From Philosophy to Spiritual Science – Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon on Gilles Deleuze and Rudolf Steiner

Rudolf Steiner conceived of his work as a ‘spiritual science’. In his book on the history of philosophy 'The Riddles of Philosophy', he writes that one can expect philosophy in the future to develop in the direction of a spiritual science. Hundred years after Steiner the question arises whether such a development can be seen. The following article explores this question on the basis of the work of Dr Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon. Ben-Aharon claims that in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze such a development can be perceived. Taking Ben-Aharon’s work as point of departure, the article explores this claim by focusing on Steiner’s idea of a living death process constitutive of human consciousness and shows how this can be found also in Deleuze’s thinking. According to Steiner, what he terms an ‘imaginative cognition’ is related to the experience of this process. The notion of a spiritual science is then discussed with regard to the works of Deleuze and his co-author Félix Guattari and their notion of a ‘nomad’ science of intensity and the virtual. Ben-Aharon’s reading of Deleuze and Guattari is contextualized by Ben-Aharon’s own account of the creation of imaginative cognition. This shows how the idea of an immanent relation between life and death can be brought to bear on Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that philosophy creates a new virtuality. The article ends by outlining Ben-Aharon’s critique of Deleuze, pointing to a difference between Steiner’s spiritual science and Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of impersonal intensive individuation without any identity.