Steiner's name for the modern reversal: the ancient East called the sense world Maya, while the agnostic age calls the spiritual world mere ideology.
Ideology as Inverted Maya in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's diagnosis, given at The Hague on 12 April 1922 in the course published as So That Man May Become Fully Human (GA 82), that the modern habit of calling law, morality, art and religion a mere ideological superstructure is the exact mirror image of the ancient Oriental teaching of Maya. The Eastern schools held that the sense world is illusion and that the spirit alone is real. Agnostic Europe, Steiner observed among the proletarian circles he had taught in Berlin, holds that the economic and sensory world alone is real and that everything spiritual rises off it as a sham. His instruction was blunt: translate the word ideology with the word Maya, and the reversal stands exposed. Our Maya is now the spiritual. The consequence he drew is that knowledge has to be worked upward from the sense pole, through imagination, inspiration and intuition.
Ideology as inverted Maya names a single act of reading. Steiner takes the word the working class of 1922 used to dismiss law, morality and art, and holds it against the Sanskrit word the Orient used to dismiss the visible world. Each culture calls something a phantom. The two cultures point in opposite directions, and the direction of the pointing tells you where each one stands.
In Steiner's Own Words
We have arrived at the opposite pole of human development compared to the one that was once the oriental worldview. It spoke of Maya and of the true essence. Everything that is only accessible and attainable to the senses was Maya to it, was illusion. And the real, the truly real, was that which is now graspable for man above the sensual. Today we live in a worldview that presents exactly the opposite. For those who are agnostic, the sensory world is the only reality. They could just as easily say maya as ideology about that which can be grasped beyond the sensory world. We should translate this word in this way. Our maya is the spiritual; once the maya was the sum of sensory phenomena.
What it Means Today
The word Steiner objected to went on to have a long career in anthropology. In 1964 Clifford Geertz published Ideology as a Cultural System in Ideology and Discontent, the volume edited by David Apter, and reprinted it in 1973 in The Interpretation of Cultures. Geertz began from the observation that ideology had become a word nobody applies to themselves: it is what the other side has. He named the trap Karl Mannheim had walked into in Ideologie und Utopie (1929), that if every set of ideas is explained away by the social position of whoever holds it, the explanation is itself a set of ideas held from a social position. Geertz's repair was to treat ideologies as symbolic systems, maps people draw when ordinary common sense stops working, and to ask what they do rather than what they hide.
Steiner had made a stranger objection forty-two years earlier. He defends no particular doctrine; he points out that the category has swallowed the whole spiritual side of life, and that a civilisation which does that has not escaped Maya, it has only moved Maya to the other side of the ledger. Thalira synthesis: Geertz rescued ideology as a map of social reality, and Steiner asks what the map is a map of, and whether the country the modern West agreed to call phantom is the one the older world called solid ground. The exercise is small and repeatable: when you catch yourself calling a moral conviction a construct, put the word Maya where the word construct was, and see whether the sentence still says what you meant.
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