Questions of Courage

Bergson, intrigued by the riddle in the differences between lived experience and abstract explanation, forged a remarkable path of insight and exploration through his life. This short video offers a short impression of the riddles that he treated like seeds, which he grew into unique vision of evolution and human freedom, and the origin of matter as creative life.  

References: 

Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution. (North Chelmsford, MA: Courier Corporation) 

and An Introduction to Metaphysics. (Hackett Publishing). 

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this episode the new Pegasus Project is introduced which involves the fabrication of a new generation of analogue projection instruments, the creation of an ensemble of light artists, the collaboration with an ensemble of singers and a tour of schools and youth groups. Reflecting on current screen culture and technology use among young people an unusual area of opportunity presents itself here, something highlighted by testimony from young people who have been involved in earlier iterations of the project. The project timeline and opportunities for collaboration and support are described as well. 

References: 

https://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/ 

Veit, W.; Stuten, J. Bewegte Bilder: der Zyklus “Metamorphosen der Furcht” von Jan Stuten: Entwurf zu einer neuen Licht-Spiel-Kunst nach einer Idee von Rudolf Steiner; Urachhaus, 1993. 

Haidt, J. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness; Random House, 2024. 

Mattis, O. Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900; [Published on the Occasion of the Exhibition “Visual Music”], Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, [23 June - 11. September 2005], the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Thames & Hudson, 2005.

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.

Nationalism is one of the most powerful aspects of political life, connected with the defining conflicts of today. This episode is dedicated to exploring the differences between nations and states, how they are

confused, and how they have come to be seen as intrinsically bound up together in recent centuries. While there is a largely unconscious conventional notion that nations should ideally have their own states, there is a way to look at things that reveals the opposite. It shows that the fusion of nations and states is not an ideal but a source of conflict and the degradation of national culture itself, and a central problem of political thoughts and life today. 

References:

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London - New York: Verso, 2006.

Gottlieb, Gidon. Nation Against State: A New Approach to Ethnic Conflicts and the Decline of Sovereignty. Council on Foreign Relations, 1993.

Jefferson, Thomas. Thomas Jefferson: Writings (LOA #17): Autobiography / Notes on the State of Virginia / Public and Private Papers / Addresses / Letters. Library of America, 1984.

Steiner, Rudolf. Towards Social Renewal: Rethinking the Basis of Society. Rudolf Steiner Press, 1999.

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.

This episode explores some of author Marilynne Robinson’s thoughts about the importance of seeing people as spiritual beings and how this relates to the history of civil and political rights in North America, and especially the USA. These thoughts are connected with current tensions within both US universities and society at large, and the role that artistic education plays in being able to experience a deeper, spiritual facet of human beings.

References:

Rachel Feintzeig, (2025) Opinion | Zombies Are Better Than the Alternative. The New York Times, 25 May. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/opinion/last-of-us-finale.html, accessed 4 June 2025.

Marilynne Robinson, (2010) Absence of Mind: Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. (Yale University Press).

Marilynne Robinson, (2019) Which Way to the City on a Hill? The New York Review of Books. Available at https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/07/18/which-way-city-hill/, accessed 4 June 2025.

Rudolf Steiner(2006) Becoming the Archangel Michael’s Companions: Rudolf Steiner’s Challenge to the Younger Generation (CW 217). (SteinerBooks).

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.

This episode explores challenging experiences that young people can have when they first enter college and university with enthusiasm for existential, heartfelt questions. It is not uncommon for young people to feel that the attitudes and methods they meet in the classroom and their professors cannot reach deep enough into the questions they are most passionate about and driven to explore. This can lead to disappointment and a temptation to turn away from their passions for knowledge, growth and understanding. There are, however, ideas, orientations and contemporary calls for expanding the understanding of science in ways that can accommodate the exploration of deeper questions and riddles that are not only intellectual but matters of the heart. Jeffrey Kripal’s suggestion that a new school of the “Superhumanities” is called for, as well as Hubert Dreyfuss and Charles Taylor’s ideas of Pluralist Robust Realism are introduced as examples.

References:

Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor (2015) Retrieving Realism. (Harvard University Press).

William James (2008) Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy. (Cambridge Scholars Publisher).

Jeffrey Kripal (2022) The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities. (University of Chicago 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.