Introduction
FIRST,
in case it should mislead,
a word about the English title. The German original bears the
formidable superscription:
Westliche und östliche Weltgegensätzlichkeit;
and the modest little
English word “tension” signifies very much more
than the diplomatic and political strain, which is more
or less chronic now between the Western democracies on the one
hand and Russia and the Communist countries on the other. At
the same time the book which follows is far from irrelevant to
that strain, of which it is in a measure prophetic.
“The spectre of Eastern Europe,” we read on page
page 115
(and these words were spoken in 1922), “gazes
threateningly across to the West.” But it is only at
surface level, and when something specific is amiss, that a
“tension” betokens an unnatural strain, or
one that threatens disaster unless it is relaxed. Thus both
modern psychology, and modern theology, often speak of
“holding in tension” as a normal and
healthy activity. The clash of two opposites — such for
instance as individual freedom and responsibility —
will always create a tension. Whether the tension snaps in a
neurosis or a war, or whether it is “held” in
health and strength and peace, will often depend on whether the
clash is merely encountered as a bewildering contradiction, or
is understood in depth as a necessary and
life-engendering polarity.
Since the end of the nineteenth century the world has been
moving steadily in the direction of a single closed economy;
and now willy-nilly it seems on the way to becoming a single
social unit also. The only question is: of what kind is that
unity to be? A living unity, as distinct from the
monolithic unity of mere spatial cohesion, always (as Coleridge
among others has pointed out) springs from a polarity; and
polarity involves, not only the two opposite extremes or poles,
but also, as its tertium quid, the vibrant
tension in the midst between them. It is a principal
object of this book to furnish an understanding in depth
of what most unites the habitable globe, historically and
culturally, into an organic whole, and this necessarily
involves an understanding of the abiding tension between East
and West.
To
understand anything in depth involves some knowledge of how it
came into being, and here the attempt is made to view the
relation between typically Eastern and typically Western modes
of consciousness in the light of the whole process of the
evolution of human consciousness. In this Rudolf Steiner
was up against the difficulty that the very existence of such a
process was then — and it is still today — not
generally recognized. That this is surprising “in an age
permeated with evolutionary concepts” has recently
been pointed out by Mr. Charles Davy, in his book
Towards a Third Culture,
in the course of which he defines the
evolution of consciousness as “a constant-direction
change in the normal experience of the perceived world.”
It is the more surprising because it would seem that,
without such a concept, little can be accomplished in the way
of understanding man and his problems. Examples of this abound
in the ensuing pages. Thus, just as the concept of biological
evolution is necessary before we can distinguish whether the
resemblance of one living form to another is due to a
superficial analogy or to a true homology rooted in their
nature and growth, so does the concept of evolution of
consciousness enable us to discern the purely superficial
nature of the resemblance between “division of
labour” in oriental antiquity and in modern times.
Or again, in the same lecture (8) in which the above example
occurs, compare with the usual chatter about
“escapism” Steiner's treatment of the old conflict
between the image of the artist as a “committed”
human being and the image of “art for art's
sake.”
In his book,
The Yogi and the Commissar,
which appeared in 1945, Arthur Koestler began by placing his Yogi and
Commissar at the opposite poles of a “spectrum” of human
nature or social behaviour — an ultra-violet and an
infra-red pole, between which all human types subsist. The
Yogi, he said, accepts the inner spirit as the source of
energy; he attempts to produce change from within. The
Commissar does not believe in any “within;” he
attempts to change the behaviour of man by manipulation from
without. Koestler defines his Commissar as “the human
type which has completely severed relations with the
subconscious.” And there is more to the same effect. But
this promising introduction is never developed; nor does
Koestler so much as notice the paradox implicit in his own
striking choice of labels — redolent, as they are,
of a polarity between East and West, and yet with the
“Yogi” corresponding, not to the Eastern (as one
would expect), but to the anti-communist Western pole.
Let
the reader contrast with this brilliant but inadequate
aperçu the counter concepts of “maya”
and “ideology” which Steiner builds up in
Lecture 4
on the historical foundations (including a careful appraisal of
actual yoga) which he has laid in the first three lectures. They
are the fruit of understanding in depth, because they are rooted
in a deep grasp of the whole history of man and of his place on
earth and in the cosmos.
In
the threefold nature of man, as Steiner expounded it, the rest
is as it were implicit. Past, present and future; religion, art
and science; the slow shift of the earth's cultural centre of
gravity from orient to Occident, and with that the transition
from an ancient instinctual wisdom to our modern
self-consciousness, subsisting in free but
lifeless thoughts — all this (such is the message
of the following pages) can really only be contemplated and
understood in understanding and contemplating threefold man. In
his head, taken alone, the human being, qua thinker,
does really reach a “commissar's” inner emptiness.
He also experiences “the terror of that emptiness,”
as Steiner points out on
page 104
and as the Existentialists have since so heavily stressed. But there
is a way, of which Existentialism knows nothing as yet, by which
humanity can fill its experienced emptiness with spiritual
substance. If a man is willing to follow that way and to
develop his dormant powers, if he will learn how to hold his
conscious but empty thinking in tension with the opposite pole
of his being, his unconscious but substantial will, then not
only his nerves and senses but the whole man can become a
sense-organ, capable of re-experiencing in freedom the
instinctual wisdom by which mankind was formerly nourished
— but also controlled. He finds (we are told on
page 94)
“the cosmos stored up as recollection inside him.”
Thus the problem of the relation between East and West leads
quickly into an exposition of both the philosophical basis and
what may be called the “methodology” of that
spiritual science, or anthroposophy, with which the name of
Rudolf Steiner is principally associated. This is, of course,
the original feature that marks our book off from any other on
the same subject. It may also be, for many, a stumbling-block
in the way of according to the thoughts it contains the candid
attention which their intrinsic quality would otherwise
command. For, if the method is presented as open to all
— as indeed it is — the actual development of the
dormant powers referred to depends on certain qualities, of
character and otherwise, which few human beings have as yet
brought with them into the world. Among those few, though he
never expressly makes the claim, Steiner himself was
pre-eminent. Readers who become aware, or who already know, how
much the findings of anthroposophy, including this very concept
of the evolution of consciousness, depend on Steiner's own
raids on that stored up cosmic memory (elsewhere more
technically referred to by him as the “Akashic
Record”) and who are perhaps inclined to dismiss for that
reason their claim to attention, will find here a reasoned
justification of the method of spiritual science, which asks no
more than to be fairly considered on its merits.
For
this reason among others “the Vienna Course,” as it
is often called, seemed a good choice to make, out of the
voluminous material available, for a special book to lay
before the English public, under a well-known imprint,
shortly after the centenary of Steiner's birth in 1961,
when through public lectures, a broadcast talk and other
avenues, the attention of many was no doubt drawn for the first
time to his work and its practical results.
Another reason for the choice is, that the relation between
spiritual science and natural science is here clearly and fully
stated at the outset. The reader will be left in no doubt of
Steiner's immense respect for the science of the West, as it
has actually developed since the scientific revolution; perhaps
also in little doubt of his thorough acquaintance with the
natural science of his own day. That can in any event in fact
be demonstrated from other sources. To the present writer
the most significant ground for the claim of spiritual
science to be a science, and to merit careful
investigation alongside the deferential attention paid as
a matter of course to the established sciences, is the one
which is glanced at on
page 56,
and more fully stated on
pages 69, 70.
It is a ground which has broadened a good deal during
the forty years that have elapsed since these lectures were
delivered, and it is this. If we look aside for a moment from
their proven efficacy in the field of straightforward physical
manipulation and consider rather their claim (abandoned now
altogether in some quarters) to furnish us with
knowledge about the nature of man and the world, it must
be admitted that the matter dealt with by the established
sciences is coming to be composed less and less of actual
observations, more and more of such things as pointer-readings
on dials, the same pointer-readings arranged by electronic
computers, inferences from inferences, higher mathematical
formulae and other recondite abstractions. Yet modern science
began with a turning away from abstract cerebration to
objective observation! And this is the very step which
spiritual science claims to be taking again today. Once grant
the possibility that observations other than those made with
the passive and untrained senses are possible, and you have to
admit that the method of cognition which Steiner describes is
more scientific, because more empirical, than the method of the
schools.
In
addition to the twenty or so books which he wrote, most of
which are translated into English, Rudolf Steiner delivered
several thousands of lectures, many of them in courses or
cycles, in different parts of Europe. His followers saw to it
that most of these were taken down in shorthand and afterwards
transcribed for the use of the Movement. Later the
transcriptions, unrevised by the lecturer, were in many cases
made available as printed books; and this is the case here.
Audiences varied widely in size, nationality, educational
background and other respects, and Steiner was wont to vary his
style accordingly. The reader may like to know that these
particular lectures were given during a “West-East
Congress” of the Anthroposophical Movement in Vienna in
June 1922. They provided each evening a sort of temporary
culmination of the various themes which had been studied during
the day, and the usual number in the audience was about two
thousand.
Steiner remarked afterwards, in a written report, that public
conferences of this magnitude represented a new departure from
his normal practice of approaching only those who were in a
manner predisposed to listen sympathetically to what he had to
say. Surely it was no small achievement to shepherd an audience
of two thousand, not all of them sympathetic, through such
unfamiliar and subtle catenations of thought as the
reader will find in
Lecture 2!
Some of those who are familiar
with the literature of anthroposophy have detected in this
particular cycle a special note — a touch of almost
apologetic urbanity — which is found nowhere else.
Perhaps this also makes them a suitable choice for the purpose
mentioned above.
Rudolf Steiner died in 1925. The years that have passed since
then have been crowded and fateful ones, changing the face of
the world and the colour of its thought. It would be surprising
if there were nothing here that “dated.” For
instance, a contempt for Western technological achievement, as
something philistine and unspiritual, can no longer be regarded
as the characteristic oriental reaction it was in 1922, when he
was speaking. Indeed the whole difference between the spiritual
— or unspiritual — life of Orient and Occident
daily becomes increasingly blurred. But is not this a symptom
of the very trend to which Steiner was drawing attention?
The elimination of a tension-holding middle between the
two extremes leads here, as elsewhere, to their chaotic and
sinister interaction. Even in 1922 the typically Western
materialism of the German Karl Marx was streaming back to
Germany and the West from Eastern Europe. Since then, we have
seen the rise and fall of a largely Westernized Japan, the
succumbing of China to the crudest materialism of all,
the incipient industrialization of India. Almost as these lines
were being written the elimination of anything that could
be called Middle Europe was carried to its absurdly logical
conclusion, and the interval between East and West reduced, in
Berlin, to the thickness of a wall.
An
Austrian subject, born in a part of Europe which is now just
behind the iron curtain, Steiner was himself a child of that
vanishing Middle Europe. Nowhere perhaps could the
disappearance after 1914 of the old order, rich in ancient
hierarchy and symbol, rotten in so much else, be experienced as
vividly as in Austria-Hungary. Nowhere was the need so
apparent, and (for a short time after the first World War) the
opportunity so promising for the construction of a new social
order, which might unite in a single organism the impulse of
humanity towards the future with the wisdom it inherited from
the past. It was this fleeting opportunity which he had
been seeking to exploit during the brief period in 1919 and the
early twenties when the Threefold Commonwealth Movement
was founded and vigorously propagated, and when for a time his
name was well known in Central Europe.
The
opportunity passed that might have brought quick returns
from a lightning campaign. But few of the problems have been
solved. That “faith in the supreme power of the State”
(page 166)
which he noted as accompanying the growth of technology, has only
gone on increasing; and everywhere within it, between class and class,
between one State and another, and between East and West, antagonisms
swell and proliferate. Koestler's Yogi had his emotional energies
fixed on “the relation between the individual and
the universe,” his Commissar on “the relation
between individual and society.” In the second half of
this book an attempt is made to show how the two relations
coalesce in the threefold nature of man. A reconstruction of
society is, no less than is a rebirth of individual psychology,
implicit in the findings of spiritual science and would follow
naturally and inevitably from a wider understanding of these.
Whereas a society “planned” on abstract principles
must inevitably strangle all progress, if only because
(as F. A. Hayek has recently argued on purely empirical
grounds) the unpredictable, free individual spirit is your only
source of novelty and change.
Once again all turns on the basic fact of the evolution of
human consciousness. On the one hand such an evolution
necessarily involves changes in the social structure, but
on the other hand that structure, and the changes which it
demands, cannot be understood except in the light of that
evolution. In the long run the views on diet of a man who had
never heard of bread would be about as practical as the views
on social reform of a man who is unaware that humanity is
evolving from a typically oriental condition, in which the
existence of the individual is latent in society, to a
typically occidental one, in which the existence of society is
latent in the individual. “What is needed,” says
Steiner, on
page 164,
“is prefigured in the unconscious will of mankind in Europe.”
In
Europe and, as he elsewhere makes clear, in America.
Perhaps few passages in this book could be more
immediately fruitful in removing perilous
misunderstandings than the closing pages of
Lecture 9,
where much, over there, of what we on this side of the Atlantic
are apt to despise as emotionally crude or intellectually
superficial, is related to a certain un-European conception of
the human will; and it is emphasized that this very conception,
primitive as the terms in which it is expressed may be,
nevertheless “carries within itself striking
potentialities for the future.”
But
it is time the reader was left to make his own acquaintance
with the ideas which follow in the form in which Steiner
himself expressed them. He will be disappointed if he seeks in
them a schematic diagram of the nature or history of humanity
or a panacea for its personal and social ills. But it may be
otherwise if with an open mind he travels through these pages
expecting only what he will find: a patient examination into
the way in which we form our ideas and the historical and
geographical factors by which that way is conditioned, and,
along with that, a preliminary contribution towards the
unfreezing of certain hidden reserves of energy, imagination
and wit, which would seem to be essential if human civilization
is to be rescued from decline.
London, February 1962.
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OWEN
BARFIELD.
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