Rudolf Steiner's Aesthetic Culture, Ecology and Economics

This paper is a contribution to a better understanding of a narrow facet of Rudolf Steiner’s work, namely the significance of his understanding of aesthetic culture and its connection with ecological sensibilities and economics. While aesthetics has largely been narrowed in conventional usage to refer to beauty and art, it was introduced by Alexander Baumgarten in the 18th century as a term that could denote knowledge gained through perception. While Steiner did not explicitly draw on Baumgarten’s philosophy he did embrace the role of aesthetic judgement as it was developed in Goethe’s natural scientific method of delicate empiricism as intuitive understanding, and by Schiller in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind. Steiner explicitly situates his associative economics, first articulated at the end of his life, within this legacy of aesthetic judgement. Steiner presents the concept of economic association, a transformation of Goethe’s notion of intuitive understanding, within a cooperative framing, as capable of facilitating valid economics judgements, or true price. Steiner’s notion of aesthetic culture can be seen as encompassing not only the arts and humanities, but also the natural sciences and economics. The paper is a contribution toward a deeper understanding of the argument put forward by Dan McKanan in Eco-Alchemy: Anthroposophy and the History and Future of Environmentalism, which frames the influence of anthroposophy as central to the emergence of the modern environmental movement and social-cooperative economics. The paper develops an interpretation that can help explain important ways that Steiner’s comprehensive notion of aesthetics facilitated this influence. The portrayals of Rudolf Steiner’s economic theory and orientation, as they have appeared in the works of Peter Staudenmaier, are also reviewed in this light revealing the limits of an excessively critical approach to understanding.