Escape from Jargon

Systems of thought sometimes form fixed, almost sacralized terminologies that paralyze rethinking. But Rudolf Steiner had ways of avoiding such jargon, keeping his use of language alive, and preventing people from turning his work into a closed system. One of his preventive methods was to make the meanings of many words vary depending on the context. Thus only by diving into the space of relations between words can one think what Steiner is saying at any particular point.  In Steiner thinking thus often becomes more independent of language and words than is the case with other authors. Words start to function as cross-sections of a thinking process that in itself is inherently in movement and never quite confinable within words.

When one works hard enough with Steiner's thinking at its best (and here I'm not referring to Steiner's five "basic" books, as essential as they are), one often finds that through it, one or another clearly non-physical reality bursts upon one's spirit in a quite non-abstract way.  One spiritual reality might come upon one somewhat as does the blush that bursts upon the face of an embarrassed child; another spiritual reality seems like a sword suddenly sliding free of a close-fitting scabbard; yet another like the sun emerging from behind a cloud over a beach; still another manifests within oneself like a small, non-physical motor spinning within itself at what seems ten-thousand revolutions per second so incredibly smoothly it only emits the quietest hum; and so on.  The spiritual world that manifests through some of Steiner's thinking is qualitatively as rich and real as nature, and manifests as a non-physically concrete process.

True, an expression like "non-physically concrete" is today generally felt to be something like a "circular square," that is, an oxymoron, a non-sensical expression.  But that is part of why Steiner, at his best, represents something new in the history of thought: he demonstrates, experientially through a new kind of thinking, that "non-physically concrete" is not an oxymoron -- that spirit is not merely some grey abstract quasi-real epiphenomenon of the electro-chemical processes of the brain, but is, rather, at least as real, alive, and qualitatively rich as the physical world -- but in a non-physical way.

And just as exposure to Nature's elements after a while can make one feel tired all over, raw and chafed by wind, burned by sun, etc., so also if one engages in a certain amount and intensity of thinking through of the right passages in Steiner's work, one does not feel afterward as though one has merely been thinking in the ordinary abstract sense.  Rather it is as if the skin of one's non-physical being or "body" had been rubbed raw by exposure to the spiritual elements in a spiritual world. Steiner's thinking at its most powerful is a discovery by Western mind of concrete spirit.  It turns out the spirit is real, it does exist, and there is a real spiritual world filled with real non-physical beings.

Of course, if a student is really determined, anything can be turned into a dead jargon, even those passages where Steiner bodies forth subtle new beauties of perception and imagination.

An artist in the realm of thinking, Steiner frequently saw things in ways no one had ever quite seen them before. Some of his books and lectures are more revealing of that brilliance than others, so beware of first impressions.  One might fail to notice the man's genius, because he sometimes clothed his new insights in one or another pre-existing garb.  But what he dresses up in that old garb can be remarkable.

At times he sounds as though his belief in science's applicability to the spiritual world is unjustifiably strong, and too influenced by the late 19th century's naive optimism that science could one day know everything with absolute precision.  But don't be fooled.  Steiner turns out to be way beyond the 19th century's scientific naivete.

In some future blog post I'll try to develop the above themes further.