Kunzru’s Red Pill: An Image of the Human Being

Questions of Courage

In this episode Nathaniel Williams turns toward Hari Kunzru’s novel Red Pill, published in 2020, as an image of what contemporary human experience. It depicts a journey of a writer who is driven to confront unsettling questions about life, the place of violence and human dignity while society around him is seething. To join with the world, we are given into the jaws of violence, even if it is simply with the decay of our body. To take the world into ourselves, into our consciousness, takes away its reality. Behold, the human being, and a description of contemporary experience. Such an image of the human being was characterized one hundred years ago this month in an introductory course on Anthroposophy given by Rudolf Steiner who suggests, “The human being stands … in double darkness, and the question arises: Where is the other world to which I belong?”.

References from this episode:

- Hari Kunzru. Red Pill. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2020.

- Rudolf Steiner. Anthroposophy and the Inner Life: An Esoteric Introduction. Rudolf Steiner Press, 2015. (Formerly Published as Anthroposophy: an Introduction).

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