About my Defending Steiner site.

I’d like to introduce my new site Defending Steiner. It was my goal to discuss some of the things that I have been reading about Steiner on the Internet during the past several years. I’ve been reading Steiner since the early 1990’s, and read several biographies as well. Yet the character that I was meeting in some Internet profiles was nothing like the Steiner I knew. Was I severely mislead and missing...

Steiner on clarity of thinking

“No occult teacher will ever instruct a person who is filled with superstition or common prejudice, or one who is prone to senseless judgment or apt to fall prey to any illusion. The golden rule applying here is that, before even taking the first step in the direction of higher learning, a person must free himself from any flighty thinking or possibility to mistake illusion for reality. Above all an aspirant for...

Steiner’s Legacy

Despite a long record of opposing prejudice and discrimination in any shape or form, Rudolf Steiner is occasionally depicted as a racist. Some even describe Anthroposophy as “racist to the core”. These attacks are so ludicrous as to be silly if the charges weren’t so serious, for it does not take much reading in Rudolf Steiner’s works for the uninformed reader to become aware of how strongly Steiner...

Sources and accuracy

In an effort to prove Steiner’s anti-Semitism, Peter Staudenmaier offered a quote from volume 92 of Rudolf Steiner’s complete works (called GA92). There is only one slight problem. These words are not Rudolf Steiner. True, they are printed in GA 92, but if you read the title page, it makes clear that these are listener’s notes of the lectures, and not a stenographic reproduction. This particular lecture is...

Polemic and history clarified III

After “discussing” history with Peter Staudenmaier for several weeks on the Anthroposophy Tomorrow e-mail list, I wrote an article on polemic and history summarizing my views on the matter. Peter Staudenmaier excerpted two sentences and responded. I replied: In the essay I wrote wrote: “In such true historical research, contrary viewpoints would be first and foremost interesting, and therefore included,...

Polemic and history clarified II

After “discussing” history with Peter Staudenmaier for several weeks on the Anthroposophy Tomorrow e-mail list, I wrote an article on polemic and history summarizing my views on the matter. Peter Staudenmaier excerpted two sentences and responded. I replied: Peter Staudenmaier: Thanks for your thoughts, Daniel. I think you still have a shaky grasp of what objectivity means to a historian and what role it plays in...

Polemic and history clarified

After “discussing” history with Peter Staudenmaier for several weeks on the Anthroposophy Tomorrow e-mail list, I wrote an article on polemic and history summarizing my views on the matter. Based on some responses, I wrote the following clarifications: True, polemic alone does not equate automatically to dishonesty. But the polemical approach is one that offers many temptations to dishonesty, especially to the...

Some thoughts on how to define ‘Anthroposoph...

Some thoughts on how to define ‘Anthroposophist’

The case of Rudolf Hess raises the question of what constitutes an Anthroposophist. The first point is to consider who is applying the term and what they hope to accomplish with this. In the case of polemical authors attempting to tarnish the Anthroposophical movement as a whole by the actions of a few individuals, an excessively broad definition will serve well.

Cultural Epochs II

The epochs of the “the theosophical-anthroposophical theory of evolution” are cultural, and not racial. The word “Aryan” for example, originally was a linguistic term for all cultures whose language derived from the Indo-European. It has nothing to do with racial characteristics. The term was borrowed by racists starting a little bit before the beginning of the 20th Century, and by the end of the Nazi...

Cultural Epochs

I have noticed of a number of critics of Anthroposophy on the Internet that (wonder of wonders) they have not actually understood that which they attack. For example, to an Anthroposophist, to say that “humanity” has evolved means that a group of individuals, collectively called “humanity” has incarnated in different races at different times, and each individual has grown and learned as a result of...

Cultural Epochs

The issue of race, culture and theosophical-anthroposophical epochs is complicated. The first thing I should like to do is separate the theosophical from the anthroposophical viewpoints, as these are quite distinct philosophies and not in agreement on many issues, particularly that of race. In stating that the epochs of the anthroposophical theory of evolution are cultural, and not racial, I do not mean to imply that Steiner...