“Don’t explain, show me!”
Paperwork and artists…
 
Alan Stott
 
The learned claim that God created the world “out of nothing”. Others claim even He/She needed “chaos”. No doubt there is a third view reconciling both claims. Certainly, He/She didn’t need paperwork. The spiritual world never has… But wait a bit. Does finding no paperwork in heaven suggest such endeavours here—which, let’s say, surely include preparing for a sojourn yonder—might somehow be significant? Is all paperwork a waste of time?
As youngsters we were forever told to “wake up”. As adults we hear the phrase “be conscious” emphasised by responsibly-minded citizens. This admonition is not simply a slogan of an older generation. Youngsters, too, generally want to experience things for themselves. Again, many people interpret the demand to “be conscious” solely as an intellectual category. Yet art trainings are concerned with fostering a professional, conscious ability. So, perceiving different interpretation, is the answer simply one of balance? That is hardly, well, inspiring—unless (as I hope to suggest) we can lay hold of the principles involved. In doing so we might suggest a right place for paperwork.
 
How, concretely, is the situation with the current general concern both for authenticity and recognition? Agreed, an overabundance of paper-work dampens all enthusiasm. Yet in nature new shoots can pierce through tarmac. Surely (let’s mix some more metaphors!), eurythmical butterfly-wings are strong enough to weather the storms of rationality? Let’s see whether, by describing the context, a step forward can be taken at the same time.
 
The music of humanity
Sharing a recent experience might help. Joining the traffic in Cairo recently inspired admiration for our coach-driver. Unlike others constantly hovering over their hooters, he calmly wove a passage through the throng. To some the situation was “chaos”; to me it was a sensitive, life situation. Rather than aggression, I sensed “adolescent” good spirits; the only prang witnessed during our stay was caused by an over-cheeky taxi-driver. It seemed no great achievement to recognise the sentient-soul of a people.
So far, things there seemed to work. But if an “advance” in awareness were to take hold communally, other developments would follow: the formulation of a Highway Code, more traffic signs, road markings, substitution of traffic-lights for police on point-duty, prohibitions (e.g., the donkey-carts would disappear from the thoroughfares), and so on.
 
The history of music offers a comparison. Individual composers only gradually emerged during late Medieval times from the “School of” Worcester, Winchester, and so on. When composers did individualise, so did notation. Byrd and Palestrina wrote notes but, for example, no bar lines; performers, however, felt them (moreover, all you had in your hand was your own part: cantor, tenor, bass…!). Another example over a century later: out of all the 96 pieces of Bach’s “48” only a couple receive tempo directions. Musicians knew, and still know, what the composer wanted. In later centuries, however, all sorts of details of execution had to be added to musical scores. Less and less was left to “chance”. Musical instinct on the wane? Rather, I’d say, precision and refinement on the increase.
 
Philosophy as music?
Nearer home, both sides, instinct and awareness, are contending today, and in our midst. Rudolf Steiner’s work precisely to find a way through is often branded—certainly many of his students are branded—as “intellectual”, “complicated”, and worse. There are anti-intellectuals who rejoice that Steiner himself did denigrate the destructive intellect. This faculty, that can only take one thing at a time, is fine for analysis but not exactly creative, as Steiner admits. But then, is the sensitive consciousness offered by creative, intuitive people something reliable? Is discipline unknown in the arts?
In his Philosophy of Freedom (1894), Steiner took hold of the nettle. Philosophers, he writes in the Author’s Preface, are “artists in the realm of concepts”. So, far from being a limited intellectual text—after all, it is not academic philosophy but an investigation of experience—, the subtitle reads “the basis for a modern world-conception”. This book unfolds a method of “self-observation” to serve life. A brief summary of its argument can, of course, read like a caricature. For the author’s attempt (Steiner’s own word on occasion) is rather to help the reader to awaken by taking him/her through a method, not a prescription. Most readers, preferring definitions, find this challenging. Well, can any philosophical attempt to define the activity of thinking actually succeed? Has anyone succeeded to define (as opposed to characterise) such words as “life”, “rhythm”, “metamorphosis”, “poetry” and the mental faculties? If not, then “Don’t explain, show me” seems a justified reaction. Nevertheless, only as far as it goes, for an adequate justification is indeed the demand of the times. Is a way through available?
 
Let’s mention a specific problem, well-known to students of English literature. It is suggested that the judicious “friend” who advised Coleridge (1772–1834) not to publish chapter 13 of Biographia Literaria (1817) was in fact fictitious. Coleridge himself realised he could hardly do more than publish a part of that famous chapter “on the imagination”—what his friend Wordsworth (in The Prelude) called “Reason in her most exalted mood”. Coleridge baulked from writing more about the imagination. You have to use it! Now Steiner, publishing later in the century, did just that by writing the philosophy of “what is”. The claim is emphatically made in the final chapter (Ch. 15) of The Philosophy… For example, the word “reality” (including its adjective and pronoun), occurs 45 times in 102 sentences (the word occurs again, in connection with the God who can be experienced, in sentence 64—somewhere in sentences 63/64 is the Golden Section of this chapter). Steiner’s achievement finally presents the philosophy of the poet.[1] We are invited to investigate experience; we are to read The Philosophy of Freedom as a “logically arranged organism,” as something artistic, indeed “as a musical score”.[2] In other words, it is artistically exact—a claim perhaps sounding paradoxical until demonstrated.
 
Steiner, a central European, linked to his inherited tradition. He greatly admired Friedrich Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters (1795). This artistically-fashioned text consists of 27 Letters. 3 cubed, or 9 x 3, is a well-known significant number which, Schiller’s commentators (see below) point out, this author employs to create a structural, musical form. Schiller (1759–1805) delineates the threefold human being. The artistic way of life—of everyone—, he shows, results from the tension between the rational and the instinctive. The three drives are not three “things”, but precisely drives, activities. The result of polarity is productivity. The tension between the rational and instinctive drives produces a third. This middle way of art is neither automatic, nor a static balance, but a creative product. Steiner claimed that if Schiller’s message—and we might add Coleridge’s, or “the poet’s”—had been digested, we would enjoy a completely different educational system today. “It is high time [Schiller’s treatise On the Aesthetic Education of Man] was reckoned among the great books of the world,” echoes Elizabeth Wilkinson (1960), co-translator and commentator with L.A. Willoughby of the definitive edition (Oxford 1967/83).
 
Schiller and Coleridge may on occasion appear to complain—who doesn’t?—but they did their utmost to awaken their contemporaries. Owen Barfield, a leading interpreter of Coleridge, claims this seminal thinker was a leading preparer of the Michael age (began 1879). The literary critic Stephen Prickett (1970) points out that in his philosophising Coleridge (and we can include Schiller) “never ceased writing as a poet.” In the context of this article, “poetic”, “musical” are almost interchangeable terms; we could substitute “artistic”, or better still “eurythmical”. At the Faculty Meeting (1924), Rudolf Steiner recommended for eurythmy students Schiller’s treatise and what he had written on it, and (in the same breath) his own Philosophy of Freedom.
 
Good morning!
There is little long-term hope of an instinctive imagination surviving the demands on awareness made today. We are to wake up as poets. Most of us complain about early rising! But is it so early in the age of the consciousness-soul? Admittedly, there are still several centuries to develop such “self-observation”—which, after all, is the only true education. Yet, although there were outstanding forerunners, the consciousness-soul began way back in AD 1413.
 
People are rightly concerned with the now. We can and do experience, richly and artistically (sentient soul); we also develop thoughts (mind-soul)—despite some attempts to escape thinking by indulging anti-intellectual thought. However, are we not informed about the categories and rudiments of language and music? Recognising our roots, too, we are proud of our cultural heritage and folk-culture. To advance, according to anthroposophy, is not a matter of “inventing the wheel”, but learning to interpret, to rediscover meaning (consciousness-soul). A dead-point, inevitably belonging to study, is even repeatedly experienced. This includes eurythmical study—and anthroposophy, as Steiner points out.[3] Yet without death, how is resurrection—Steiner specifically mentions the arts—to take place? (Incidentally, this paragraph contains three significant words beginning with “re-”.)
 
These considerations suggest that paper-work can be carried out on the creative level. Others have gone before us, lighting beacons. After Steiner himself, another inspirer is the great Canadian literary critic, Northrop Frye (1912–1991), who mapped out the whole field of creativity—a Herculean achievement. “And what about the nitty-gritty of course descriptions, lesson plans, and assessments?” Well, the best advice could still be the repeated holistic maxim to “proceed from the whole to the parts”! The means are at our disposal. Most certainly through work (yes, expect plenty of misunderstandings and criticisms), chaos will become cosmos.
 
“There will always be a tendency, more marked in transitional times, for Christians to demand a faith free from the trammels of theology, the processes, star-led and camel-borne, of the human reason. But an unintellectual salvation means an unsaved intellect. The Child grew in wisdom, as well as in stature” (Ronald Knox. Stimuli. 1951).
 
Footnotes
[1] An English attempt on the theme of The Philosophy of Freedom using a threefold category from psychology (thinking, the feelings and volition) is Wilfrid Richmond’s, An Essay on Personality (Edwin Arnold. London 1900), available (like thousands of titles in the public domain) now that many libraries are going open, from www.archive.org [1]. See also his slighter but valuable Philosophy and the Christian Experience (Blackwell. Oxford 1922).
[2] R. Steiner GA 103. Hamburg, May 31, 1908. GA 103. My own suggestion of what his paradoxical phrase could mean appeared as “The Philosophy of Freedom as a Musical Composition: The Seven-Sentence Rhythm of Love”, in our Section Newsletter (Dornach, Rb44/45, 2006). It is also available on web-pages www.alansnotes.co.uk [2].
[3] Rudolf Steiner. Ways to a New Style in Architecture. Address at the founding of the Association for the projected building (Johnannesbau) which later became the Goetheanum. Berlin, 12 Dec. 1911.
 

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article posted with permission of the author