The Aesthetics of Rudolf Steiner and Spiritual Modernism

272 Pages·2016·4.31 MB·English

The Aesthetics of Rudolf Steiner and Spiritual Modernism

by

Jennie Louise Cain

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
(Germanic Languages and Literatures)
in the University of Michigan
2016

Doctoral Committee:

Associate Professor Frederick Amrine, Co-Chair
Associate Professor Kerstin Barndt, Co-Chair
Associate Professor Andreas Gailus
Professor Elizabeth Sears
DEDICATION
for Mira and Devika

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my gratitude to my committee members, who have
inspired and supported me all of these years at Michigan: Frederick Amrine, Kerstin
Barndt, Andreas Gailus and Betsy Sears. It would have been impossible for me to pursue
this topic without Frederick Amrine’ s deep and extensive knowledge of Rudolf Steiner
and without his ability to patiently guide me to relevant concepts and works within
Steiner’ s oeuvre of over four hundred volumes. I am especially thankful to Fred for his
keen intellect and his exhortations to try to see the bigger picture. I owe a debt of
gratitude to Kerstin Barndt for her continual prompting to think critically, the
conscientiousness with which she closely read many drafts of my work in various states
of disorder, and for her warm encouragement every step of the way. During the final
months, Kerstin’ s guidance has been invaluable. Andreas Gailus provided critical
feedback at various stages and I also appreciate Betsy Sear’ s detailed and insightful
written feedback during the final stage of writing.
There are two people especially worthy of acknowledgement for their part in
contributing to my growth as a teacher and a scholar. Hartmut Rastalsky helped me to
discover the joy of teaching, has been an amazing mentor and has provided thoughtful
feedback on my teaching as well as on fellowship and award applications. I also wish to
thank Christian Clement for creating the online resource Rudolf Steiner Online Archiv
that enabled me to easily access many texts by Steiner.
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During my years here I have benefitted greatly from the highly skilled and
dedicated administrative staff in the German department, including Sheri Sytsema-
Geiger, Nancy Blasch, Rachelle Grubb, Jen White and Gitta Killough. Thanks are owed
to each of them for guiding me and my colleagues through important administrative
procedures. I am especially grateful to Jen White for the many needed reminders, pieces
of practical advice and, above all, for all of our talks in her office that helped break up the
monotony of dissertation writing.
Multiple institutions have supported my education as a scholar and a teacher.
These include the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature, the Rackham
Graduate School, the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching, and the Deutscher
Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD). I am thankful for the generous fellowships that
enabled research in the US and in Germany and for many helpful seminars on aspects of
research and teaching.
At the University of Michigan, I am indebted to my classmates and friends for
their personal and intellectual support. To Seth Howes, Sara Jackson and Solveig Heinz I
owe thanks for their mentorship. I also wish to acknowledge my classmates Biz Nijdam,
Nick Heckner, Hannah McMurray, Emma Thomas, Ariana Orozco, Michael André,
Simon Walsh and Claire Insel for their camaraderie and feedback on my work. To
Kathryn Sederberg I owe special thanks for her friendship and support, for her fine
editing skills, and for helping to keep me sane in graduate school.
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Over the course of my life there have been a number of wonderful teachers whose
passion and skill helped shape me. I thank my class teacher Frances Vig for her
creativity and unbridled enthusiasm and my high school teacher Ed Vaitones for sparking
a special interest in German. I wish to recognize Dr. Hans Michael Speier and Dr.
Christine Geffers-Browne, two especially inspiring professors at the summer master’ s
program held at Middlebury College. I also wish to thank Dr. Jochen Richter, long time
director of the summer program, and the many other teachers and staff there who made
this program an intensive and truly exceptional educational experience. To Dennis
Klocek, director of the Consciousness Studies program, I owe thanks for igniting interest
in further study of Goethe and of Steiner. The late Dr. John Mohan, professor of Russian
literature and my favorite teacher at Grinnell College, will always be remembered for his
love of literature and his cornball humor.
Finally I wish to extend my deepest thanks to my family. My parents, Beth and
Roger, have always been so loving and supportive in all of my eclectic pursuits. I thank
my dad for the way he has always modeled a love of ideas and an interest in spiritual
practice. A very special thanks goes to Mira’ s and Devika’ s two beloved
grandmothers —”Oma” and “Dadiba”—who have gone above and beyond in their
support of me and my family by babysitting and also living with us for substantial
periods here and even in Germany. Thanks to them, I was able to finish the PhD with the
peace of mind that my little girls were in the best of hands. I also want to thank
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caregivers who have become part of our extended family by loving our girls as their own:
Areli Hernandez, SandraSartori, Mary Eldridge and Laura Ganzel.
Finally I want to thank my best friend and husband Hirak Parikh for his
companionship, encouragement, and technical support and for keeping a cool head during
moments of crisis. Above all, Hirak helped me maintain the perspective that the
dissertation is just one stage of life. I look forward to the many years ahead with you!

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
DEDICATION ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii
LIST OF FIGURES viii
ABSTRACT ix
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER 1
Rudolf Steiner’ s Goethean Symbolism and his Influence on Wassily Kandinsky’ s
Theory of Abstraction 37
CHAPTER 2
Against Mimesis: Steiner’ s Theory of the Evolution of the Arts in Dialogue with
Wilhelm Worringer’ s Abstraktion und Empathie and Alois Riegl’ s Kunstwollen 110
CHAPTER 3
The first Goetheanum Building and Steiner’ s Vision of Peace and Internationalism 174
CONCLUSION 247
BIBLIOGRAPHY 256

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LIST OF FIGURES
FIGURE 1: THE FIRST GOTHEANUM 186
FIGURE 2: STEINER’ S PAINTED MOTIFS OF THE ARCHETYPAL FIGURES OF THE
SEVEN POST-ATLANTEAN CULTURES WITH A SERIES OF COLUMNS AND THE
LARGE CARVED WOODEN SCULPTURE DER MENSCHHEITSREPRÄSENTANT
BELOW. COLORED DRAWING BY VAN BEMMELEN. 235
FIGURE 3: CROSS-SECTION OF DOMES FROM A MODEL. 239
FIGURE 4: THE MAIN HALL WITH THE AUDIENCE AREA BELOW AND THREE OF
THE COLUMNS WITH THEIR CAPITALS. 240
FIGURE 5: A CLOSE-UP OF THE SECOND COLUMN 242
FIGURE 6: A CLOSE-UP OF THE THIRD COLUMN 243
FIGURE 7: THE THIRD AND FOURTH COLUMNS 244

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ABSTRACT
Around 1900, a wave of European artists and intellectuals turned to spiritual
themes and modes of thought to reform a society perceived as dominated by rationalism,
materialism and mimetic art. My dissertation places at the center of this movement
Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925)—the Austrian philosopher, artist, architect, pedagogue and
social reformer. I trace Steiner’ s influence on canonical modernists and show that his
writings are deeply resonant with contemporary developments in the visual arts, art
theory and architecture. In Chapter One, I examine the influence of Steiner’ s theory of
dematerialization on Wassily Kandinsky’ s conception of abstraction. While exploring
significant points of connection between both thinkers, I argue that Steiner ultimately
does not aim for abstraction but instead for a return to the phenomenological world in an
immersive mode characteristic of Goethean thought. In Chapter Two, I bring Steiner’ s
art historical theory into dialogue with the writings of the German art theorist Wilhelm
Worringer and the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl. I argue that both Steiner and Riegl
conceive of the history of art as the expression of a collective aesthetic drive, what Riegl
calls Kunstwollen, and that Worringer and Steiner understand “abstraction” in
philosophical rather than periodic terms. Chapter Three turns to Steiner’ s first
Goetheanum building, placing it in the context of Expressionist architecture on the one
hand and anti-war responses to the First World War on the other. I bring Steiner’ s
theory of the first Goetheanum as promoting peace into conversation with three
contemporaneous thinkers and projects: Bruno Taut and his Glashaus Pavilion from
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1914; the German fantasy writer and illustrator Paul Scheerbart; and Sigmund Freud’ s
1915 anti-war text “Zeitgemäßes über Krieg und Tod.”
My project makes three interventions into the field of modernism studies. First,
by considering Steiner’ s place within Expressionism, it adds to the heterogeneity of this
movement. Second, it contributes to the neglected subfield of what I call “spiritual
modernism,” arguing that the spiritual was never historically “excluded” from the
modern. Finally, my dissertation broadens our understanding of modernism by
complicating traditional binaries such as religious/secular and pre-modern/modern.
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