Representations of Waldorf Education V: Toward Wholeness

If Gardner’s voice aims at the prophetic and Emersonian, M. C. Richard’s voice in Toward Wholeness: Rudolf Steiner Education in America aims at the oracular. “In new age consciousness, the religious impulse continues to evolve. Like the sun, it shines across all divisions.” (156) As with many, many pronouncements in this book, we may agree or disagree, but we are given little to support a discussion. This is not to say that Richards does not present a progression from idea to idea, but that the ideas are too often ill-examined or axiomatic. What exactly are “new age consciousness” and “the religious impulse”?

Another example demonstrates the limits of her approach. Richards teases apart Steiner’s concept of “Geisteswissenschaft,” translated literally as “spiritual science.” This word normally describes what in English speaking countries are the studies called the humanities or human sciences, but Steiner intends to revive, in part, its older meaning as a knowledge of the human being conceived as microcosmic mirror of the macrocosmic universe (see, for example, Hildegard of Bingen, quoted in Fox 1987) and as a being of body, soul and spirit. “Spiritual science,” Richards writes, is science that is “not a tool… not intellectual science.” “Spirit uses intellect but goes beyond it. Spiritual science requires the union of inner perception (spiritual) and objectivity (science).” (43) The spiritual may involve “inner perception,” although Richards would agree there’s much more to it than this, but objectivity, while scientific, is also spiritual. In fact, Steiner’ spiritual science aims to overcome the apparent dichotomy between objective and subjective experience not in blending or coupling them (nor in using one to destroy the other), but in transcending them—or, equally, discovering the immanence of one in the presence of the other—to discover a common source for each. Semantically, of course, the term “subjective” implies both its opposite, “objective,” and a pair of negations, “non-subjective” and “non-objective.” But this semiotic-rectangular view of these concepts is reductive and analytical. A synthetic view, which, like a geometric proof, can be obtained only through an intuitive, participatory leap, and not through an explanation, discovers the situational or contextual unity of experience. “Subjective” and “objective” do not cancel each other out in meaninglessness; they are poles between which experience is strung.

In searching for an analogy or example to describe this unity of experience, Richards employs “the [physicist’s] recognition that the observer is part of the observed.” This contradicts our naïve understanding of cause and effect, but does not reach what might better be called the unity of quantity and quality. The indeterminance—and apparent unity—of the principles of physics does not lead to understanding or love, which are conscious experiences of quality.

Richards’ book reads like a collection of essays. But for a few introductory chapters and a conclusion, the contents leap around, from “Education As an Art” to “Teacher Training and Handwork” (in itself an odd and inexplicable combination, understandable only in view of Richards’ work as a potter). In its deliberate embrace of the “new age” and its view of Steiner’s work as “alternative”, it represents well the generation of schools I call the Alternatives.