Steiner's name for a spiritual culture that has lost the living spirit and now reads as mere opinion, rising like smoke from economic life.
Spiritual Life as Ideology in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's diagnosis of what became of European spiritual culture once the living spirit withdrew from it. Speaking in Basel on 13 February 1919, in the cycle published as GA 336, The Big Questions of our Time and Anthroposophical Spiritual Knowledge, Steiner described a spiritual life thinned into mere thoughts, mere concepts, mere laws of nature, so that science, art, and religion appeared to rise from economic processes like smoke, a social superstructure with no reality of its own. He dated the thinning to the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, when the Church lost the momentum to carry its impulses into the knowledge Bruno, Galileo, and Kepler were opening. The modern proletariat did not invent this view of culture; it inherited it from the bourgeoisie. Steiner names the descent to ideology the first of the true forms of the social question.
Spiritual life as ideology is the condition Steiner placed at the root of the modern social question: culture experienced as opinion rather than as contact with real spiritual beings. He did not fault the workers who held the view. He held the leading classes responsible for handing down a spiritual inheritance from which the spirit had already drained away.
In Steiner's Own Words
And in this view that the spiritual life is an ideology, we have the true formulation of the social question in one area. Much else is only a consequence of this. Even what often appears in the purely economic sphere (we shall see this in the course of these lectures) is only a consequence of the fact that in the decisive period, when the proletariat longed to receive a spiritual life, the other classes gave it something in which there was no spirituality left. The modern spiritual life had become ideology, ideology. The religious momentum, the religious impact, the spiritual impact in general had disappeared from this intellectual life. This is how the modern proletarian received this intellectual life.
What it Means Today
Charles Taylor, the Canadian philosopher at McGill University in Montreal, gave the same event a different name almost ninety years later. In A Secular Age, published by Harvard's Belknap Press in 2007 and grown out of his Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, Taylor argues that Western modernity did not simply subtract religion and leave the bare facts standing. Something was built in its place. He calls it the immanent frame: a lived sense that meaning is generated inside the human mind rather than encountered out in the world. Alongside it he sets the buffered self, sealed against the spirits and forces that the older porous self had felt pressing on it from outside. Taylor's sharpest move is his refusal of subtraction stories, the tidy account in which unbelief is what remains once superstition is taken away.
Steiner arrived at the same conclusion in 1919 from the other end. Taylor traces the frame through Latin Christendom, reform movements, and disciplinary revolutions. Steiner traces it through the Church's failure to meet the knowledge Bruno, Galileo, and Kepler were opening, and then through the wage relation that handed the result to the worker at the machine. Thalira synthesis: Taylor describes the buffered self from outside, as a historian of belief, while Steiner describes it from inside, as a hunger felt in front of the machine, which is why Steiner treated the repair as a social task rather than a philosophical one, and why his answer that year was an independent spiritual life rather than a better argument.
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