Interesting article by Jamie:
On the origins of Biodynamics. Steiner usually get the bulk of the credit. But not rightfully so.
Tom
It’s a bit too simple though.
Jamie is right that the lectures were never intended to be practical farming guides but that’s a bit of a red herring. Steiner never claimed that they were.
Steiner was born in a rural area and moved to Vienna as a kid, where he met a mystical guy who collected herbs and that relationship affected his later life. As he grew up, Steiner watched the peasantry disappear as the world industrialized in the late 1800s and early 1900s. But those peasants disappeared only to become the proletariat - the industrial working class.
This bothered Steiner because he felt that human’s original and proper culture was based on nature but the new one was based on machines. So among other things, he became a socialist.
In the 1880s and 90’s the Socialist Worker’s Party had a Worker’s College and they hired Steiner to teach the workers there. He taught history and public speaking. His thinking was that that if the workers know their history and origins as peasants, they would be able to articulate it and stand up to the capitalists and petty bourgois.
Steiner actually taught at the college for a number of years but one day the administration figured out that he was basically undermining them with his philosophical ideas. He was teaching workers about the role of the individual in nature and he wasn’t bothering with class consciousness. Even worse, having the workers think for themselves and articulate their own thoughts was antithetical to creating a dictatorship of the proletariat, which relies on sheep-like stupidity.
So Steiner got fired.
But besides being a socialist, more importantly, Steiner was a mystic. He thought he was clairvoyant and thought that people were instinctively clairvoyant in earlier times. I guess he just ignored most of the Middle Ages and the Mongol invasions, since anyone who knew the plagues and slaughters were coming would have hidden somewhere. He knew a little bit about science and since nitrogen was the fertilizer people were using, he decided that it was nitrogen must be the thing that connected farmers and the earth, air, and water. He believed that with the rise of industrialization, people created distinctions between art and science and between the spiritual and the non-spiritual, and that we could all overcome that and go back to a truer experience of life. So he founded anthroposophy, which biodynamics came out of.
But he was not a farmer and knew it. He said he wished that he could be accepted as one because he felt that was a noble calling.
Nor did not want to go back completely to feudal times. Instead, he wanted to create something new, using the old principles of the peasants combined with modern “scientific” knowledge.
But he knew that he himself was not a farmer and consequently the practices of biodynamics was never something he was able to create or was interested in creating. He provided the “principles” only.
Of course, he was still goofy as hell IMHO.
Thanks for sharing that background, Greg. Steiner was even more of a woo/woo guy than I knew. More of a big picture guy. Interesting that the Socialists fired him.
Tom