The
audience attending this series of lectures in 1920 was at once
informed by Steiner that he proposed to consider the connections
between natural science and social renewal.
Everyone
agrees, he says, that such a renewal requires a renewal of our
thinking (one must remember that he was speaking of the groping
and soul-searching that followed the great and terrible war of
1914–18), yet not everyone “imagines something clear
and distinct when speaking in this way.”
Steiner
then sketches rapidly the effects of the scientific world-view on
the modern social order. Scientific progress has made us very
confident of our analytical powers. Inanimate nature, we are
educated to believe, will eventually become transparently
intelligible. It will yield all its secrets under scientific
examination, and we will be able to describe it with mathematical
lucidity. After we have conquered the inorganic we will proceed
to master the organic world by the same means.
The
path of scientific progress however has not been uniformly
smooth. Steiner reminds us that by the end of the 19th century
doubts concerning the origins of scientific knowledge had arisen
within the scientific community itself, and in a famous and
controversial lecture the physiologist du Bois-Reymond asked the
question, How does consciousness arise out of material processes?
What is the source of the consciousness with which we examine the
outer world? To this du Bois-Reymond answers, Ignorabimus
— we shall never know.
In
this Ignorabimus Steiner finds a parallel to an earlier
development, that of medieval Scholasticism. Scholastic thinking
had made its way to the limits of the supersensible world. Modern
natural science has also reached a limit. This limit is
delineated by two concepts: “matter”— which is
everywhere assumed to be within the sensory realm but nowhere
actually to be found — and consciousness, which is assumed
to originate within the same world, “although no one can
comprehend how.” Can we fathom the fact of consciousness
with explanations conceived in observing external nature? Steiner
argues that we cannot. He suggests that scientific research is
entangling itself in a web, and that only outside this web can we
find the real world. The great victories of science have subdued
our minds. We accept the all pervading scientific method. It has
transformed the earth. Nevertheless it seems incapable of
understanding its own deepest sources. Scientific method as we of
the modern world define it can bring us only to the Ignorabimus
because it is powerless to explain the consciousness that directs
it. In our study of nature, and by means of our concept of
matter, we have made everything very clear, but this clarity does
not give us Man. Him we have lost. And the lucidity to which we
owe our great successes in the study of the external world is
rejected by consciousness itself. For in the depths of
consciousness there lies a will, and this will revolts when lucid
science tries to “think” Man as it thinks external
nature.
To
conclude from this that Steiner is “anti-science”
would be a great mistake. To him science is a necessary, indeed
indispensable stage in the development of the human spirit. The
scientific examination of the external world awakens
consciousness to clear concepts and it is by means of clear
conceptual thinking that we become fully human. Spiritual
development requires a full understanding of pure thought, and
pure thought is thought devoid of sensory impressions. “Countless
philosophers have expounded the view that pure thinking does not
exist, but is bound to contain traces, however diluted, of sense
perception. A strong impression is left that philosophers who
maintain this have never really studied mathematics, or gone into
the difference between analytical and empirical physics,”
Steiner writes. Mathematical thought is thought detached from the
sense world, and as it is entirely based upon rules of reason
that are universal it offers spiritual communion to mankind, as
well as a union with reality. It is moreover a free
activity. Spiritual training, says Steiner, reveals it to be not
only sense-free but also brain-free. The operations of thought
are directed by spiritual powers. Pure thinking leads to the
discovery of freedom and leads us to the realm of spirit. And
Steiner tells us explicitly that out of sense-free thinking
“there can flow impulses to moral action. ... One
experiences pure spirit by observing, by actually observing how
moral forces flow into sense-free thinking.” This is
something very different from mystical experience, for it is a
result of spiritual training, of a sort of scientific discipline
through which we discover more organs of knowledge than are
available to those who limit themselves, as modern philosophers
do, to scientific orthodoxy and to ordinary consciousness. In the
last lecture of the present series Steiner speaks of advanced
forms of consciousness, of a more acute inner activity, and of
higher forms of knowledge.
Contemporary
thinkers are often strongly attracted to these higher forms. They
approach them enthusiastically, frequently write of them vividly
but in the end reject them as retrograde or atavistic, unworthy
of a fully accredited modern philosopher.
Paul
Valéry, a poet who devoted years of his life to the study
of mathematics and who wrote interestingly on Descartes and
Pascal, provides us with an excellent example of this in his
Address in Honor of Goethe. Goethe fascinates Valéry,
for Goethe too was a poet who found it necessary to go beyond
poetry — “the great apologist of the world of
Appearances,” Valéry calls him. He says, “I
sometimes think that there exists for some people, as there
existed for him, an external life which has an intensity
and a depth at least equal to the intensity and depth that we
ascribe to the inner darkness and the mysterious discoveries of
the ascetics and the Sufis.” Goethe is an investigative and
not merely a reactive poet. Valéry greatly admires his
botanical work, seeing in it one of “the profound nodal
points of his great mind.” He goes on to say, “this
desire to trace in living things a will to metamorphosis may have
been derived from his early contact with certain doctrines, half
poetic, half esoteric, which were highly esteemed by the ancients
and which, at the end of the eighteenth century, initiates took
to cultivating again. The rather seductive if extremely imprecise
idea of Orphism, the magical idea of assuming the existence of
some unknown hidden principle of life, some tendency towards a
higher form of life in every animate and inanimate thing; the
idea that a spirit was fermenting in every particle of reality
and that it was therefore not impossible to work by the ways of
the spirit on everything and every being insofar as it contains a
spirit, is among the ideas which bear witness to the persistence
of a kind of primitive reasoning and at the same time of an
impulse which of its nature generates poetry or personification.
Goethe appears to have been deeply imbued with the feeling of
this power, which satisfied the poet
in him and stimulated the
naturalist.”
What
Valéry assumes here is that there is only one single
legitimate method of examining natural phenomena. As a poet he
sympathizes with imaginative knowledge, as a thinker he strikes a
note of regret and even condolence. “It is one of the
clearest examples of transition from poetic thought to scientific
theory, or of a fact brought to light by way of a harmony
discovered by intuition. Observation verifies what the inner
artist has divined. ... But his great gift of analogy came into
conflict with his logical faculties.” And the logical
faculties, strictly circumscribed, must be obeyed. Magic and
primitive reasoning, alas, will not do says the analytical
intellect of Valéry.
Steiner
had devoted many years of study to Goethe. He was the editor of
Goethe's scientific works and in his lectures often refers to
him. And there is no nostalgia for “Orphism” in
Steiner, no “magic” or “primitive reasoning.”
He too is a modern thinker. What distinguishes him from most
others is his refusal to stop at what he calls “the
boundary of the material world.” And how does one pass
beyond this boundary? By a discipline that takes us from ordinary
consciousness and familiarizes us with consciousness of another
kind, by finding the path that leads us into Imagination. “It
is possible to pursue this path in a way consonant with Western
life,” he writes, “if we attempt to surrender
ourselves completely to the world of outer phenomena, so that we
allow them to work upon us without thinking about them, but still
perceiving them. In ordinary waking life, you will agree, we are
constantly perceiving, but actually in the very process of doing
so we are continually saturating our percepts with concepts; in
scientific thinking we interweave percepts and concepts entirely
systematically, building up systems of concepts. ... One can
become capable of such acute inner activity that one can exclude
and suppress conceptual thinking from the process of perception
and surrender oneself to bare percepts.” This is not a
depreciation of thought. Rather, it releases the imagination. One
“acquires a potent psychic force ‘when one is able’
to absorb the external world free from concepts.” Steiner
says, “Man is given over to the external world continually,
from birth onwards. Nowadays this giving-over of oneself to the
external world is held to be nothing but abstract perception or
abstract cognition. This is not so. We are surrounded by a world
of color, sound and warmth and by all kinds of sensory
impressions.” The cosmos communicates with us also through
color, sound and warmth. “Warmth is something other than
warmth; light something other than light in the physical sense;
sound is something other than physical sound. Through our sensory
impressions we are conscious only of what I would term external
sound and external color. And when we surrender ourselves to
nature we do not encounter the ether-waves, atoms and so on of
which modern physics and physiology dream; rather, it is
spiritual forces that are at work, forces that fashion us between
birth and death into what we are as human beings.” I have
thought it best not to interpose myself but to allow Steiner to
speak for himself, for he is more than a thinker, he is an
initiate and only he is able to communicate what he has
experienced. The human mind, he tells us, must learn to will pure
thinking, but it must learn also how to set conceptual thinking
aside and to live within the phenomena. “It is through
phenomenology, and not abstract metaphysics, that we attain
knowledge of the spirit by consciously observing, by raising to
consciousness, what we would otherwise do unconsciously; by
observing how through the sense world spiritual forces enter into
our being and work formatively upon it.”
We
cannot even begin to think of social renewal until we have
considered these questions. What is reality in the civilized
West? “A world of outsides without insides,” says
Owen Barfield, one of the best interpreters of Steiner. A world
of quantities without qualities, of souls devoid of mobility and
of communities which are more dead than alive.
Saul
Bellow
The Boundaries of Natural Science – by Rudolf Steiner
