Steiner's name for the hidden spiritual life of the materialist: only the waking head denies spirit, while feeling and will remain spiritually inclined below consciousness.
The Spiritualist In The Materialist in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's diagnosis that a person can hold materialism only with the waking head, while the same person's feeling life, which dreams, and will life, which sleeps, remain spiritually inclined beneath consciousness. Steiner developed the idea in The Remedy for Our Diseased Civilisation, a lecture given in Dornach on 6 August 1921 (GA 206), naming the sensualists Jacob Moleschott and Heinrich Czolbe as examples and concluding that the materialists, the sensualists, are the strongest spiritualists. The claim carries a warning anchored in his reading of modern civilisation since the fifteenth century: spirituality that is never raised into consciousness does not disappear, it is seized by Ahriman and inflames the instincts toward egoism instead of illuminating them. Depth psychologists after C. G. Jung study the same pattern as the return of repressed religious energy in secular populations.
The Spiritualist In The Materialist names one of Steiner's most counterintuitive findings: the confirmed materialist is spiritually split. His waking thought life denies the spirit, yet his dreaming feelings and sleeping will keep reckoning with spiritual worlds, and he cannot silence them. Steiner watched this in the writer who rages against everything spiritual because a spiritualist sits inside him, an opponent living under his own skin.
In Steiner's Own Words
It is interesting to observe, from a spiritual-scientific standpoint, what takes place in that case. Imagine a Moleshott, or a Czolbe, who only acknowledge sensualism, or materialism with their heads; but below, they have their will, the volitive part of man, with its entirely spiritual inclinations (but the head does not know this); it reckons with the spiritual and with spiritual worlds. They also have within them the feeling part of man; it reckons with ghostly apparitions. If we observe things carefully, we have before us the following spectacle: There sits a materialistic writer, who inveighs terribly against everything of a spiritual nature existing within his sentient and volitive parts; he grows furious, because there is also a part within him, which is spiritualistic and altogether his opponent.
What it Means Today
Fifteen years after this lecture, depth psychology arrived at the same diagnosis by its own route. In March 1936 C. G. Jung published the essay Wotan in the Neue Schweizer Rundschau, later collected in Civilization in Transition, arguing that the rationalist, technically educated population of Germany had not outgrown its religious energies at all: the old god-image had merely sunk into the unconscious, and from there it returned as collective possession, inflaming instinct on a national scale. Jung's mechanism is Steiner's warning restated in clinical vocabulary. A civilisation that is materialist only in its waking head does not become spiritually neutral; its unacknowledged spirituality goes underground, attaches itself to the drives, and erupts as fanaticism, greed, and mass movements that reason cannot argue away. Steiner had named the same danger in Dornach in August 1921, adding the name Ahriman for the power that captures unraised spirituality, and predicting that instinct-driven egoism would grow wherever the will's hidden spiritual life stayed unconscious.
Thalira synthesis: what Jung treated as the return of the repressed, Steiner treated as a task of raising, since the spiritualist in the materialist is not an illness to be managed but a buried capacity waiting to be lifted, and the difference decides whether the subconscious spirit inflames the instincts or illuminates them. The practical direction of the lecture follows from this: a spiritual world-conception must become as widely popular as materialistic science, so that what dreams in feeling and sleeps in will can wake by the honest route instead of the ahrimanic one.
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