Reading Steiner and Whitehead

Any academic effort to explain, understand, or otherwise account for Steiner's work needs to address and engage the relation between one’s own approach to the pursuit of knowledge and the approach that Steiner implied or advocated—including his explicit critiques of conceptions of knowledge and knowing typical of the academy of his day, especially as these continue to inform present academic practice. I will suggest that a fruitful path into Steiner's work—in a manner that helps us to engage these questions in ways that can genuinely disturb us—is provided by his age-mate Alfred North Whitehead. There is a compelling similarity in the world-pictures arrived at by Steiner and Whitehead, made all the more intriguing because they arrive from opposite directions: Steiner starts from the problem of how to articulate his own uncommon experience of spiritual realities in a form that could facilitate the cultivation of that experience by others; Whitehead from how to frame a speculative system of general ideas in terms of which all aspects of experience can be interpreted. I am persuaded that by reading Steiner and Whitehead in and through and off of one another, each can be seen to offer constructive criticism of how the other met the task before him. And this engagement offers us as present readers significant aid in overcoming the obstacles of our own assumptions—about the character of reality, the activity of knowing, the process of communicating (and the role of language in that process)—that are implicitly or explicitly challenged by Steiner’s work. Steiner brings far wider experience to Whitehead's project; Whitehead brings a more direct, clear, and (in terms of meeting the contemporary reader) ultimately more effective critique of the obstacles that stand before a serious entertaining of the possibilities toward which all the forms of Steiner's efforts gesture.