Questions of Courage

• Courage in the Academy

  This video could be of interest for young people studying in the academy  who are considering exploring spiritual approaches to understanding and knowledge. Williams introduces a handful of scholars who have dedicated significant time to researching and publishing on Rudolf Steiner’s work and legacy, and why research in this area can take courage.    References: Christian Clement preface to: Rudolf Steiner, Band 13: Schriften über soziale Dreigliederung, frommann-holzboog verlag  Dan McKanan, Eco-Alchemy: Anthroposophy and the History and Future of Environmentalism. (Oakland, CA: University of California Press).  Peter Staudenmaier, Between Occultism and Nazism: Anthroposophy and the Politics of  Race in the Fascist Era. (BRILL).  Helmut Zander, Anthroposophie in Deutschland: theosophische Weltanschauung und  gesellschaftliche Praxis 1884-1945. (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht)Questions of Courage is a project of the Youth Section at the Goetheanum, in collaboration with Goetheanum TV. To support the Youth Section Global Access Fund, please visit: https://www.goetheanum.org/en/youth-donations.

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• Freedom What?

  I have read two longer book reviews in recent months, both in influential journals, of the growing consensus that human freedom is an illusion. The consequences elude me, and I turn to satire for relief. “Scientists around the world reach consensus that freedom is an illusion, they have now turned to the question of what the significance of this conclusion can be given they are unsure exactly what conditions have brought it about.” Thinking stalls and turns in on itself in free fall. I am trying to get a small piece of shell out of the egg white and each time I stab with my finger it is displaced. I am an artist that is drawing the world but when I try to draw myself, graphite becomes rubber and suddenly erases my presence. I am a latent view from nowhere. I live in an element that conducts world-consciousness and insulates self-knowledge, a substance that reveals a world to me while concealing myself. As far as I am concerned, celebrated conclusions of thought accentuate riddles they profess to solve. But of course, there is, after all, natural science and the expanded majesty of the universe. Satisfaction wells up as thought marries action in physics and rockets fire and fly. But after I have spent late nights staring at the bottom of the glass, taking my fill of a union of mind and matter, intoxicated with the necessary interdependence of the great material mathematical matrix, I am sick as the sun rises. Sunrise greets me with the penetrating question of why, while the how of a necessary and functional web of cause and effect entices me away from the headache and back to sleep. I am drawn to the hair of the dog that bit me as a remedy, as a morning headache following a night of drinking might be softened by a glass of beer. But fascination with mytho-mechanics is a puzzle to put together only so many times in the nerd - crazed vitalism of alienation before it whispers its secret: Silence. The world, my unproven gold standard of reality, won’t testify. I am the secret the world keeps to itself in speechlessness. I am the taboo of the universe. I thought I heard a poem in a rainstorm. A message of light flashed at me through leaves in the wind in September, but where I walk eyes turn away and voices fade. In these reveries a bustling crowd of life and meaning disperses, hushing into echoes and whispers with my approach. I go to work on the subtly ensouled scenes but sensation fades with my attention, as if my wandering thought is the expert anesthesiologist. I face the numb, unconscious world and feel I am practicing the wrong science, I want to administer not anesthetic but aesthetic attention. I do not belong to the world of things and I sense myself as infinite, me the great nothing of helpless life. I, the strange fruit of the world, a living symbol, an orphan birthed by a universe that seems to have passed away in hard labor. Can the child live? This child of the world, can it grow into its kin, the All? In the past the rivers spoke, as did the stars, and their words were a Theo-sophy or Gnosis. Wisdom was living spiritual revelation of community ritual and cosmos. From that old and wonderful, wise and atavistic puppet magic, all full of reverent acceptance of life before science, the disenchantment was born to children, all vulnerable, but most precious. How can this child grow save through loving the corpse, not simply its inert, mytho-mechanical form, but as a body that has not quite yet gone back to dirt, wherein the beautiful forms of a once living divine presence is still visible, if devoid of the living self? From what once moved with life may some form of Anthropo-sophy arise through love of this beautiful countenance? Then freedom may involve resurrecting the world through beautiful, heartfelt knowledge. It may involve a new, extra-mechano-morphic meaning, emerging in creative, thinking hearts.Questions of Courage is a project of the Youth Section at the Goetheanum, in collaboration with Goetheanum TV. To support the Youth Section Global Access Fund, please visit: https://www.goetheanum.org/en/youth-donations.

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• Encountering Vladimir Soloviev

  A Young Man encounters Vladimir Soloviev  This video tells the story of the effect Vladimir Soloviev’s work and poetry on a young man from the USA and reflects on the significance of meeting other nations and language groups through art, culture.  References  Vladimir Soloviev: Russian Mystic by Paul Marshall Allen The Meaning of Love by Vladimir Soloviev  The Justification of the Good by Vladimir Soloviev  The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky Questions of Courage is a project of the Youth Section at the Goetheanum, in collaboration with Goetheanum TV. To support the Youth Section Global Access Fund, please visit: https://www.goetheanum.org/en/youth-donations.

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• 100 years Rudolf Steiner Conference at Harvard

  In this episode the upcoming 100 years Rudolf Steiner Conference at Harvard is discussed, the research of one of its main organizers, Dan McKanan, and its potential significance.  Webpage for conference: https://pes.hds.harvard.edu/steinerconference  References: Ed. Johannes Kronenberg and Lammerts van Bueren (2025) On the Earth We Want to Live. Springer Nature, forthcoming  Dan McKanan  (2017) Eco-Alchemy: Anthroposophy and the History and Future of Environmentalism. (Berkeley, CA: Univ of California Press). Questions of Courage is a project of the Youth Section at the Goetheanum, in collaboration with Goetheanum TV. To support the Youth Section Global Access Fund, please visit: https://www.goetheanum.org/en/youth-donations. 

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• Victor Pelevin and Aesthetic Freedom

  This episode of Questions of Courage offers reflections on the contemporary Russian novelist and writer Victor Pelevin, and particularly the intersection in his work of aesthetics and Buddhist orientations of liberation.References: BOMB Magazine | Victor Pelevin. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2002/04/01/victor-pelevin/  Pelevin. Generation P ; Curtea Veche Publishing. -The Blue Lantern; Faber, 2001. -The Clay Machine-Gun; Faber & Faber, 1999.  Victor Pelevin: anatomist of the new Russia | Profiles | Jason Cowley | journalist, magazine editor & writer. https://www.jasoncowley.net/profiles/victor-pelevin   Solovyov, V. S. Lectures on Divine Humanity; Lindisfarne Press, 1995.   Questions of Courage is a project of the Youth Section at the Goetheanum, in collaboration with Goetheanum TV. To support the Youth Section Global Access Fund, please visit: https://www.goetheanum.org/en/youth-donations.

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