Steiner's name for abstract explanation set in place of a living artwork or a living world, theosophy included, spoken in Berlin in 1911.
Theosophy as a Straw Skeleton in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's own name for what conceptual exposition does to a living work of art, and then to the living world, once the intellect has taken it apart. He set the image out in Berlin on 12 December 1911, speaking to the first General Assembly of the Johannesbau-Verein, the association that would build the Goetheanum. Reading the medieval Legend of the Seven Wise Masters in the Diederichs edition, Steiner showed that a fully correct spiritual-scientific reading of its imagery still leaves you feeling you have wronged the book, because a straw skeleton of abstract concepts now stands where the artwork stood. The German is ein strohernes Gerippe. Steiner then turned the verdict on his own movement: theosophy offered as an explanation of the world is itself such a skeleton, above all in its schemas of the fourfold human being.
Theosophy as a straw skeleton is the self-criticism at the centre of Steiner's argument for building the Goetheanum. Explanation, however accurate, replaces what it explains. The intellect of the fifth post-Atlantean age demands an account of every image, and the account it gives is dry beside the image. Steiner accepted that loss openly, then asked what could be built on the far side of it.
In Steiner's Own Words
Although there must be Theosophy, although our time demands Theosophy, we must feel it in a certain respect like a straw skeleton compared to the living reality. In a certain way, this is no exaggeration. For in so far as Theosophy only occupies our minds, in so far as we are only with the intellect, in so far as we coin schemas and all kinds of technical terms, especially in the parts that relate to man himself, in so far is Theosophy a mere straw skeleton. And it only begins to become a little more tolerable where we can describe, for example, the different conditions of Saturn, the Sun and the Moon and the earlier times on Earth, or the activities of the different hierarchies.
What it Means Today
Fifty-three years after that Berlin evening, Susan Sontag published Against Interpretation in the Evergreen Review of December 1964, collected two years later by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her charge is Steiner's charge made without any of his cosmology: interpretation tames a work, translating its sensuous particulars into a content the intellect can carry away, and the translation is a loss. She ends with the line the essay is remembered by, "In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art." Steiner in 1911 had already conceded the whole case, including against himself. He called theosophy a cross, a sacrifice, a field of corpses that strips away the living world content humanity had carried, and still insisted our age is condemned to explain, because the fifth post-Atlantean intellect can do nothing else.
Thalira synthesis: where Sontag asks criticism to stand aside and let the work be, Steiner asks the analyst to go all the way through the death of the image and come out the other side building. That is why the 1911 lecture is not an essay but a fundraising address for the Johannesbau. His answer to the straw skeleton was a double-domed timber structure in Dornach with carved capitals and coloured glass, spiritual science pressed back into a form the senses could receive. Anyone who has watched a poem go grey under a lesson plan knows the diagnosis. Steiner's prescription is the harder half: make something.
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