“Savior’s Face: Starlight” (1921) by Alexei Jawlensky

Chers amis :

Here is a brief report from Section member Fred Dennehy concerning an international initiative to re-publish important works by Georg Kühlewind for our 21st century. Section leadership council members Fred Dennehy et Robert McKay are working on this jointly with other friends and members of the Section on this continent and elsewhere. Although Georg Kühlewind has been a very significant teacher for many senior Section members, his extensive work has not been recently celebrated or discussed in our Section meetings or conferences. It is heartening to hear news of this exciting Section initiative, and I hope that the idea of a conference devoted to Georg Kühlewind’s works can move forward successfully in North America or elsewhere.

Fred Dennehy’s Report on the Initiative:

“We have put together a fundraising group for the publication of books by and about Georg Kühlewind, and to promote a symposium/conference about his work. Anyone interested should contact me or Rob McKay. [Editor’s note: for reasons of privacy and security, I have not shared the contact email addresses for Fred or Rob. Those active in the Section know how to reach out to them or they should contact me directly if they want the contact information for Fred or Rob.]

 

“We have arranged for the publication of a second edition of four of his ‘basic’ books: Stages of Consciousness; The Life of the Soul; Becoming Aware of the Logos; et The Logos Structure of the World. They are now available from SteinerBooks.  We are also having translated and published the biography of Georg by Laszlo Boszormenyi, as well as Weihnachten, a Christmas book by Georg.  In the long term, we would like to have published all of Georg’s untranslated work.  We are now beginning the process of arranging for a Kuhlewind Conference somewhere in North America in 2027 or 2028.”

Related News . . . 

This is a good place to remind folks that Fred Dennehy fera une présentation sur Owen Barfield at one of our Section Zoom meetings scheduled for January 2027. Keep an eye on the Section meeting schedule for the date. Fred has presented Owen Barfield at our Section meetings in past years, and his 2021 Section meeting presentation on Barfield’s life and philosophy is one of the most popular videos on The Literary Arts YouTube channel. For those who missed it, here it is for viewing:

“Owen Barfield: The Soul of a Word” / Lecture by Fred Dennehy. Click here for more Barfield events at the Section meetings.

In addition to his expertise with the works of Georg Kühlewind et Owen Barfield, Fred is also an accomplished Shakespearean actor and playwright. You can find his previous Section presentations on The Actor’s Process et William Shakespeare by clicking the highlighted words in this sentence.

Georg Kühlewind (1924–2006)

Chemist, meditation teacher, and student of the Logos

George Kühlewind with Rene Querido at the entrance to Philadelphia Hall, Rudolf Steiner College, Fair Oaks, CA. [Historical photo contributed by Section leadership council member Gayle Davis, former President of the College.]

Readers who know Rudolf Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom will remember the moment in its third chapter when thinking turns to observe itself. Rudolf Steiner calls this an exceptional state, because in ordinary life we never watch our thinking while we think. Georg Kühlewind spent half a century turning that exceptional state into a practice. He made it something that can be trained, deepened, and shared.

A Life Across Borders

Kühlewind was born György Székely in Budapest on March 6, 1924, into a secular Jewish family. As a teenager he was drawn to psychoanalysis, Jung, and the history of religions, and at seventeen he studied with the mythologist Karl Kerényi. In 1944, after forced labor service, he was deported to German concentration camps, including Buchenwald. He was liberated by American troops in April 1945.

He first met anthroposophy at eighteen. After the war he returned to it through Steiner’s Truth and Science et Goethe’s World Conception. Then came the decisive encounter: Steiner’s 1908 Hamburg lectures on the Gospel of John. For thirty years Kühlewind taught and researched physical chemistry at the Technical University of Budapest. Under communism, anthroposophy could not be practiced openly in Hungary, so he wrote in German under the name “Kühlewind.” In his later decades he lectured widely in Europe and the Americas. He died in Budapest on January 15, 2006.

Thinking in the Present Tense

At the center of Kühlewind’s work is a distinction familiar from La philosophie de la liberté: the finished thought versus the living act of thinking. Ordinary consciousness, he argued, lives in the past tense. It deals with what has already been thought, felt, or perceived. The activity that produces those results stays hidden from it.

Kühlewind located the key to that activity in attention, which he regarded as the most direct expression of the I. His exercises in concentration, perception, and meditation all aim to strengthen and purify attention. The meditant learns to dwell in the moment before a thought hardens into a result. What Steiner described as “living thinking” becomes, in Kühlewind’s hands, a concrete path of practice which Kühlewind discussed widely with many individuals at the end of the 20th century. In Northern California, he worked closely with Friedemann Schwarzkopf, and he visited the Rudolf Steiner College and the community several times. Waldorf teachers may remember faculty meetings in which he was present as a senior advisor and sage.

Becoming Aware of the Logos

Perhaps Kühlewind’s best-known book in English is Becoming Aware of the Logos: The Way of St. John the Evangelist. In this book, Kühlewind reads the Prologue of John as a description of consciousness. 

In the beginning was the Word … and the Word was the true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.

When we understand a sentence, Kühlewind observed, we do not assemble meaning from sounds. We grasp the meaning first, and the words only point toward it. Every act of understanding therefore rests on a meaning-giving power that comes before language. That power is the Logos, the light present in every human knowing.

Here his epistemology meets Steiner’s Christology. In the John Gospel lectures, Steiner presents Christ as the Logos who makes the human “I AM” possible. Kühlewind carries this into the field of inner experience. The free, self-aware act of thinking that La philosophie de la liberté describes is where the Logos becomes conscious of itself in the human being, one might argue. In this context, freedom and the Logos experience turn out to be two sides of a single event. Kühlewind developed the theme further in The Logos-Structure of the World, which treats language as a model for understanding reality itself.

Possible Section Presentations in 2027 . . . ?

As I said, the Section has not, to my knowledge, ever taken up Georg Kühlewind’s contributions to the Literary Arts & Humanities in a formal sense — not because we don’t value those contributions, we just never had an opportunity for friends and members to do this. Now, with the good news shared by Fred and Rob, perhaps friends and members can contribute to this renaissance of interest in this important commentator and philosopher!

10.05.26