What is Anthroposophy?

by Jeff Barney

This is a story told from my own perspective. Every individual within the Anthroposophical movement would tell it uniquely.

In 1894, at thirty-three, Rudolf Steiner published his timeless work The Philosophy of Freedom. This work is a living testament to the reality that human knowledge is the agent of loving action and thus freedom.

What had become the two most powerfully divergent streams in Western life, platonism and aristotelianism, were brought together by Steiner after 2,000 years of dualism. The Western march has been culturally dominated by a watered down version of one or the other: the transcendence of Plato and the immanence of Aristotle. They are both found in one-sided ways in all forms of conventional institutions. There is a schism in the breast of the institutions and individuals influenced by these schools of thought. Institutionally, the most obvious are the transcendent God of Christian fundamentalism and the materialism that seeks knowledge only through the manipulation of physical nature. Individually, we all suffer from abstract prejudices and beliefs as well as a chronic tendency toward cynicism.

When we start from a one-sided belief in transcendence or in matter, a whole breadth of human experience lies fallow. This amounts to self-destruction as we standardize education, chemicalize farming, pharmacologize the healing arts, etc. Conformist rituals insure the enslavement of a self that the practitioner is conditioned to believe doesn't exist.

Steiner, on the other hand, establishes the phenomenal reality of self. He exposes, as culturally biased superstition, the whole shattered Western thought edifice that permeates in ever-branching veins into the muscle and bone of society through its institutions and individuals. Others before Steiner have healed this split to a degree. The great mystics, saints, alchemists, artists and perhaps those in secret schools offered a countercultural respite from a collective schizophrenia for the individual practitioners.

The Philosophy of Freedom offers a real, not theoretical or subjective, self to be recognized as the basis of all knowledge and action. This ineffable being is found to be a continuity within our thinking, feeling and willing life. It is also painfully apparent that this agent of autonomy is, to a great degree, only potential. Like all living organisms, it is in metamorphosis. We are like a farm. We must cultivate ourselves, our social organism and our eco-system, or the vitality of life will be further depleted and disease will set in.

Knowing this vital individuality is part of what I refer to as Anthroposophy: anthropos- meaning human being and -sophy meaning wisdom. All human beings have this indwelling at least as seed. Foremost for me, Anthroposophy is living phenomena perceptible to all healthy and good-willed adults. It is a demonstration of thinking as the starting point for all knowledge, feeling and action, and a path for all of these to be developed as organs of ever-broadening intuitive perception. Room is now made for some good old R&D work and a movement to support it.

Anthroposophy has developed into a spiritual science. Steiner and others still inspired by him have researched and developed a knowledge-based spiritual path. The scientific fruit of this spiritual path are the living spiritual realities underlying self-renewable social forms, medicine, farming, evolution, karmic biography, education and the arts. More and more people are awakening to the possibility of this kind of work, though they may not call it Anthroposophy. Many have never even heard of the Anthroposophical Society, don't view it as necessary, or have a healthy impulse against being a follower of some dead white guy. That is fine. But I hope prejudice won't disclude a potential intimacy of shared experience.

Anthroposophy is a post-dualist movement. Just as there was surely a consciousness before the separation into what we know now as conventional sects, so can there be new forms appropriate to present-day awareness that incorporate all sincere practices. Anthroposophy seeks this with the bringing together of art, science and spiritual revelation, with the whole self as an instrument attuned.

Contact the Anthroposophy Society of NC at 919-732-4535 or Jeff Barney at barft@aol.com.