The Unqualified I: A Spiritual Ethic Against Racism
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To see what matters most, we must learn to look again, and differently. The obvious is never the fullness of truth. As J.M. Barrie reminds us in Finding Neverland, when young Peter dismisses a loyal companion by saying, “It’s just a dog,” Barrie interrupts him sharply: “Just a dog? Just? Porthos dreams of being a bear, and you want to shatter those dreams by saying he's just a dog? What a horrible candle-snuffing word. That's like saying, 'He can't climb that mountain, he's just a man,' or, 'That's not a diamond, it's just a rock.' Just.”
This scene captures something deeply human: the terrible violence hidden in the word "just"—how it can shrink a soul to the size of a label. When we use the word that way, we don’t merely describe; we confine. We snuff out a person’s possibility, their mystery, their becoming.
The Hydrangea and the Soil
Think of a hydrangea bush. You’ve probably seen one—those flower clusters that bloom in pink, blue, purple, or white. But here’s the wonder: they’re all the same plant. The flower’s color changes depending on the soil. If the soil is acidic, the flowers turn blue. If it’s alkaline, they bloom pink. The same hydrangea, different blossoms.
Now think of the human family. Across the Earth we bloom in different shades and shapes. Climate, geography, soil, and diet have shaped us into this spectacular diversity. These external differences are the beautiful flowering of the human plant. But just like hydrangeas, the human being is one—diverse in form, unified in essence.
Sometimes people forget this and say things like, "They’re just a..." or "That’s nothing but a..." These words try to turn a person into a category. They say, "This is all you are."
But the truth is: “Just” is a lie.
Each of us has something inside—what Rudolf Steiner called the unqualified "I"—that can never be fully explained, labeled, or predicted. This "I" is the part of us that chooses, loves, creates, and suffers. It’s the part that learns, forgives, hopes. And every human being has it. Not because of their race or gender or job or beliefs. But because they are human.
Racism and other kinds of prejudice happen when we forget this. When we stop seeing the living being and only talk about the surface. When we call someone "just" a refugee, or "only" a laborer, or "nothing but" a color.
But the truth is this: the real work of life is learning to see the soul in others.
Seeing the Human Being
Imagine meeting someone not as a role or a label, but as a mystery—a presence, a Thou. This is the ethic of reverent perception, of setting aside our assumptions in order to see who is truly there. It is what Martin Buber calls the I–Thou relationship: a spiritual encounter in which the subject does not objectify the other. In contrast to this is the cold flattening of “nothing-buttery,” as Owen Barfield described it—the habit of reducing a person to a function, type, or label. “Nothing-buttery,” Barfield said, “is not science. It is bad poetry.”
Steiner, too, warns against this reductive consciousness. In Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path, he writes, “Insofar as the human being thinks, they are the unqualified 'I'.” The I cannot be captured by surface descriptions or social classifications. It is not a construct of ancestry or ideology, but the free spiritual being who acts in moral intuition. This is the foundation of what Steiner called ethical individualism: to live in love toward our actions and to let others live in understanding.
Elsewhere, Steiner makes the comparison between a dull plant and a so-called “dull” human being, reminding us that just as a plant’s appearance depends on invisible soil and light conditions, so too a person’s expression may depend on hidden factors of destiny, trauma, or deprivation. We must not confuse dulled expression for absence of soul. Behind every outer life is the full mystery of the I, waiting to unfold. To judge the “dull man,” Steiner implies, is to misread what the spiritual eye has not yet learned to see.
This way of seeing demands that we renounce stereotype and assumption. Goethe’s term for it was Anschauung, or “exact sensorial imagination,” a form of loving attention in which one lets the phenomenon speak for itself. Alex Podolinsky calls this transformation "Active Perception," writing, "What must be seen ‘outside’ can only be found when the passive subjective gaze is awakened to Active Perception."
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke captures the spiritual courage of this perceptive transformation when he writes, “You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born. Fear not the strangeness you feel. The future must enter you long before it happens.” To see someone without category, to allow the future to enter our perception of them, is itself a form of love.
This seeing is not passive observation—it is moral awakening. It asks us to look at each person not as a member of a type, but as an individual radiating from within. It is the beginning of all real relationship, and it is how the world is redeemed, one act of reverent vision at a time.
Love, Sacrifice, and the Death of Type
There is a deeper law at work here, written not in culture but in spirit. Early Christianity teaches that in the Incarnation, something changed—not just for Christians, but for the whole human story. St. Paul writes in his letter to the Galatians, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” And Origen reflects on this same spiritual truth: “Christ came to gather into one all nations and to abolish the former division.”
Valentin Tomberg, echoing this current, writes in Meditations on the Tarot, “All blood-rights, all traditions, all privileges of race and nation, are annulled by the cross.” To insist on inherited identity as the foundation of personhood is to deny the possibility of spiritual rebirth. It is to ignore the very purpose of incarnation: to become more than we have been given.
But how do we perceive this reality in the face of a culture that constantly tempts us to reduce others? Charles Taylor speaks to our loss of spiritual seeing in modernity. In Cosmic Connections, he describes the human need for reconnection with meaning—“not just any mode of awareness of the surrounding world, but one shot through with joy, significance, inspiration.”
To see this way—to love this way—requires sacrifice. Rilke writes, “I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not complete this last one, but I give myself to it.” The giving of ourselves is how this love becomes real.
James Baldwin, from within the brokenness of a world bent on classification, insists: “I am not your Negro.” And elsewhere he urges: “What you’ve got to remember is what you’re looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be.”
Love, in this context, is not mere sentiment—it is active perception. It is not about external agreement. It is not about emotional comfort. It is about sacrifice. Love has never been about merit. As the Gospel reminds us, it is no virtue to love those who love us; “even the Gentiles do that” (Matt. 5:46–47). Love is proved when we love our enemies—when we will their good, even when they do not will ours.
Alex Podolinsky reminds us that perception itself can be a moral act. In Active Perception he writes, “the subjective and the objective unite… Human intelligence is not an abstract faculty of the mind, but a conscious awakening of every human organ of observation—including the intellect itself.”
To see truly is to love.
To love is to refuse to reduce.
To refuse to reduce is to take up your cross.
To take up your cross is to let go of your “type,” your fear, your superiority—so that all of us might live.
“Greater love hath no one than this, that they lay down their life for their friends.”
To love like this is to perceive the Other not as category, but as another I.
And when we do that, the world begins anew.
Bibliography
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Barfield, Owen. Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988.
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Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Translated by Ronald Gregor Smith. New York: Scribner, 1958.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Scientific Studies. Edited by Douglas Miller. New York: Suhrkamp, 1988.
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Podolinsky, Alex. Active Perception. Australia: Biodynamic Agricultural Association.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet. Translated by Stephen Mitchell. New York: Vintage, 1986.
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Taylor, Charles. Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2024.
Tomberg, Valentin. Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism. Translated by Robert A. Powell. New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 2002.
