American Philosophy and Rudolf Steiner: Emerson, Thoreau, Peirce, James, Royce, Dewey, Whitehead, Feminism

247 Pages·2013·2.25 MB·English

by  Robert McDermott

Rudolf Steiner

2012
LINDISFARNE BOOKS
AN IMPRINT OF STEINERBOOKS/ANTHROPOSOPHIC PRESS, INC.
PO Box 749, Great Barrington, MA 01230
www.steinerbooks.org

Copyright 2012 © by Robert A. McDermott All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of
the publisher.

BOOK & COVER DESIGN: WILLIAM JENS JENSEN

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

American philosophy and Rudolf Steiner : Emerson, Thoreau, Peirce, James,
Royce, Dewey, Whitehead, feminism / edited by Robert McDermott.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 247).
ISBN 978-1-58420-137-3 (pbk.)—ISBN 978-1-58420138-0 (ebook) 1.
Philosophy, American. 2. Steiner, Rudolf, 1861–1925. I. McDermott, Robert A.
B893.A44 2012
191—dc23
2012033841
CONTENTS
Preface by Robert McDermott
Foreword by Dan McKanan
Introduction by Robert McDermott
1. Hearing Steiner's Anthroposophy in Emerson's Prophetic Voice
by Gertrude Reif Hughes
2. Deliberate Lives, Deliberate Living: Thoreau and Steiner in Conversation
by Rebecca Kneale Gould
3. William James and Rudolf Steiner
by Robert McDermott
4. Charles Sanders Peirce and Rudolf Steiner: Prophetic Philosophers
by Robert McDermott
5. Josiah Royce and Rudolf Steiner: A Comparison and Contrast
by Frank M. Oppenheim, S. J.
6. Steiner's Anthroposophy and Whitehead's Philosophy
by David Ray Griffin
7. John Dewey's Project for “Saving the Appearances”: Exploring Some of Its
Implications for Education and Ethics
by Douglas Sloan
8. Rudolf Steiner's Activist Epistemology and Feminist Thought in America
by Gertrude Reif Hughes
Bibliography
About the Contributors
For
John J. McDermott and Frank M. Oppenheim, S. J.,
scholars and proponents of classical American thought
and for
Gertrude Reif Hughes, Douglas Sloan, and Arthur Zajonc,
scholars and exemplars of Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy
PREFACE
Robert McDermott Five of the articles in this volume were written as part of a
seminar on Rudolf Steiner and American Thought as part of a Project for the
Renewal of Philosophy, Science, and Education sponsored by Laurance S.
Rockefeller. These essays—by David Ray Griffin, Gertrude Reif Hughes,
Frank M. Oppenheim, S. J., Douglas Sloan, and myself were first published in
ReVision: A Journal of Consciousness and Transformation (spring and
summer 1991). I am grateful to Jurgen Kremer, editor of ReVision, and to The
Society for the Study of Shamanism, Healing, and Transformation, for
permission to republish these essays. In spring 1992 a second seminar,
directed by Arthur Zajonc, met to discuss Goethean science. The proceedings
of the third seminar, directed by Douglas Sloan, and devoted to society and
education, were published in ReVision (1993).
I invited to this seminar eleven professors who I knew would be able to
explore collaboratively the relationship between the Anthroposophy of Rudolf
Steiner and major American thinkers, including: five professors and authors
committed to Anthroposophy—Gertrude Reif Hughes, Robert Sardello,
Douglas Sloan, and Arthur Zajonc, and six colleagues well-schooled in
American thought—David Ray Griffin, Patrick Hill, Frank M. Oppenheim, S.
J., Richard Tarnas, Frances Vaughan, Roger Walsh. I also invited Georg Locher,
a distinguished teacher of Waldorf teachers, to lead the group in artistic
exercises each afternoon. I served as facilitator. All thirteen participants read
several books by Steiner and by American philosophers.
The group took time on several occasions during the seminar to discuss and
regret the first American attack on Iraq that took place during our week
together. The group was grateful to participate in a Mass offered for us by Frank
Oppenheim, S.J. Except for Patrick Hill, who died in 2008, all thirteen
participants are still working on behalf of the topics that brought us to Rye, NY
in 1991.
When Gene Gollogly, publisher of SteinerBooks, agreed to my
recommendation that we republish the ReVision double issue, Rudolf Steiner
and American Thought, as a Lindisfarne book, I immediately recognized the
need for several additions. They are: an essay on Steiner and Emerson,
contributed by Gertrude Reif Hughes, professor emerita at Wesleyan
University; an essay on Steiner and Henry David Thoreau contributed by Becky
Gould, professor of religion and ecology at Middlebury College; and a
foreword by Dan McKanan, Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian-Universalist
Professor, Harvard Divinity School. I am grateful to Matthew David Segall, a
gifted CIIS doctoral student, for correcting typographical errors and improving
infelicitous expressions throughout this volume.

San Francisco, CA October 2012
FOREWORD
Dan McKanan
Few thinkers from outside the United States have touched American culture in
as many ways as Rudolf Steiner. Agriculture, education, spirituality, and
medicine—or more precisely, alternative practices in these fields—all bear clear
marks of his influence, for those with eyes to see. Yet the very breadth of
Steiner's impact has perhaps made him harder, not easier, for observers of
American culture to notice. The terms “Waldorf education” and “biodynamic
agriculture” are more widely recognized than “Rudolf Steiner” or
“Anthroposophy.” Anthroposophic initiatives are commonly understood in
relation to parallel initiatives with different spiritual roots, rather than in
relation to the rich fabric of Steiner's worldview. Americans typically imagine
biodynamic agriculture as a more intense form of organics and Waldorf schools
as “like Montessori schools only more so.” When I describe the Camphill
movement, most interlocutors respond with “Is that like the L'Arche
movement?” And thousands of shoppers at health food cooperatives and Whole
Foods supermarkets purchase Weleda skin lotion, diaper cream, or homeopathic
remedies with little sense of connection to Steiner's vision of spirit active in the
world.
This situation is not catastrophic. People can benefit from the fruits of
Steiner's insight without knowing his name, and many who have been helped by
a specific anthroposophic initiative ultimately find their way to others. Still,
Steiner's relative invisibility in the United States is problematic for at least three
reasons. First, obviously, is that many people who have been helped by a
specific anthroposophic initiative do not find their way to others, even to those
others that might be most relevant to their own life situation. Second is that
certain aspects of Steiner's vision that might be highly relevant to the American
situation are virtually unknown beyond committed members of the
Anthroposophical Society. I think particularly of his theory of the threefold
social order. It has the potential to reconcile the libertarian current that is so
strong in American politics with equally strong traditions of egalitarian social
reform, yet its lack of an institutional base comparable to Waldorf schools has
rendered it virtually unknown. Third, when people fail to perceive the full
spiritual context of Waldorf, or biodynamics, or Weleda, they are less able to
assess them critically and thus to embrace or reject them in freedom. A
significant minority of parents who have sent their children to Waldorf schools,
for example, have been troubled by what they perceive as a lack of transparency
about Waldorf's spiritual roots. Roman Catholic schools and hospitals do not
face this particular challenge, simply because the Catholic worldview is fully a
part of the broader American conversation.
This collection aspires to raise Steiner's profile by digging into just one field
of inquiry: philosophy. Before he became known to the world as a transmitter of
clairvoyant wisdom, Steiner was an academic philosopher, editor of the
scientific writings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and author of a foundational
work in philosophy, Philosophy of Freedom: The Basis for a Modern World
Conception, published in 1894. Philosophy of Freedom expressed in
philosophical terms many of the ideas that would later emerge as integral to the
spiritual science of Anthroposophy.1 In that early work, Steiner chose not to
make mention of his own extraordinary spiritual experiences, making his case
in terms that would be readily accessible to any reader with philosophical
training. For this reason, it figures prominently in most of the essays presented
here, and readers might consider having a copy close by as they work their way
through this volume.
Both the affinities and the tensions between Steiner and American
philosophy can, perhaps, be traced to a single, perplexing word: pragmatism. In
a loose sense, this word designates a concern for results, for effectiveness, for
worldly transformation. The Puritanism of seventeenth-century New England,
the republicanism of the eighteenth century, and both capitalist industry and
social reforming energy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are
“pragmatist” in this sense. Steiner resonates with this tendency because, more
than most spiritual teachers, he was deeply concerned with what we might call
“applied spirituality”—with using spiritual insights to inform education,
medicine, agriculture, and the arts.
In a narrower sense, “pragmatism” designates a specific school of American
philosophy that reached its heyday in the early decades of the twentieth century,
when it was promoted in slightly different forms by William James, John
Dewey, and Charles Sanders Peirce. The founding idea of this school was
articulated by Peirce: “Consider the practical effects of the objects of your
conception. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your
conception of the object.”2 From the perspective of this “pragmatic maxim,”
both traditional idealism and traditional materialism fell short—the former
because it was not grounded in experience and the latter because it arbitrarily
reduced experience to the interplay of atomistic sensations and particles, failing
to see how meanings are built up from interconnections. The pragmatists
aspired to be “radically empiricist”—attentive exclusively to experience, but
open to its full richness and variety.