Introduction
The eight lectures of Rudolf Steiner were
given at the Stuttgart Free University Courses between March
16th and 23rd, 1921. There were other subjects and also other
speakers. The invitation was directed to students and
scientists. One main intention is formulated by Steiner in
his concluding address: “We have attempted to introduce
the seminar work in such a way that perhaps it could really
be recognized that a genuine scientific spirit is our
aspiration”— that no sectarianism or desire to
found a new religion is at work ...
The time was
that of social upheaval in Germany after World War I. In that
period Steiner and his co-workers were intensely active in
scientific, social, educational and medical work. In the
brief span of not quite seven years after the end of World
War I (1918) and Steiner's death in 1925, an incredible
amount of advice and concrete instruction was given; but also
given were new tasks as to what to investigate, individual
prescriptions for doctors (including curative education), to
farmers for what is now called Bio-dynamic agriculture and
last but not least to Waldorf Education in lectures and
regular teacher's conferences.
Growing
recognition of Waldorf Education and Bio-dynamic Farming
— to name just two representative fields — lead
quite naturally to the question: in which form were these
things given? Thus, there is a legitimate demand for the
lectures given in that period.
Among the
different lecture series of that time the one offered here is
of special methodological nature. Already the long
title gives an idea of the scope of subjects treated.
There could be
raised an objection: Mathematics has changed in the more
than 70 years that have elapsed. Indeed, it has changed
as never before a science has changed its methods, its object
and general outlook. No science has moved farther away from
the intuitive notions of space and of number which had been
the basis of geometry and calculus as developed in the 2000
years before our century.
A similar
objection can be raised with regard to the
Experiment. Even the hectic search in the forties of
this century for the properties of uranium-235 and of
plutonium — both didn't even exist in weighable
quantities — was still straightforward experimentation
of the known type even though refined e.g. to purity of
ingredients unthinkable up to then. But compared with them,
the more recent experiments at Livermore, CERN, Dubna have
completely different goals, quite aside of their difference
in method. They do not handle any longer material substances
and do not investigate properties of such, they are directed
to hypothetical particles like “quarks.”
These, often
enough, do not “exist” in a form similar to that
of a physical solid, they exist “virtually”; they
are thought of first and
“produced” afterwards —
and by that their outcome verifies a theory or, as to that,
refutes it if the particles in question do not turn up, let
us say, in predicted numbers. But coming back for a moment to
pure mathematics. What is said in the first lecture about the
certainty of mathematical knowledge is today far more evident
than in those days when still one could believe that
mathematical concepts were abstracted from Nature
(like John Locke's contention that concepts are only
percepts stripped of unnecessary details). Today, we know
with absolute certainty that mathematical concepts are free
creations of the human mind.
The problems,
it is true, connected with the foundations of mathematics
have raised some doubts about its "certainty" by questioning
whether mathematics is absolutely exempt of contradictions.
But for all scientific purposes mathematical reasoning still
stands as a model of exactness.
[1]
Steiner really
does not just pay lip service to the scientific method of
Natural Science. In this book one will find very brief and
concrete descriptions of the step from the ordinary approach
to knowledge to the mathematical — and from there to
“Imaginative Cognition.” It is discussed how one
can proceed from the study of the eye as a physical apparatus
to an entity permeated with life and to form an Imagination
of the etheric body in the eye. “Through imaginative
activity one has grasped the etheric nature of the human
being in the same way as one grasps the external inorganic
world through a mathematical approach.”(Lecture 3, p.
51)
And it is
discussed in detail how to proceed from imagination to
inspiration. In comparison to the, so to speak, general
method of the “Path of Knowledge” (As in Steiner's
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment,
here, a method for the scientist is given.
Furthermore, whether this method is scientific in the general
sense of the word was put to the listener's own judgement as
it will be now for the reader.
There is a
remarkable passage where Steiner relates the conversation
between a pupil of the brain researcher MENGER who had made a
drawing an the blackboard of the hypothetical connections
between parts of the brain explaining in his opinion its
functioning — and a man who spoke in the sense of
HERBART stating that he would make the same drawing, but now
for the thought masses and their combinations. I think this
is quite remarkable because N. WIENER relates in his book
Cybernetics (1947, p 32 and 164) a similar
situation. In a Symposium about how to make a reading
apparatus for blind people, there was a drawing on the
blackboard describing a possible circuitry. The connections
should symbolize layers of electrical switches (nowadays just
called neurons as in anatomy) in a network that should be
able to extract shape (“Gestalt”) from
the imitation of a retinal image in the eye. Then a brain
anatomist (Dr. VON BONIN) saw the drawing and immediately
asked whether this represented the fourth layer of the visual
cortex of the brain.
Steiner's
event must have taken place somewhere in the nineties of the
last century; Wiener's event about half a century later in
the forties of our century. Of course, there is a difference:
Steiner pointed to an archetypical correspondence between
certain thoughts, Wiener relates something that was
planned for technical development, which now is becoming
hardware.
I do not
hesitate to take this "coincidence" as a Symptom for the
lasting actuality of the lectures presented here.
Georg Unger, Ph. D.
February 1992
Dornach, Switzerland
Notes:
1. Some
mathematical concepts have been expressly created in
mathematical physics in order to show certain structures
which would correspond to this or that
“model” and thus would give substance to
hunches or pipe dreams of the theorizing physicist,
enabling him, in the ideal case, to check this theory
with predicted numerical values or else to either refute
or modify his brainchild.
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