A few days ago, I shared a conference retrospective about Harvard Divinity School’s Rudolf Steiner centennial:
I’ve since had a chance to listen carefully to another talk on the subject of racism in Steiner’s work by Gopi Vijaya. You can listen to it below:
I appreciate the methodological clarity that Gopi brought to this topic, which helpfully clears the ground for a renewed spiritual scientific inquiry that invites us to “jump in and swim” alongside Steiner. We cannot advance this conversation if we prefer to stay dry and safely on shore.
Listening to his talk, I found myself pulled in two directions: gratitude for the clarity and seriousness of his methodological ambition, and concern about the tone some may hear in how that ambition is expressed. Gopi is a physicist by training and admits that inquiries into the onto-epistemic status of race take him beyond his usual research. He describes contemporary discussion on the topic as a “minefield”: race discourse today is frequently navigated in terms of risk management rather than as inquiry. Instead of invective or moral crusade, he tried to bring scientific discipline to a topic whose social pressures tend to encourage silence, denial, or ritualized denunciation. The challenge is finding a practical and inclusive way of inviting the kind of inquiry he proposes so that it can help (post)modern Western people metabolize social injustice and moral injury. The risk is that spiritual science unintentionally functions as another way of stepping around the blast radius.
In my view, Gopi’s most constructive move was to stage race as a problem of thinkingbefore it is a problem of opinion. The central obstacle is conceptual: “race” defeats our default academic habits of definition. It is often impossible to locate sharp boundaries in the continuum of human variation. We are all hybrids. Gopi treats biological forms of statistical analysis as a partial retreat from the heart of the issue: it attempts to sanitize the question by limiting it to the measurable, which is to say, to what sense-bound, representational modes of cognition can handle. He then introduces a compelling analogy, contrasting the clarity of mineral classifications with the ambiguity of living organisms. In the mineral world, the regularity of crystalline systems allows for sharp boundaries, while in the plant world, life refuses rigidity and proliferates transgressively. The point in the shift from minerals to plants is not that science becomes impossible, but that the mode of thought that is adequate to minerals does cognitive violence when imposed on living beings.
Whatever else one thinks of anthroposophy, what I find most compelling about Steiner’s work is that it asks us to grow beyond static modes of thought, to cultivate living concepts that partake directly in the real instead of remaining content with collections of dead abstractions that merely picture it. As a process-relational philosopher, it is immediately obvious to me that Steiner is striving to think beyond stale substance-property categories. Nature is not a mechanistic model or statistical plot but a creative process of metamorphosis. It should then come as no surprise that knowing its inner being (as opposed to just tinkering with its dashboard1) requires a metamorphosis of mind. Beyond the naive realism of classical scientific materialism that severs observer from observed (an onto-epistemology quantum physics long ago left behind, though thus far without a coherent replacement) there is a higher realism of disciplined imagination—a superjectivity2 that does not deny relational process, but trains us to notice it everywhere. Only then can we become awake to and responsible for the formative power of our thinking.
“…our attention is [habitually] concentrated only on the object about which we think, but not at the same time on the thinking itself. The naive consciousness, therefore, treats thinking as something which has nothing to do with things, but stands altogether aloof from things and contemplates them. The picture which the thinker constructs concerning the phenomena of the world is regarded, not as part of the things, but as existing only in men’s heads. The world is complete in itself even without this picture. It is all ready-made and finished with all its substances and forces, and of this ready-made world man makes himself a picture. Whoever thinks thus need only be asked one question. What right have you to declare the world to be complete without thinking? Does not the world produce thinking in the heads of men with the same necessity as it produces the blossom on a plant? Plant a seed in the earth. It puts forth roots and stem, it unfolds into leaves and blossoms. Set the plant before yourselves. It connects itself, in your soul, with a definite concept. Why should this concept belong any less to the whole plant than leaf and blossom? You say the leaves and blossoms exist quite apart from a perceiving subject, but the concept appears only when a human being confronts the plant. Quite so. But leaves and blossoms also appear on the plant only if there is soil in which the seed can be planted, and light and air in which the leaves and blossoms can unfold. Just so the concept of a plant arises when a thinking consciousness approaches the plant.”
Gopi’s talk becomes most provocative when he compares two forms of race hierarchy. He suggests that academic critical race theorists have replaced older racial rankings with a new moral polarity, that between anti-racism and racism. This only assures we remain trapped in the same habitual mode of thought by trying to pin static labels on dynamic, relational realities. It represses the deeper issues. He mentions stand-up comedy as one of the only sites in contemporary culture that functions as a temporary pressure valve. Thus, ideological repression and comedic release substitute for genuine concept formation. The topic has become so morally radioactive that it’s slipped into the subconscious, surfacing only in distorted forms. Still, while attempting to forge a more adequate way of conceptualizing “race” and diagnosing the libidinal economy of racial taboos remain essential for moving the discourse forward, such methods do not on their own succeed in healing the real asymmetries of harm that make the topic so morally fraught in the first place. The rhetoric of “we are still stuck in labels” can all too easily slide into a tone that implicitly treats contemporary moral sensitivity as itself the problem. Despite some hesitancy about the effectiveness of their tactics, I relate to the motivations of anti-racist activists as hard-won moral advances responsive to real and enduring legacies of violence. This can be true even if their virtuous motives often find overwrought expression and remain tactically misguided.
So while I would want to hold these tensions a bit differently, Gopi’s call for a more spiritual scientific method does, when coupled with moral clarity about racialized histories of oppression and their ongoing residues, help us think and act more effectively.
Gopi turns to another insightful analogy, this time mathematical: the imaginary unit ias an explosive concept that allowed physics to shift into a quantum mode of thinking that can fluidly move between opposites rather than remaining trapped in 1 vs. -1. He argued we need a similar conceptual shift in race discourse, such that we avoid reified categories to instead notice active possibilities and trajectories: either we are fostering a culture of discourse wherein unique individuals are encouraged to free themselves from racial (or any other) generic characteristics, or we are fostering the adoption of group racial identities that overwhelm individuality. Morality, he rightly points out, is properly concerned with personal responsibility, individual to individual. If we personify entire races as either morally culpable, or morally pure, we commit a grave category error. Moral agency belongs to persons, not abstract categories. I would, however, add an important qualification: while moral responsibility is personal, moral injury is often social. This is why it is important to carefully distinguish the virtues of individual morality from the gaslighting of “colorblindness.”
Gopi is urging critics to stop treating anthroposophy as a set of propositions to be sorted into “acceptable” and “unacceptable” bins, and instead to meet it on its own terms as a discipline that demands inner transformation. “Jump in and swim,” do not remain on the shoreline taking photographs and casting labels. I share his concern that purely external, etic critique functions only as a refusal to think, fanning the flames of moral panic without in any way improving the material, or spiritual, conditions of human life.
Of course, there are dangers in turning toward more emic modes of reception. The appeal to higher cognition can become a form of spiritual bypassing and a way of disqualifying moral protest. If the implicit message is that those who foreground racial sensitivity are simply operating at a “lower level of consciousness,” then our inquiry is at risk of shifting away from the careful work of participatory concept creation into a defense of Steiner’s supposedly unerring indications. Anthroposophists can speak about and even engage in organic thinking while still carrying resentments. In my experience, resentment is not merely a moral failure but offers an epistemic clue. It signals that something in us is refusing to be transformed by what we claim to be examining. If the need to defend overrides the openness to being mistaken, our attempts at spiritual science degrade into apologetics.
I believe it is possible to hold two commitments simultaneously: disciplined spiritual imagination and committed historical conscience. As I said in my conference retrospective, I do not believe anthroposophy has a future if it seeks to secure itself either by denial of Steiner’s racist comments or by surrendering the possibility of spiritual science to Marxist dialectics. It should not simply collapse into the approved academic language games of the moment, as though its spiritual onto-epistemology were an optional accessory. But neither can it circle the wagons around Steiner, attempting to alchemize every harsh line into some esoteric truth that conveniently absolves us from ethical reckoning. Steiner himself acknowledged that spiritual research can err, and if we cannot acknowledge his potential errors without panic, we are not practicing spiritual science by providing peer review.
Gopi is right that race challenges our habits of definition, and he is right that living realities require living concepts. I would only want to add that living concepts are best judged not solely by their elegance and inner coherence, but by their fruits, by what they enable in human relations. In that sense, the method he calls for cannot be separated from the moral atmosphere in which it is practiced. Evolving our consciousness must not become a way of looking down on the people who are experiencing and naming harms. In that case we are not engaged in cognitive advance but in cognitive armoring.
The anthroposophical invitation to metamorphic thinking can and must be joined to an unflinching willingness to acknowledge where Steiner was simply mistaken. If we can do that, then we can move beyond the stale binaries of condemnation and defense toward an anthroposophy mature enough for peer review, and therefore mature enough to serve a pluralistic planetary society.
Footnotes
See Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances, 55: “Take a clever boy, who knows nothing about the principle of internal combustion or the inside of an engine, and leave him inside a motorcar, first telling him to move the various knobs, switches, and levers about and see what happens. If no disaster supervenes, he will end by finding himself able to drive the car. It will then be true to say that he knows how to drive the car; but untrue to say that he knows the car. As to that, the most we could say would be that he has an ‘operative’ knowledge of it—because for operation all that is required is a good empirical acquaintance with the dashboard and the pedals. Whatever we say, it is obvious that what he has is very different from the knowledge of someone else, who has studied mechanics, internal combustion and the construction of motor cars, though he had perhaps never driven a car in his life, and is perhaps too nervous to try. Now whether or no there is another kind of knowledge of nature which corresponds to ‘engine-knowledge’ in the analogy, it seems that, if the first view of the nature of scientific theory is accepted, the kind of knowledge aimed at by science must be, in effect, what I will call ‘dashboard-knowledge.’”
By “superjectivity” I mean to reference Whitehead’s sense of how, in his process-relational onto-epistemology, subject and object dialectically sublate one another in the production of novel individuality. He calls this the process of “concrescence,” wherein a “superject” refers to the way objects grow together to form a new subject that, in perishing, incarnates novel values to be inherited by subsequent subject-superjects.
Footnotes2Plato 
What do you think?