pandora
29th January 2006, 19:18
I wanted to find out what people thought about Rudolph Steiner and his ideas of Biodynamics.
Rudolph Steiner: Steiner's was born in 1861 in Kraljevec, now in the newly independent nation of Slovenia, formerly in Yugoslavia. When Steiner was born, this region was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
According to an article by Hilmar Moore in Biodynamics Magazine http://www.biodynamics.com/steiner.html
Europe was going through a similar situation as we are going through today with the loss of rural labor to technology.
In Europe the rural peasantry vanished in his lifetime, to become the industrial proletariat the industrial working class.
"The old culture was based on nature; the new culture on the machine and industrial processes. Realizing that these people were ripped out of an ancient culture and placed into a new life, he readily agreed when he was asked in the 1890's, to teach at the Worker's College in Berlin which was sponsored by the Socialist Worker's Party. He taught for seven years there and presented two subjects: public speaking and history. "(Moore, 1997)
At that point the middle class had commercial and educational opportunities and the upper class had many advantages it still enjoys today:
"But the workers were bereft no training, no education, and no culture to sustain them. Steiner taught them public speaking so that they would learn to express themselves verbally, which also requires learning to think in an orderly and sequential manner. Without this ability, the workers were totally at the mercy of propagandists and managers. That our schools do not teach people to think or speak clearly today leaves most of us at the same disadvantage! He taught history because if we do not know where we have come from, we cannot see where we are going and we do not know who we are. Here are two absolutely basic human needs: to be able to ask, "Who am I?" and to express myself to others. (Moore, 1997)
"Rudolf Steiner's tenure at the Worker's College ended when party officials realized that he based his history lectures on the sanctity of the human individuality and its evolution and not on fostering class consciousness, and that teaching the workers to think clearly stood in the way of the "dictatorship of the proletariat," (Moore, 1997)
This is where Moore does not understand Marxism so I altered his perception.
It must be understood that party officials at that time were not really interested in true Marxism, instead they pushed a bureaucratic variation of socialism which enjoyed stirring up ignorant workers to do whatever you want them to do, while party officials remained firmly in control. Steiner's work was very popular and he sometimes spoke to several thousand people. He felt very strongly that the peasants, farmers and the proleteriat had something to offer that the overly educated did not. Here is a sample of his work:
* * *
When I was a young man I had the idea to write a kind of "peasants' philosophy," setting down the conceptual life of the peasants in all the things that touch their lives. It might have been very beautiful. An absolute wisdom would have emerged, the statement of the Count [Count Keyserlinck, who hosted the conference] that peasants are stupid, would have been refuted. A subtle wisdom would have emerged a philosophy contained in the very formation of the words. One marvels to see how much the peasant knows of what is going on in Nature.
Today, however, it would no longer be possible to write a peasants' philosophy. These things have been almost entirely lost. It is no longer as it was forty or fifty years ago. Yet it was wonderfully significant; you could learn far more from peasants than from the University.... "
Rudolph Steiner: Steiner's was born in 1861 in Kraljevec, now in the newly independent nation of Slovenia, formerly in Yugoslavia. When Steiner was born, this region was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
According to an article by Hilmar Moore in Biodynamics Magazine http://www.biodynamics.com/steiner.html
Europe was going through a similar situation as we are going through today with the loss of rural labor to technology.
In Europe the rural peasantry vanished in his lifetime, to become the industrial proletariat the industrial working class.
"The old culture was based on nature; the new culture on the machine and industrial processes. Realizing that these people were ripped out of an ancient culture and placed into a new life, he readily agreed when he was asked in the 1890's, to teach at the Worker's College in Berlin which was sponsored by the Socialist Worker's Party. He taught for seven years there and presented two subjects: public speaking and history. "(Moore, 1997)
At that point the middle class had commercial and educational opportunities and the upper class had many advantages it still enjoys today:
"But the workers were bereft no training, no education, and no culture to sustain them. Steiner taught them public speaking so that they would learn to express themselves verbally, which also requires learning to think in an orderly and sequential manner. Without this ability, the workers were totally at the mercy of propagandists and managers. That our schools do not teach people to think or speak clearly today leaves most of us at the same disadvantage! He taught history because if we do not know where we have come from, we cannot see where we are going and we do not know who we are. Here are two absolutely basic human needs: to be able to ask, "Who am I?" and to express myself to others. (Moore, 1997)
"Rudolf Steiner's tenure at the Worker's College ended when party officials realized that he based his history lectures on the sanctity of the human individuality and its evolution and not on fostering class consciousness, and that teaching the workers to think clearly stood in the way of the "dictatorship of the proletariat," (Moore, 1997)
This is where Moore does not understand Marxism so I altered his perception.
It must be understood that party officials at that time were not really interested in true Marxism, instead they pushed a bureaucratic variation of socialism which enjoyed stirring up ignorant workers to do whatever you want them to do, while party officials remained firmly in control. Steiner's work was very popular and he sometimes spoke to several thousand people. He felt very strongly that the peasants, farmers and the proleteriat had something to offer that the overly educated did not. Here is a sample of his work:
* * *
When I was a young man I had the idea to write a kind of "peasants' philosophy," setting down the conceptual life of the peasants in all the things that touch their lives. It might have been very beautiful. An absolute wisdom would have emerged, the statement of the Count [Count Keyserlinck, who hosted the conference] that peasants are stupid, would have been refuted. A subtle wisdom would have emerged a philosophy contained in the very formation of the words. One marvels to see how much the peasant knows of what is going on in Nature.
Today, however, it would no longer be possible to write a peasants' philosophy. These things have been almost entirely lost. It is no longer as it was forty or fifty years ago. Yet it was wonderfully significant; you could learn far more from peasants than from the University.... "