin in their skin) is less able to absorb the Christ impulse is exactly the kind of seemingly logical inference from his words in this lecture that I believe Rudolf Steiner would have found to be “monstrous.” I find it to be a monstrous thought and so do you and so do most people, for good reason.
In these lectures, however, as I see it, RS is not speaking about individual human beings (which is the main focus of his eagle teachings) but rather about collective realities, about generic tendencies that live in groups of people by virtue of their race and ethnicity. As we know from Rudolf Steiner’s eagle teachings, he did not believe that any individual was bound to the tendencies living in them through their race and ethnicity, but he did believe that these collective tendencies will continue to play a strong role in the historical process, since people’s capacity to free themselves from these tendencies is only gradually emerging in human evolution.
So, what I understand him to be saying is simply that lighter skinned people have a particular karma with (or generic tendency toward a strong engagment with) matter, which is both a positive and a negative. It can mean a natural ability to infuse matter with their individual spirit or it can mean a natural tendency to let material realities eclipse an awareness of spiritual reality.
In other places, Steiner focuses much more on the shadow side of this karma, but here he focuses more on the positive side, which I think he felt the need to do because of all the shame and blame pouring down on Central Europe at that time. I think he wanted to rouse the central Europeans in that particular place to their true sense of mission, to the dignity of the central European striving at its best.
If we heard an African-American preacher giving a sermon in which he told the congregation that their dark skin gives them a special relationship to the working of Christ in the depths of the earth (which I think it does quite honestly), and that they should try to live up to or realize this mission, would we find that to be racist? Certainly, it could be interpreted in a racist way, but I am not sure I would qualify such a remark as inherently racist.
I think if asked Steiner would have affirmed that every race and culture has a special and unique relationship to the Christ Impulse. But he also would have said that any given period of history, some cultures are called to play a stronger role in the exoteric shaping of history than others. This is the deeper point he is trying to make here I think, he is saying to the Europeans: don't lose touch with your unique mission at this moment in history!
It is interesting this regard to note that Steiner somewhat conflates here the Slavic people (a white skinned people) and the Asian people (a brown skinned people), in that he sees both as having the tendency (or mission as I would call it) to hold back from Western culture and materialism—to preserve something of the past spirituality of humanity for the future when it will merge with what comes from the West. So here he switches over to realities of spiritual geography rather than race, which is an overall source of confusion in these lectures, that I will try to clear up later in my short course.
Personally, I feel that Steiner goes a little too far in his focus on the shadow side of the Asian and Slavic tendency to hold back from the West. Yes, that tendency has a shadow side but it also has an important light side, which I don’t feel Steiner brings out with sufficient clarity here.
Just think, for example, of how Paul Kingsnorth’s critique of transhumanism in his new book (Against the Machine) is informed by his relationship to Orthodox Christianity. Here we see, I think, a real quality of conscience arising that is informed by this Eastern quality that Steiner characterizes in such a negative manner in this lecture. Or should we look at the work of Paramahamsa Yogananda in America with the same lens with which Steiner characterizes the retrogressive tendencies working in the Krishnamurti affair In Europe? I personally don’t think so.
It is important to remember that Steiner articulated something I call the “magpie principle,” namely, the idea that all people and all cultures and races have both a light and a shadow side. Where I think Steiner often erred (typically in private lectures like this or in offhand comments) was in comparing the light side of one culture to the shadow side of another culture without making the subtleties clear. This is where I think his lack of experience of other cultures plays a role, and this is where I think we can bring a balance to Steiner’s Lion and Bull teachings today.
He makes it clear, for example, in this lecture, that it is important that certain cultures hold back from the stream of western culture and materialism, but he tends, as I see it, to not fully honor the importance of this gesture in the whole context of world evolution, but tends to somewhat demonize it using derogatory terms. This is where I think his Lion and Bull nature do get the better of him sometimes. He felt so strongly the need to uphold the dignity of the Cainite, egoic impulse of the West and of the white people, but sometimes he takes it too far I think, at least to the ears of people like us living 100 years later.
Having said that, I am sure a mathematical analysis would reveal that the vast majority of his cultural criticisms were leveled at his own culture. That is something that is also easy to forget.
I hope this is helpful Matt, best, Robert
Thanks, Robert. This is a helpful answer. I do take seriously the fact that karma adheres to ethnic groups as well as individuals, and in different and continually evolving ways. To reiterate a point we both feel is important for understanding 174b, I think the cultural and spiritual dynamics unfolding in the Western hemisphere and in the US in particular (at least I know it here most intimately) are radically distinct from those of Central Europe a century ago. I suspect present day Europe is also now in quite a different situation compared to what Steiner felt he was addressing in 1915.
When I consider these questions about skin color and the Christ impulse from a US-centric perspective, looking at generic tendencies of peoples with lighter and darker skin tones, it feels evidently true not just a century ago but today that most white evangelical churches have by and large lost the plot entirely. Seems to me that, were Jesus to show up in our midst again today, these white churches, caught up in an idolatrous nationalist fervor and what the political philosopher William Connolly calls the "capitalist-evangelical resonance machine," would likely play the role of the Pharisees in condemning him as some kind of anti-American socialist blasphemer. Since Jesus probably had olive-brown skin, they'd no doubt also call ICE's tip line to have him deported. I don't mean to demonize an entire demographic, by any means. I simply raise this as a proportional counterpoint to Steiner's claim that dark skin houses demons that block the Christ. Maybe that made sense in Central Europe in 1915. I do not think it makes sense in 21st century America. The evidence, whether we consider individuals or generic groups, suggests the opposite.
I do not find it necessary to disavow Steiner as a spiritual teacher for these or other statements, even if I find them to be quite obviously racist (no matter what sort of esoteric spin we may want to give them). The prejudices he expresses in some of his statements to particular German-speaking audiences are hardly unique for that time and place. Racial prejudice is not a unique flaw of white people. All peoples have this tendency toward racial chauvinism. But this tendency to racial prejudice is distinct from the question of systematic white supremacist racism across US cultural, economic, and political institutions, which despite important advances since the 1960s is quickly being reversed under Trump. I don't mention systemic racism because I think DEI practices or race-based affirmative action in employment and education are any kind of solution--I think a lot of that is rather a symptom of the rot and only makes racial tensions worse. Steiner's eagle teachings on these questions are desperately needed, which is why I feel your method of distinguishing those from his lion and bull tendencies is potentially so helpful.
Again, very helpful distinctions. Thanks, Matt.
Just for clairification:
"I simply raise this as a proportional counterpoint to Steiner's claim that dark skin houses demons that block the Christ. Maybe that made sense in Central Europe in 1915."
You say that Steiner's specific claim might have made sense in Central Europe in 1915. Not to be pedantic, but I keep wanting to differentiate two implicit distinctions that seem to happen in this conversation. I'm sorry because I know I might be being very dense.
The typical orthodoxy in Anthroposophy would read your comment as saying something like, "At that time, in that context, Steiner's claim might very well have been true in an important way."
But I wonder if you 'makes sense', you mean something more like, "At that time and place, I can see how a well intentioned person could have just absorbed folklore beliefs and taken them as his starting premises in analyizing the world."
Obviously, the latter would be how I'd take 'making sense' if we are talking about the explicit claims Steiner made about how and why non-white people simply can't integrate with the Christ for quite some time.
I think I'm worried that the 'best' respnoses coming from within Anthroposophy are going to just be slight modifications on, "Be patient, don't assume we understand Steiner yet; There is still much wisdom we might extract from his claims that can appear to be plainly incorrect; and also remember that he was a man of his times."
I genuinely respect that stance in that I know it comes from good hearted places; but, I also see it replicating the very dogmatic tendencies that I think lived in Steiner and played some role in shaping some of the blind-spots that seem to have played a role in how his clairvoyance developed after 1902. Again, my assumption is that no matter what form 'clairvoyance' takes in the future of humanity, it will always have an important struggle with its natural and intristic (and always changing) blind-spots that shape it.
Hence, my deep worry that there is almost no interest at all in the Anthroposophical movement to make this (clairvoyant development) an important study. It's always the, "In some lifetime, you may be capable of really verifying or refuting The Initates claims."
Jeff, I mean basically what you mean, that Steiner's claim "makes sense" if I treat him as, well, not eagle or lion or bull but just as a human being. He is speaking to and for other German people as a German speaking person* in the early days of what was then the bloodiest nationalist war in human history. Germany was already being blamed for the war, with the public in England, France, and even the US increasingly placing all the blame on them. I can understand why he might say something so chauvinist and racist in that context, despite it standing in flat contradiction with many other admirably anti-racist statements in his books and public lectures.
*as you know he was born in what was then Hungary and is now Croatia, and it seems his critics were constantly calling his ethnic identity into question, even accusing him of being--gasp!--Jewish, etc. So perhaps, as a human being, he was also a bit anxious to show his allegiance to a folk soul that sometimes did not accept him as one of their own.
To say his statements "make sense" in this context is not to say I find any truth in them. I am just saying, as I think you are, that such statements function to humanize him.
Thank you.
Sometimes, I almost worry that my focus is so little on the question of if Steiner had ill-will towards non-white people. I don't see it.
After you read my formal response to the videos and this blog, I'd love for any feedback you have, especially push back if you think my emphasis on how this stuff seems to expose a major hole in Steiner and most of his students regarding not seeming to have any curiosity about how clairvoyance actually develops.
That said, I fully get what you mean now about seeing that he was also just a guy in a specific time who we can understand taking on some one-sided views. Thanks.
I'll be sharing my response after I finish both videos, but, Matt, one question for now:
I'll say more about this later, but I'm very grateful for how you framed several of the questions you're holding.
When you talk about Steiner saying it isn't 'universally true', I notice that I might be getting lost in several different meanings of 'universal'.
For instance, if Steiner gave a lecture about green marbles and he said, "The only people who will be able to understand me are people in this room today. Okay, having said that, I want you all to know that for the next 1500 years green marbles will not be able to roll uphill."
It sounds extreme, but I realize it really isn't that extreme in this context. What do we mean by not taking what he says as a universal truth? I can imagine that we want to be very sensitive to as much contextual information as we can gather, especially related to why Steiner might believe that only people in that room could understand him.
But if he is being very clear, repeatedly, as to the fact (his opinion) that green marbles can't roll uphill and he even repeatedly gives his opinion as to what causes green marbles to not have this capacity, I feel it might be okay for us to simply have a different point of view and even claim that he's just wrong about that.
Anyway, if you could just say a few words about what you meant by that term, it'll help me digest your comments and prepare my own.
Much appreciated!
Jeff
Thanks for seeking clarification, Jeff. I take Steiner's meaning in context to be that, in the midst of world war pitting European nationalities against one another, it is not possible for him to speak in a way that would be understandable to all nations in the same way. When it comes to certain worldly issues, what is true for Germans in that moment will not be true for French people, even if they are all anthroposophists. He is clear that when he speaks out of the anthroposophical impulse, universally human truths can be heard. But this particular lecture was apparently spoken out of his sense of allegiance to German-speaking peoples, rather than out of an anthroposophical impulse. I think here of his admission in PoF that none among us is all individual or all genus. 174b is, at least in part, Steiner speaking as a member of a genus. I am able to withhold judgment about whether what he said to that particular group of people at that time is somehow "true" (in the sense that it is somehow appropriate for his/their group soul karma). I do not withhold judgment when speaking out of either my own sense of Americanness or my devotion to Anthroposophia: both compel me to reject the statement about skin color as false.
Thanks, that helps.
But do you see what I'm trying to get at between the distinction between legitimate tricky roles that context plays in how something can be understood versus specific claims like green marbels can't roll up hill or non-white people can't integrate with the Christ.
I'm having trouble expressing what i think is important as we take first steps in sorting out the area in which we obviously respect Steiner (or anybody) who is reminding us of the importance of context versus having the freedom to notice when an empirical claim can at least be pushed against with reason and observation.
I'm not saying we start by assuming Steiner was wrong about non-white people waiting behind until they are capable of integrating with The Christ. I'm saying we can't conflate two very different kinds of analysis from the start.
I sometimes hear fellow Anthroposophists suggesting (directly or indirectly) that we really have to hold off from assessing any claims Steiner makes until we can fully verify them ourselves. In my opinion, this creates a loop that will always feedback, at best, to a 'wait and see' type of approach that never takes actual steps forward in learning about Steiner's blind-spots and how they shaped his phenomenological experiences.
Hey, Matt
Much to consider, still working through Robert's after reading 174b-2.
I do want to ask you however whether "private property" is the term you wish to end with here? Such a strong association with the economic, and control of external circumstances...
Would "The Philosophy of Freiheit" better indicate the direction in which to find what Steiner is talking about here?
And is he saying that the "Christ impulse" can be the possession of any group at all?
Or that at the level of groups the support for the individual's search for the I AM is present or lacking?
Thanks always for your serious thoughts.
John Beck
Regarding the question:
"And is he saying that the "Christ impulse" can be the possession of any group at all?"
My repeated study of 174b-2 is that Steiner is saying that only people with white skin can individuate The Christ at this time. He isn't suggesting some kind of Group Incorporation of the Christ; or at least not directly. But he is saying that his vision of individuation is that, for the time being, only white skinned people can do this. And he then states very clearly why. And he even states why this is natural and positive that non-white skinned people must wait and then carry the next wave forward.
To be clear, I don't have the impression that Steiner is speaking from ill-will or hatred.
But I don't agree with his observations or with his reasoning in this lecture.
That said, I appreciate the way this lecture ties together all his other statements and makes what used to sound like paradoxes actually cohere internally.
When he talks about racism or racial thinking coming to an end, we can see how that does not contradict his claim here that this 'end' need not be understood as immediate. Also, hateful and obsessive views about race can come to an end today, and that does entail that non-white people can integrate with the Christ.
So I don't even see it as a contradiction for Steiner to say: "Hey, there is no room for racism anymore; and the reason why is that white humanity won't be able to achieve their mission if they obsess about race. They need to achieve their mission in about 1500 years so that they can then help 'impregnate' all non-white people with the Christ, at which point, the non-white people will assume the cutting edge of evolution."
I don't agree, but that is coherent and internally consistent.
The point of my question, "And is he saying that the "Christ impulse" can be the possession of any group at all?", is my view that no group as a group can take in the "Christ impulse" as a group.
The Christ Impulse is not a group thing. That's what I mean. Yet we keep trying to link what Steiner says about this group or that group to access to the Christ.
Other beings can and do work through groups (per 174b-2); Christ works only through individuals and through the creation of universal humanity.
Steiner's race point, or one of them (in the Workers talks), is that an effect of the largest organ of our bodies, the skin (he had a lot to say about physiology) is to receive or reflect warmth and light. I don't know if that's true, I don't have more than a crumb of his vision. He takes that on to assert that darker skin takes in more warmth and light -- and I think he sees more there than materialistic warm and materialistic light. Having this -- may I say "higher warmth" and "higher light" available from outside, an individual currently incarnated with a darker skin coloration doesn't have to create those from scratch, de novo, inside themselves. The so-called "white" person will have to do this, which will either force him/her to develop capacities for doing that, OR -- Steiner doesn't specify this, but it's common sense -- a given "white" person will have to live with diminished warmth and diminished light, whether lower or higher.
And as specifically to the Germans, the potential I AM bearers among the Europeans, he makes totally clear on many occasions that their great guide, Goethe, is scarcely known to them in his time.
To recap, I read RS saying white skin forces individuals who seek spiritual warmth and light to develop the inner capacity of warmth-light creation. Dark skin, he says, makes this development unnecessary, and they are able to hold onto previous qualities of community etc. which must be preserved for the next cultural age.
Hi John,
Thanks for chatting.
"To recap, I read RS saying white skin forces individuals who seek spiritual warmth and light to develop the inner capacity of warmth-light creation. Dark skin, he says, makes this development unnecessary, and they are able to hold onto previous qualities of community etc. which must be preserved for the next cultural age."
Okay, but I'd just stress that it seems his lecture 174b.2 gives us a more specific idea to react to and think about. And I don't think it contradicts what you are saying.
He is saying that white humanity has an important mission. This mission (to help 'impregnate' all the other races with The Christ around the year 35000) is only possible because only white people, at this time, can integrate with The Christ.
He even specifies and underlines this by explaining that non-white skin is showing us directly this lack of capacity AND that demons form in that context. He says that non-white people must be 'held back' until around the year 3500 and can only proceed forward if white humanity achieves its mission.
I need to stress that I don't see this as hateful talk. In fact, many Anthroposophists are quick to point out that reincarnation and cosmic evolution make racism nearly impossible. That's fine.
But, in the context of Robert's blog and videos, it seems that we are trying to face squarely the hardest and clearest parts of Steiner's claims. For me, that is his detailed explanation as to why only white people can integrate with the Christ for the next 1500 years.
No matter what other ideas we have about his challenges to white people and his deep wish for a living unity in humanity, it seems that this blog is asking us to find ways of working with the hardest and most direct aspects, the statements by Steiner that non-white people are going to continue finding, more and more often, as they come across his name and hear about Steiner schools or other aspects of the movement.
Many white evangelical churches in the US are convinced that the teachings of Christ are fully compatible with "capitalist populism" and Trump-style glorification of wealth and fame. I chose my phrase "private property" with due consideration of these factors.
My next door neighbors are believers in the "prosperity gospels" and based on flat, unverified claims by authority figures, they have no problem seeing their wealth as verification of their deep connection to Christ.
Over the last fifteen years I've spoken to many Anthroposophists who will use crime statistics to argue that Steiner's claims about non-white skin in 174b-2 can be approached and verified statistically.
I consider myself an Anthroposophist, but only in the sense of a very tiny trickling stream that is just surfacing above the water and is still miles apart from the main River.
But I believe this strongly. If it is true that Steiner's teaching have the capacity to play an important role in 'racial healings', this will have to be expressed in the direct and concrete ways that we Anthroposophists (not claiming that you identify that way, Matt) address their direct questions regarding the systematic way Steiner explains his vast view in that lecture and, of course, in other lectures with similar kinds of comments.
For 10 years Iived in a town with a wonderfully creative Waldorf School. I informally became the person that teachers sent non-white people to in town who were considering Waldorf for their children and then read these comments by Steiner.
At that time, there weren't teachers who really knew how to have these conversations outside of the usual, "Well, we have to understand him in context and work with his core books for years before we can truely even begin to grasp the meaning of those statements. In the meantime, here are other quotes and lectures you should read to see what he belived about education."
I would like to think that any Anthroposophist at this time can readily see why those well-intended responses are lightyears from the kinds of conversations necessarily.
Those were some of the most intense, moving, painful, and educational conversations I've ever had. I never once even implied that the people's worries were grounded in any kind of ignorance. I always led with my own reasons for thinking that neither Steiner nor his most enthusiastic student's seem to recognize that his experience, and theirs, is shaped by blind-spots, like every human beings. And, then, I would try to express why there might still be real value in exploring Waldorf. I did this by talking about the difference between the kind of pure phenomenology Steiner was capable of versus what he felt was an 'exact clairvoyance' that might require lifetimes to even begin to verify.
As people began to see reasons to value this discrepancy, some of them felt there might be room for them within a Waldorf community. But, as you might suspect, by the time we got to 2016, the pain in reading some of Steiner explicit claims was just too much to keep listening to me.
Anyway, more soon. Thanks for the dialog. I find this to be one of the most important Anthroposophical conversations there is. It includes all of my other interests and passions regarding the importance and possible dangers of Steiner's work and how we take it up.
I just want to say how grateful I am for this conversation, its very rich and helpful, many thanks to each of yuo for your thoughtful reflections. I hope to share some more thoughts soon. Until then have a great weekend everyone!
And I want to thank you again for sharing your work and opening up dialog! Hope you had a great weekend, Robert, and to anybody else reading this :)