Elena:
It's interesting that Mr Eftestol is doing something similar to what I am doing which is to find the points of contact between esoteric systems with exoteric understanding. This is no casualty. The esoteric and exoteric need to reconnect just like death and life need to reconnect in our every day consciousness.
I'm particularly interested in the following sentence:
"Deleuze, referring to Plato, contrasts two fundamentally different types of sensations. In
opposition to those sensations that can be termed recognitions, and which correspond to a certain
image of thought, he puts the kind of sensations that are "no longer objects of recognition, but
objects of a fundamental encounter."16. Sensations that are recognitions are the same as what we call
perceptions. They are formed in harmony with the other faculties of the mind and give us the stable
mental life of "common sense". However, these perceptions are a secondary rational organization of
a primary, nonrational dimension of sensation."
I think this nonrational dimension of sensation is also what I've been calling "the logos" or that which gives life to life.
Deleuze is new to me so I should study him more deeply but this "piecing together" of knowledge and concepts that "hit the mark" is as enjoyable for the mind as a jigzaw puzzle for the moving center.
An Attempt to Map Some Relations Between the Work of Rudolf Steiner and Gilles Deleuze.
By Torbjørn Eftestøl
Abstract:
In this paper I investigate some aspects of Rudolf Steiner's and Gilles Deleuze's work. In doing this
I focus on art as a form of cognition and relate artistic creativity to Steiner's philosophical
conception of truth. I then try to see art and philosophy in relation to the creation of truth and how
this relates to Steiner's method as it is presented by Jesaiah Ben-Aharon in the book The New
Experience of the Supersensible. On this background I find some interesting similarities between
Steiner's and Deleuze's conception of artistic creation. Deleuze is seen as investigating the function
of art in a way parallell to that of Steiner, and to develop a view of the artistiv endavour as what he
calls «a higher empiricism» which is comparable to the method of Rudolf Stiner's spiritual science.
Rudolf Steiner developed his own philosophy and aesthetic among other out of a confrontation with
the work of Goethe, and in one of the his introductions to Goethe's natural science he discusses the
relation between art and science underlying and inherent in all of Goethe's work. Contrary to the
traditional opposition between science as a quest for truth and art as forms of free imagination and
creativity, he relates the two as different methods of one and the same endeavour. Both are
operations of truth and creativity. For Goethe art was, Steiner writes: "one of the revelations of the
primal law of the world; science was for him the other one. For him art and science sprang from one
source."1
The reason for this attitude can be found looking closer at Goethe’s and Steiner’s approach to the
phenomena of consciousness and knowledge. Neither of them take representation as the point of
departure, neither for the concept of truth nor for artistic creation. Concerning his own conception
of truth, Steiner puts this very clear in the introduction to Truth and Knowledge:
The outcome of what follows is that truth is not, as is usually assumed, an ideal reflection of
something real, but is a product of the human spirit, created by an activity which is free. [...]
Man is not a passive onlooker in relation to evolution, merely repeating in mental pictures
cosmic events taking place without his participation; he is the active co-creator of the world-
process, and cognition is the most perfect link in the organism of the universe.2
We have the reason to believe that Steiner developed his conception of truth and art on the
background of an effort and ability to experience and observe the creative constitutive processes of
consciousness and not only the results of these prosesses, and that this determined his philosophical,
scientific and artistic routes and the difference these took from that of his contemporaries. Truth and
artistic creativity for Steiner means to create the possibility to see and experience this primordial
constitutive activity, out of which representation and the consciousness of our every day life
emerges.
This determines the how of both operations: What must be created is the situation of becoming
where representation is no longer possible. Representation, and the conception of truth derived out
of it, is necessarily a secondary state which has evolved out of a primary situation. Truth in Steiners
view thus means to understand and experientially cognize this primary situation as an active co-
creation of the world-process. This means that what is at first given in experience must be
1 From Art to Science quoted from http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA001/English/MP1988/GA001_c08.html, 28.10.09
2 Truth and Knowledge, quoted from http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA003/English/GC1981/GA003_pref.html,
28.10.09
decomposed to allow for the becoming-process always already at work but concealed in every
experience. Philosophy and art lead to this by different routes, but both aim at creating the state of
becoming prior to representation.
Philosophy leads to this becoming-process in the domain of thinking by a conceptual procedure
which strives to overcome representation, and this is the primary concern of Truth and Knowledge
and the whole of Steiner's epistemology. Art leads to the same in the domain of sense-perception by,
in Steiner’s words, a: "sinnliche Erscheinung in der Form der Idee"3. What this means might not be
completely clear, but according to the Goethe scholar Henri Bortoft, idea in the sense used in the
German philosophical tradition does not mean what we usually think of as idea, as something
subjective in our heads, so to speak: "... an organizing idea - this is what an idea is: organizing"4. An
idea should not be thought of as an entity but as an activity, and so the form which the sensible
apperance is given is not as an object or representation, but as a function. In an artwork the elements
of sensation are brought into play, and this play should have the form of an idea in this sense. They
should, to use the formulation by Paul Klee, not render something visible, but render visible.
With this in mind we can see Steiner's definition of art as erecting a sensible aggregate of sensations
which resists representation and thereby opens for the process of creating truth. An artwork is an
assemblage of sensible material which by its arrangement forces one to enter a creative engagment
with it so that the act of comprehension becomes an entry into the world-process. Art is therefore
not about (feeling) reactions to something percieved (the domain of representations) but about the
becoming put to play in an encounter. This is not something subjective or objective, but a world-
process.5
In his philosophy and subsequent spiritual science Steiner develops his method for creating truth as
active co-creation of the world-process, or of becoming, as I will say. In this paper I will try to shed
some light on the relation between art and philosophy, and their role in relation to creating this
event.
This method was presented by Steiner in his writings thrughout his whole life, and it is therefore
extremely difficult to comprehend. The Israeli author Jesaiah Ben-Aharon has elaborated and
developed this method in detail in the book The New Experience of the Supersensible, and I will
3 Goethe als Vater einer neuen Ästhetik, Rudolf Steiner, GA 271 Kunst und Kunsterkenntnis, Rudolf Steiner Verlag,
1991, page 33.
4 The Wholeness of Nature, Henri Bortoft, Lindisfarne Press 1996, page 128
5 That this becoming involves the life of feeling is another issue. But the important here is to stress that the affective
dimension is not a secondary subjective reaction to what is experienced, but part of the original cogizing activity.
now try to present an outline of the method based on this work.
The basic idea of this method can actually be presented as quite simple, although an elaboration of
the philosophical and phenomenological aspects of it is extremely complex and difficult. This basic
idea consist in separating thinking from any kind of given perception to such an extent that the
activity of thinking is able to revolve around itself so intensely that the only thing percieved
becomes this activity itself. This process, which can be found prefigured in the philosophy of
Fichte, is developed within the experience of rationality, by working with understandable concepts,
and is therefore not a mystical irrational experience, but one which comes to terms with the
boundary of rationality itself, namley the experience of understanding, or more technically, the
constitutive experience of evidence. What rationality takes for granted and can not be explained, its
blind spot, becomes the place where the activity of thinking is percieved. And this perception is at
the same time a self-creation and a world-process because this is the place where subjectivity and
objectivity can not be discerned but are created in the first place. This is therefore the beginning of
truth as active co-creation of the world process.
This event of becoming should then eventually be involved all aspects of life. This new faculty, the
ability to think the pure activity of thinking itself can little by little be confronted with the
experience of sense perception. When thinking is able to pour itself actively into the realm of
perception without naming and fixation of objects, the event of becoming is experienced also in the
realm of perception.6
In his philosophy Steiner gives the epistemological startpoint for this process as the concept of the
"directly given". This is a boundary-thought which has the function of delimiting the relation
between thinking and perception, and to show how the two are alway already intertwined in our
experience of the world. If we were able to extract thinking completely from our experience of the
world we would experience the "directly given":
This “directly given” picture is what flits past us, disconnected, but undifferentiated. In it
nothing appears distinguished from, related to, or determined by, anything else.7
This shows that the conceptual element is internal to our world and that it is not in any way imposed
6 This process is pictured in The New Experience of the Supersensible, Jesaiah Ben-Aharon, Temple Lodge, London
1995.
7 Truth and Knowledge, Rudolf Steiner, quoted from
http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA003/English/GC1981/GA003_c04.html, 28.10.09
upon something percieved, since the activity of distinguishing, relating and determining is what
reveals the world in the first place, as well as the self to itself overagainst this otherness. In The
Philosophy of Freedom, a work which can be seen as a continuation of Truth and Knowledge, the
situation of the hypothetical purely passive condition of the ‘directly given’ is described in this way:
The world would then appear to this being as nothing but a mere disconnected aggregate of
objects of sensation: colors, sounds, sensations of pressure, of warmth, of taste and smell;
also feelings of pleasure and pain. This aggregate is the content of pure, unthinking
observation.8
There is therefore a kind of thinking which is internal or immanent within perception, a kind of
thinking embodied and enacted within the different sensory mediums and their interactions, but
which is totally unconscious since it is prior to the creation of our given every-day subjecivity. Even
if this is not the same as what we usually call thinking, the activity inherent in our ordinary thinking
has its origin in this primordial activity which brings forth the world and subjectivity in the first
place. Steiner says that there is nothing that prevents us from supposing the possibility of a form of
consciousness where the concept and the perception is aquired simultaneously, ie. where there is no
division between thinking and perception, but that the specific human organiation of our age
functions in such a manner that they come in two; as an "outer" percieved world and "inner"
thinking.9
The method of spiritual science aims at consciously creating this primordial situation where the
world splits into perception and thinking and thus also creates the dualistic state of consciousness.
In his book Riddles of Soul, he describes the way to realize this as to become
familiar with the inner process that combines psychic representation with sense-impression;
so familiar that it can hold at arms length the influx of the sense-impressions themselves (or
of their echoes in after-experience) into the act of representing.10
As Ben-Aharon shows in his book, this requires that the unconscious and instinctive relation
between thinking and perception be deconstructed and held apart so that one is able to create “a
8 The Philosophy of Freedom, Rudolf Steiner, quoted from
http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA004/English/RSP1964/GA004_c04.html 28.10.09. This book develops the ideas
presented in Truth and Knowledge where “the situation” of the “directly given” is first presented.
9 This he relates to the (individual as well as historical) evolution of individuality and freedom.
10 Rudolf Steiner, Riddles of Soul, qouted from The New Experience of the Supersensible, p. 17
negative and reversed, that is, an actively produced non-relation between perception and
thinking.”11
This decomposition is exactly what transforms the given subjectivity and its representational mode
of experience into an event of becoming. When one is able to cultivate and strengthen thinking to
such an extent that this activity becomes the only perception, transforming the experience of body
(as "inner" perception) during the process, one can according to Ben-Aharon apply this ability
within the field of sense-perception and thereby enter the world in its living becoming, before it is
converted into representations, before it is "killed". In the methodical introductory chapter to The
New Experience of the Supersensible this is pictured as a process where perception and thinking are
transfomed anew into each other and together create a new faculty of cognition. The passage, which
is worth reading carefully, goes as follows:
Instead of letting thinking and sense-perception devitalize each other in the forming of the
brain-and-sense-bound mental picture, we let them flow freely through each other and be
reversed into each other. Living thought thus reaches to the living origin of sense-perception,
and pure sense-perception reaches as far as the original source of thinking. Beyond their
midway cross point they are both gradually reversed into each other, at once keeping,
transforming and giving up their original identity in the reversal process inside each other’s
opposite stream. When thinking grasps the origin of perception it becomes, as thought,
perception, and when perception penetrates to the source of thinking it becomes, as
perception, thinking. In this living, mutual exchange of thinking in and through perception,
and perception in and through thinking, thinking is perceived through living sense-
perception, and sense-perception is thought through living thinking.12
In a lecture held in Colmar, France13, Ben-Aharon discusses the future role of philosophy as
presented by Deleuze and Guattari in their book What Is Philosophy? In this book they express it as
"The sole purpose of philosophy is to be worthy of the event". This can be directly related to the
process and method sketched above. But now we can ask; if philosophy and thinking in the future is
moving away from representation and interpretation and towards "the becoming of the event and
the event of becoming"14, how can we regard the role of the artistic enterprise in relation to this?
11The New Experience of the Supersensible, p. 17
12Ibid, page 21
13 Anthroposophy and post-modern Philosophy in Dialogue Observations on the Spiritualization of Thinking, Lecture
by Jesaiah Ben-Aharon, Colmar France, June 1., 2007
14 The Event and the Other, Lecture in Oslo, posted at http://www.ybaschool.co.il/eng/norway.htm, 28.10.09
In the introduction to the book Francis Bacon The Logic of Sensation by Gilles Deleuze Daniel
Smith says that
Modern art and modern philosophy can be said to have converged on a similar problem:
both renounced the domain of representation and instead took the conditions of
representation as their object.15
This statement is highly interesting in relation to Steiners conception of truth. As we have seen,
truth concieved by Steiner is exactly not "a true representation" but, by experiencing the formative
process of representing (i.e. the conditions of representation), the ability to resist and thereby
transform representation and consciously enter the stream of becoming before it is converted into
our ordinary world of subjective and objective states. If, as Smith says, art has converged with
philosophy on this problem it means that it strives for the same realization, only within a different
domain.
The conditions of representation and the effort to go beyond them, is, as Smith says, a central part
of Deleuze's philosophy. In his work on art he studies this from the perspective of the "logic of
sensation". This means that he tries to explicate the concept of how a work of art engenders
becoming. On this point we can find a very interesting correlation between Steiner's internal
relation between aesthetics and his image of thought as presented through the concept of the
directly given, and the internal relation of these enterprises within Deleuze's thinking. To clarify to
what extent this correlation is real is a huge task, but here I want to try to open for a first possible
discussion of this correlation.
An interesting place to start this is to look at some of the background of Deleuze's theory of
sensation. Deleuze, referring to Plato, contrasts two fundamentally different types of sensations. In
opposition to those sensations that can be termed recognitions, and which correspond to a certain
image of thought, he puts the kind of sensations that are "no longer objects of recognition, but
objects of a fundamental encounter."16. Sensations that are recognitions are the same as what we call
perceptions. They are formed in harmony with the other faculties of the mind and give us the stable
mental life of "common sense". However, these perceptions are a secondary rational organization of
15 «Deleuze on Bacon: Three Conceptual Trajectories in The Logic of Sensation», Daniel W. Smith, in Francis Bacon
The Logic of Sensation, Gilles Deleuze, University of Minnesota Press, 2003
16 «Deleuze's Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality» by Daniel W. Smith, in Deleuze, A Critical
Reader, Paul Patton, Blackwell Publischers Ltd. 1996, p. 30
a primary, nonrational dimension of sensation. This distinction and the notion of sensation used by
Deleuze originally comes from the phenomenological tradition. A well known example which
highlights this distinction is the experiences of congenitally blind people who were given sight after
the operation to remove cataracts was developed.17
Initially such patients were afflicted by a painful chaos of forms and colors, a gaudy
confusion of visual sensations within which they could distinguish neither shapes nor space.
They would acquire a perception of the world only after an often-painful process of learning
and apprenticeship, during which they developed the schemata and “Gestalten” capable of
providing this prereflective sense experience with the coordinates familiar to ordinary
perception.18
This forms the background for Deleuze's theory of sensation, and it is interesting to note that the
description of the ‘directly given’ picture which Steiner gives as a boundary thought delimits a
similar cognitive situation as the one reported by the patiens. I think this points to a common trait in
the work of Steiner and Deleuze, namely the occupation with the pre-conscious organizing activity
within perceptual recognition, and the effort to understand and experience human consciousness
and the world as it is composed by practically "deconstructing experience" so to speak. Thereby
they both reveal a more fundamental level of our thinking capacity and of our being as a composite
of sensation, at least it we take their work to be what they both claim it to be: empiricism, or more
precisly, a higher empiricism. And here they both regard art as an experimental approach to this
existential domain of experience.
"One can think of the whole of Deleuze's later work as an effort to define a logic of thought that
would be embodied in sensory relations" Reidar Due says19. And for Deleuze this embodied
thinking he calls a "thinking in terms of affects and percepts" and is what makes out the artistic
activity. Due writes that Deleuze:
conceives art as thought embodied in a sensory medium and sees philosophy as a practice of
formal construction analogues to art. Deleuze thereby seeks to define the medium of thought
independently of how thought is experienced, by seeing thought as the tracing of relations
within an abstract sensory space.20
17These are documentetd in the book Space and Sight by Marius von Senden, London Methuen, 1960
18 See note 15
19 Deleuze, Reidar Due, page 154, Polity Press 2007
20Ibid, page 154
Thus, for Deleuze the work of art is not an object, but thought materialized as sensations; it is "a
bloc of sensations, that is to say, a compound of percepts and affects” he and Guattari say in What is
philosophy?2117. In his philosophy he conceives of art as a practice which can draw us into the pre-
subjective becoming which is concealed by our subject-object consciousness, and he sees modern
art precisely as the attempt to leave the domain of representation and reach the situation of
becoming. This happens when our ordinary perception is destabilized and looses its ground, so to
speak, so that we begin to actively trace the relations within the sensory plane, as Due formulates it.
We then stop the simple registration of objects which characterizes the mode of representation, and
are forced to actively think inside the sensory medium. This procedure he studies in his work on art
and calls it to introduce "difference" into sensation in order to discover "syntheses prior to the
identities of figure and perception"2218. For these syntheses there exists no pre-established order to
identify with, no known figures or perceptions, and this is the fact why it forces us to leap into the
unknown zones of becomings, which always are at the edge of chaos.23
Art is constituted by this second type of sensation which are "a fundamental encounter", or rather it
composes with them. In this way the artist thinks in terms of affects and percepts, and this can be
understood in terms of a play of sensations which reveals not primarily a recognazionable object,
but this play itself, and thereby the "force" or "being of sensation".
It is in this way that art can be said to be "a sort of great laboratory for a higher empiricism"24. Art
can thus be a startpoint for an empiricism of the forces of the real world, as opposed to what is
generally taken to be empiricism, which Deleuze calls "empirical representation" and which
operates inside our ordinary consciousness of representation. Accordingly he writes in Francis
Bacon The Logic of Sensation that
there is a community of the arts, a common problem. In art, and in painting as in music, it is
21What is Philosophy?,Deleuze/Guattari, Columbia University Press, 1994, page 164
22This is discussed by John Racjmann in Pure Immanence, Essays on a Life, Gilles Deleuze, Zone Books, New York
2001, page 15
23Here I will limit myself to this preliminary level of the theory of sensation, but it would be a highly interesting path
to pursue it into the concepts of force and intensity and «the immanent non-organic life of things», all concepts
which occur frequently in Deleuze's writings. Here we might find a correspondence to Steiner's concept of the
etheric, at least it seems that Ben-Aharon suggest this in his Colmar lecture (se note 13). When Deleuze says that art
is a higher empiricism, a transcendental science of the sensible, it could look like there is corespondence between
Steiner's method and this higher empiricism. In any case I think we should take it seriously that Deleuze calls
himself an empiricist, and that he concieves this outside what we usually take to be empiricism which he calls
empirical representation. On this background concepts like "immanent non-organic life of things" are highly
interesting, and I belive should be taken not a literary creations, but precise concepts derived out of experience.
24 Pure Immanence, Essays on A Life, page 15
not a matter of reproducing or inventing forms, but of capturing forces. [...] How will
sensation be able to sufficiently turn in on itself, relax or contract itself, so as to capture
these nongiven forces in what it gives us, to make us sense these insensible forces, and raise
itself to its own conditions?25
This higher empiricism of Deleuze I believe can be compared to the method of spiritual science
which Steiner presents. As Steiner says, in order cognize the immanent spiritual nature of the world
in a consciousness prior to representation “the soul must be familiar with the inner process that
combines psychic representation with sense-impression; so familiar that it can hold at arms length
the influx of the sense-impressions themselves (or of their echoes in after-experience) into the act of
representing.”26 I believe this characterize the same cognitive situation as Deleuze delimits when he
writes that art is a bloc of percepts and affects which creates the conditions for discovering
syntheses prior to the identities of figure and perception.
The conception of art which Deleuze presents has therefore many similarities with that of Steiner's
"sinnliche Erscheinung in der Form der Idee". Both see art as something which forces us to realize a
different kind of thinking embodied within a sensory medium, and which therefore can take us
towards a transformation where, as Ben-Aharon says, perception and thinking are transformed into
each other; "thinking is perceived through living sense-perception, and sense-perception is thought
through living thinking"27 so that both the world, our self and the border between them are mutually
transformed into a new becoming.28
It is important that Deleuze developed much of his philosophy and of course especially the
philosophy of art by engaging with contemporary works of art. His thinking may therefore be seen
as a explication of the development within twentieth Century art. And I think that if we now
compare the tendencies in the development of 20th Century art to the above, we can trace a
development towards the realization of the event of becoming which runs through Deleuze's
writings and which is also the goal of the spiritual science of Steiner.
25 Francs Bacon The Logic of Sensation, Gilles Deleuze, Continuum Books, New York 2005, page 40
26See note 10
27See note 12
28Compare for example with this passage from The New Experience of the Supersensible: "At this moment of crossing
the threshold of sense-perception a most beautiful and immensely rewarding experience takes hold of us. Human
percieving consciousness becomes light, gently radiating and circulating, weaving - and that is the unusual
impression - inside and around, the centre and circumference of what was the object. It merges with the expanded
essence of the object that was formerly only thought, but now is experienced in living light. But now also the eye
becomes an 'object' of perception for an expanded, new eye. The eye is experienced detached, separated from the
body, and it swims on the rays of its own light into the living, light-pulsating space of the object, becoming its eye of
etheric apperance, serving its unfolding being." The New Experience of the Supersensible, p. 91
From the point of view of representation, clearly there has taken place a gradual process of
deconstruction or decomposition of form during this Century. Most obvious we can see this in the
visual arts, but a similar process can be found in literature, in music, and in all other forms of
expression. Modern art is in general more concerned with the elements of figures and perceptions,
then with the repertoire of figures and representations and the laws inherited from the tradition
(tonality in music for example). From the point of view of recognition and representation we
gradually draw towards chaos.
We can therefore say that by this development we have reached a state of affaires within the artistic
situation of our time which resembles and converges with the boundary thought-experience. Both
this epistemological situation and the artistic situation point at the act of formalization which works
out the structural dispositions within sensible experience. The French philosopher Alain Badiou
says accordingly: “an artistic situation, in general, is always something like relation between a
chaotic disposition of sensibility in general (what is in the physical, what is in the audible, and in
general) and what is a form.”29 and another place: "the sense of form which belongs to the 20th
century, sees form as what the artistic act authorizes by way of new thinking. Form is therefore an
Idea as given in its material index, a singularity that can only be activated in the real grip of an
act."30
This means that, as Steiner also said about Goethe's conception, art is an operation of truth. Art in
this sense becomes an endeavour of knowledge and cognition, but this is of course not common-
sense understanding of knowledge as information or judgement, but of the experience of the process
of cognition. Truth not as representation, but truth concerned with the conditions of representation
as event: “...what is an artistic event? ...generally speaking, an artistic event, a real artistic event is a
change in the formula of the world....it’s a new current in the chaotic sensibility. It’s a new
disposition of the immanent relation between chaotic sensibility and formalization.”31
What can be said about the reason and motivation for all this? As Daniel Smith points out in the
already quoted passage from the introduction to Francis Bacon: Modern art and modern philosophy
can be said to have converged on a similar problem: both renounced the domain of representation
and instead took the conditions of representation as their object. As I have tried to show, these
conditions are the conditions of a specific form of consciousness, and the artistic development may
therefore be regarded as sign of a change or evolution at work in the general consciousness of
29 The Subject of Art, Alain Badiou, quoted from http://www.lacan.com/symptom6_articles/badiou.html, 28.10.09
30 The Century, Alain Badiou, Polity Press, Cambridge 2007, page 159
31 See note 29
humanity and the work of Steiner and Deleuze as attempts to follow and grasp this evolution; an
evolution towards the event of becoming, or as Steiner would say, towards man as the active co-
creator of the world-process.
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