A subconscious cruelty that modern thinking discharges through concepts: criticism that cuts into a living individuality instead of characterising how it came to be.
Cruelty in Thinking in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for a subconscious appetite for cutting that modern intellectual life satisfies through concepts rather than through the hands. Steiner set it out on 18 November 1916 at Dornach, in the sixth lecture of the cycle published as The Karma of Vocation (GA 172), while examining Franza Feilbogen's 1916 study of the Swabian writer Friedrich Theodor Vischer. The biographer condemned the narrow Tübingen schooling that had in fact produced the man she admired. That gesture, Steiner said, slashes spiritually into a living individuality. He set it beside the practice he attributed to certain black-magic schools, where a novitiate cuts into the flesh of living animals to breed a quality into the soul. Modern people lack the courage for the outer act, so the same lust is gratified in the concept, and what it yields is not black magic but present civilisation.
Cruelty in thinking is the quality Steiner asked his Dornach audience to test for in themselves before claiming that their thinking was unprejudiced. It is not anger and not open malice. It is the small satisfaction taken in a concept that severs: the biographical verdict, the diagnostic label, the review written to dismantle. Steiner treats it as a condition of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch rather than a private moral failing.
In Steiner's Own Words
Since people lack the courage to practice this cruelty outwardly, they are cruel in their concepts and ideas. In many works of the present time we observe this cruelty in descriptions and representations. We observe it in much that is done and said, and it is far more common at the bottom of the soul than is ordinarily supposed. I have told you that in some schools of black magic the custom exists of acquiring the means for performing black magic by having the novitiate cut into the flesh of living animals. Certain characteristics are thus developed in the soul. Not everyone can do that at present, but many people gratify the same lust through their system of concepts; this does not lead to black magic, of course, but to our present civilization.
What it Means Today
Susan Sontag reached a close diagnosis without any occult vocabulary. In the title essay of Against Interpretation and Other Essays (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), written in 1964, she described the interpretive habit of modern criticism as an aggression carried out against the work. Interpretation, she wrote, is “the revenge of the intellect upon art.” The critic does not meet the poem or the film; he digs out a content, converts the thing into something else, and leaves the sensuous surface depleted. Sontag's remedy was not better interpretation but attention of another kind, an erotics of art in place of a hermeneutics, meaning a return to what can actually be seen and heard. That is Steiner's loving characterisation arriving forty-eight years later, from a Manhattan literary quarterly, by an entirely different road.
Thalira synthesis: Sontag names the appetite and stops there; Steiner names its organ. What she calls revenge, he locates in a subconscious will that has been denied its outer object and so turns the cutting inward, onto the concept. This is why neither writer prescribes a change of opinion. You cannot argue your way out of cruelty in thinking, because the cruelty does not live in the conclusion, it lives in the grip. Steiner's test is plain enough to use on a Tuesday: once your judgement of a person is formed, ask whether the concept could also describe how that person came to be. If it can only condemn what formed them, the concept was a knife.
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