Dear Friends,
Recent conversations with Tom have brought forward a deeper appreciation of a central riddle in connection with this book: Just why did Steiner want us to call it "The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity" in English? Was this indication of his something superficial, or was it a quite essential matter of Steiner's perceptions of the nature of the souls of the West, that PoF be set forward in a context of spiritual activity instead of freedom? Is it possible that English speakers by thinking of the situation is terms of freedom will actually miss the point of the book?
Terry Boardman wrote in an essay called: The Idea of the Threefold Society at the Dawn of the Third Millennium
"In his lectures to the West-East Congress in Vienna 1922, Rudolf Steiner spoke of Europe-Asia as 'the problem' of modern times and Europe-America as 'the solution'. By this he meant that Europeans were preserving the dessicated remnants of an ancient Asian spirituality in the dusty abstractions of their intellectual, political, and religious systems. The future lay rather with the will to create out of nothing. And this willingness he saw in the youthful energies of the Americans"
Is this formulation an appreciation of this mystery of "spiritual activity" - the "will to create out of nothing"?
In thinking about this I tried to recollect my own relationship to this text. The first mental picture that arose was of me holding in my hand the book. The second mental picture was of me living life, and drawing from the riddles of my life the questions that the book was able to help answer. The book did not led to the questions, but rather my life led to the questions. The book then only served to help me answer questions from life. The questions from life came in my biography before I came to the book.
If I was to rewrite the book, this then would have to be its form. Questions from life would be drawn into some kind of fine shaping, some kind of artistic but finely tuned form. These questions would have to be organic though. Related to life, not related to philosophic inquirey.
Once I saw this, I was then able to relate to this picture what other studies had taught me - studies I had undertaken for years in which I tried to appreciate the nature and the differences between the soul life of Central Europeans, and the soul life of Americans. I have elsewhere characterized, for example, the Central European as living in the Ideal, and seeking from this inner view of the Ideal to incarnate it into themselves, and perhaps into the wider social order. The American, on the other hand, finds in life a sequence of nested problems. An American's thinking is then not about the ideal, but about how to pragmatically solve the questions brought to us by life.
An American seldom introspects (gazes at his navel), because the entire focus is on life and its riddles. It would only be when these riddles themselves raised questions that naturally led to introspection, that an American would take up such a path in order to solve the riddles of life. This also was part of my life's path, for my very first taste of being inwardly unfree was when I discovered myself containging a thought content that made me uncomfortable. I did not like the thoughts that arose in my soul, because they seemed at odds with how I wanted to live my life. The circumstances of the biography then created a necessity to look within in order to resolve what came in the form of an outer dilemma.
Is this experience the model that I would need to follow were I to try to revise PoF and update it for our time and for the soul gesture of Americans? I am in the present uncertain, except as regards the fact that this seems to be a quite excellent question.
joel