Steiner
the "Scientist"
Rudolf Steiner was a self-described occultist and clairvoyant. [See "Occultism" and "Clairvoyance".]
Understandably, Steiner's followers today prefer to use other terms to describe him: They call him a scientist, an academic, a philosopher, and so forth. Such descriptors make Steiner seem respectable, but they are inaccurate — they ascribe to Steiner qualifications and credentials that he did not actually possess.
Here is a message, posted in early 2022, that delves into the question of Steiner's credentials as a scientist. The writer is historian Peter Staudenmaier.
Background: Toward the end of the second decade of the 21st century, official school inspectors in the United Kingdom found significant flaws in Waldorf schools operating there. Eventually, several Waldorf schools in the UK were shut down. [See "Steiner School Crisis".]
The umbrella organization for British Waldorf Schools — the Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship (SWSF) — responded by attempting to "modernise" their schools, hoping to mollify the inspectors. Staudenmaier's message, below, came during an online discussion of these matters.
Staudenmaier begins by referring to a previous message posted by Steve Walden. In his own message, Staudenmaier refers to the Executive Director of the SWSF, Fran Russell.
Here is Staudenmaier's message:
Many of the ongoing concerns about science education at Waldorf schools derive from Steiner's own conflicted attitudes toward science. Steiner considered anthroposophy a "spiritual science," and his followers celebrate him as a "scientist of the invisible." Like Steiner himself, his followers often reject standard scientific accounts of evolution, among other subjects. The mainstream Waldorf position is that "Human beings are not descended from the apes":
Human beings are not descended from the apes. Zoology in upper school. By Martin Schwarz, March 2013 If in class 9 the focus is on the high degree of specialisation in the animal and the developmentally open-ended human being, it is on the inner organs in class 10, cytology in class 11 and the whole animal realm in class 12.
Such claims can be found throughout the contemporary Waldorf milieu. Along with related phenomena like anti-vaccine myths and anthroposophical climate change denial, beliefs like these routinely raise misgivings about Steiner's project as a whole. They also play an important role in the persistence of racial ideology among Steiner's followers, as well as the persistence of esoteric resentments against intellectualism, materialism, rationalism, and so forth.
The historical reasons for this lie in Steiner's turn to esotericism after 1900. Anthroposophy was an offshoot of Theosophy, which presented itself as a "synthesis of science, religion and philosophy." The search for expanded forms of knowledge beyond the confines of established science was a fundamental element of the modern German occult revival and a driving force in the development of Steiner's esoteric worldview. Many of Steiner's followers today prefer to use terms like "Goethean science" to characterize anthroposophist approaches to knowledge, and Steiner himself invoked Goethe constantly. Though meant to bolster anthroposophical claims to scientific legitimacy, this is a conspicuously flawed strategy; aside from the dated nature of Goethe's scientific observations, scholars have systematically undermined the notion of substantive commonalities between Steiner and Goethe.
There are quite a few studies in English that explore this context thoughtfully and carefully. Important examples include Kocku von Stuckrad,The Scientification of Religion: An Historical Study of Discursive Change, 1800-2000 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014; see 110-12 for his section on Steiner) and Heiner Ullrich, Rudolf Steiner (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). As Ullrich notes, "The paradox of anthroposophy is that it claims to be science-based" while instead representing a "rehabilitation of mythical forms of thought" (135). More detailed analyses are available from Olav Hammer, Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age (Leiden: Brill, 2001) and Egil Asprem, The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse, 1900-1939 (Leiden: Brill, 2014).
Research like this could be very useful for those trying to reform Waldorf education from within.
Peter S.
March 21, 2022
"Steiner the Scientist"
https://groups.io/g/waldorf-critics/message/33020
[R.R., 2022.]