New article coming soon. In the meantime...

Some resources I've come across recently: Matt Segall on threefolding, life lessons from Goethe, and some new, AI-translated(!) articles by Rudolf Steiner.

Hey all — I’m still in the midst of setting up a new home and starting a new job, but be assured: I’m working on a new article and hoping to send it out in the next couple weeks. In the meantime, here are a few interesting things I’ve come across recently.

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A really nice overview of social threefolding

Matt Segall is a process philosopher and associate professor at the California Institute for Integral Studies. Recently, he met up with a community of integral thinkers online and gave them a great introduction to threefolding:

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Celebrating Goethe’s 275th birthday

Unfortunately, I didn’t know it was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 275th birthday on August 28th so I missed all the parties (noooo!!!!). For those of you who don’t know Goethe, he was a German renaissance man of the 18th century who was way ahead of his time. Though he’s mostly only known for his literary works, his greatest achievement was in developing new ways of perceiving the world. He developed an approach to science that was a kind of disciplined listening to the things themselves, what he called a “delicate empiricism.” The phenomena of the world are always speaking themselves into the world — can we hear what they’re saying? This approach will be vital for bringing healing to the natural world in our time, as well as for bringing healing to the social world.

For anyone interested in finding out a little more more about Goethe,¹ a friend recently shared a video with me that gives a nice picture of who he was — especially the width of his interests and gifts. Of course, it doesn’t really touch on the depths of those gifts, but you can’t expect everything from a 10 minute video.

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Important new works by Steiner… but AI-translated

During his life, Steiner wrote and lectured extensively about social change. Many of those books have been published in English, but some of the most interesting ones are still only in German.

Recently, the Rudolf Steiner Archive published a number of articles and pamphlets that Steiner (and others) wrote during the height of the threefolding movement. Each of these articles delves into a particular aspect of the threefolding work at that time, so they’re super fascinating (especially for those of us working closely with threefolding… but I think they’ll also be interesting for folks new to the ideas.)

But there’s a significant caveat: The writings have all been translated by AI. The publishers at the Archive have told me that these translations have been edited by human beings, but personally I would much, much rather just have them all translated by human beings in the first place. That said, the Archive is making this important work available, so I’m also very grateful, but I think readers need to be aware of the difference. What is that difference? Here’s how I think about it:

The poet Robert Bly once described how only a poet can translate another poet. Of course anyone fluent in Spanish can give a basic rendering of Pablo Neruda, but what does it mean to convey the consciousness of one of his poems — the delicate weaving of words that can suddenly lift us up into new worlds? A poem is like a spell, an incantation. It’s meant to awaken the reader, and to do so, it matters how the words are spoken. If they’re not spoken right — if they’re not spoken by someone who grasps their meaning and is also gifted with language — then the spell won’t work.

This isn’t the case with everything. Technical writings — an owner’s manual or recipe book — can probably be translated by anyone. But anything with deeper meaning needs to be translated by someone who grasps that meaning (or is at least striving to grasp it). Otherwise, we’re not doing justice to the work. We aren’t being fully faithful to it.

Needless to say, AI doesn’t inwardly grasp anything, so of course it can’t do justice to the depth of meaning embedded in Steiner’s work. And so I pray that these new AI-translated versions of Steiner will not replace the human-translated versions that would have eventually come — I hope that SteinerBooks and the Rudolf Steiner Press will not neglect these works because they now exist in this partial form. I hope instead, that people will read them for what they are — incredibly fascinating, but entirely incomplete previews of Steiner’s work — and that they’ll only spur us on to see the importance of Steiner’s work and to support its full publishing.

If you want to take a look, you can find these articles and pamphlets here.

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That’s it for now. I’ll be back in touch with a regular article soon!

— Seth

1. And for anyone interested in finding out even more about Goethe, I’d recommend taking a look at The Nature Institute and reading some of Steiner’s basic books on Goethe, especially Goethean Science and The Science of Knowing.