Steiner's 1919 forecast that the physical world war would be followed by a worldwide spiritual conflict, with Orient and Occident divided by opposite paths to knowledge.
The Spiritual Battle Between Orient and Occident in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the worldwide conflict of soul he expected to follow the First World War, set out in the ninth lecture of Spiritual-Scientific Consideration of Social and Pedagogic Questions (GA 192), given in Stuttgart on 15 June 1919. Steiner reads the fighting of 1914 to 1918 as an extreme of physical war, and says an equal extreme of spiritual war will answer it, one in which the whole earth takes part. The two poles are the Anglo-American Occident, which he says reaches the supersensible through mediumistic trance, and the Asian Orient, which reaches it through breath and heart rhythm in yoga. Central Europe, wedged between them, holds neither instinct and has to school a third path deliberately. Used today, the term works as a diagnostic: it asks which way of knowing, rather than which nation, a cultural conflict is defending.
The spiritual battle between Orient and Occident is not a war between armies. Steiner told a Stuttgart audience of teachers in June 1919 that the children then in school were growing into it, and that the fault line would run through methods of knowledge: how a civilisation reaches the supersensible world decides what it goes on to want from the earth.
In Steiner's Own Words
But just as this battle was such that it cannot be compared with anything in history, so it will be followed by a spiritual battle that also cannot be compared with anything in history. The extreme physical battle on the one hand will be followed by a spiritual battle, which will also represent an extreme of what humanity has experienced so far in its historical development. It will be seen that the whole earth will take part in this spiritual battle, and that in this spiritual battle Orient and Occident will stand with contrasts of a spiritual and mental kind as they have never been before.
What it Means Today
Seventy-seven years after that Stuttgart lecture, the Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington published The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon and Schuster, 1996), expanding an essay he had written for Foreign Affairs in 1993. His argument was that with the Cold War finished, the deep conflicts of the coming decades would be neither ideological nor economic but cultural, running along the seams between civilisations, and that Western assumptions about universal values would be heard elsewhere as imperialism. Huntington drew that map from demography, religion, and state behaviour.
Steiner had drawn a map of the same shape in 1919 from somewhere else entirely. In the fourteenth lecture of the same cycle, given in Stuttgart on 20 July 1919, he describes what each pole does to reach knowledge: the Anglo-American world putting suitable people into trance and reading its political principles out of what the subconscious returns, the Oriental world working on breathing and heart activity through yoga so that the intellect is fertilised rather than switched off. Both, he says, yield real supersensible knowledge, and both come back coloured by the egoism of the body that received it.
Thalira synthesis: Huntington's seams are drawn between cultures from the outside, while Steiner's run between faculties of cognition, so the same conflict reads to him less as a contest over who governs the earth and more as a contest over which faculty humanity will be allowed to think with. When a conflict is reported as a clash of values, that leaves one usable question: what does each side count as a valid way of knowing?
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