Steiner's name for culture kept as an ornament by the classes the economy carries, and closed to the people whose labour pays for it.
Spiritual Luxury in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name (Geistesluxus) for the condition of cultural life under capitalism: science, art, and religion cultivated as an ornamental surplus by the classes whose comfort the economy carries, while the people whose labour supports that economy stand outside it. Steiner named the condition in the second lecture of The Liberation of the Human Being as the Basis for a Social Reorganization (GA 329), given in Bern on 17 March 1919, where he described spiritual life that had become a kind of cultural luxury for the ruling class and therefore an ideology for the modern proletarian, a smoke rising off the reality of economic life. Because spirit appeared only in that ornamental form, the worker could reasonably judge it unreal. The remedy Steiner proposed was not more culture but a different footing for it: a spiritual life administered by itself, proving its reality out of its own impulse rather than out of state patronage or capital.
Spiritual luxury is the shape culture takes when it is carried rather than shared. Steiner watched science and art expand across the nineteenth century while the workers who paid for that expansion watched from outside, and he understood why they answered by calling spiritual life an ideology. The word marks a diagnosis, not a dismissal of spirit.
In Steiner's Own Words
All spiritual life must be a private matter in relation to the rule of law and to the cycle of economic life. That spiritual life alone which is directed to its own powers, that spiritual life alone which always proves its reality out of its own impulse, that will not be a spiritual luxury, that will not be a spiritual abundance, that will be a spiritual life which must be longed for by all men in the same way. In looking at medieval spiritual life, for example science in relation to religion and theology, the following sentence has often been uttered: Philosophy, the wisdom of the world, is trailing behind theology.
What it Means Today
Pierre Bourdieu put numbers to the thing Steiner described from a Bern platform. In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Editions de Minuit, 1979; Harvard University Press, 1984, translated by Richard Nice), Bourdieu surveyed French taste in music, painting, food, and furniture, and found that preference tracked class position closely enough to work as a credential. He called the resource cultural capital: the painters you can name, the table manners nobody had to teach you. It is inherited at home, ratified by school, and spent in the job market. From the Collège de France chair he held from 1981, Bourdieu spent two decades showing how the appearance of disinterested culture does the work of social sorting.
Steiner and Bourdieu see the same object and part company on the prescription. Bourdieu granted the cultural field only a relative autonomy, always shadowed by the economic one. Steiner argued in GA 329 that spiritual life is not inherently ornamental, only made so by administration from outside, and that it becomes real again when it stands on its own initiative rather than on state patronage or capital. Thalira synthesis: cultural capital measures the ornament with precision, while Steiner's question is what a culture would have to be funded and governed by in order to stop functioning as one. The test is practical: ask who pays, who is admitted, and who could not come.
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