Lecture V
Dornach,
December 28, 1922
The isolation of man's ideas (especially his mathematical
ideas) from his direct experience has proved to be the outstanding
feature of the spiritual development leading to modern scientific
thinking. Let us place this process once more before our mind's
eye.
We were able to look back into ages past, when what man had to
acquire as knowledge of the world was experienced in communion with
the world. During those epochs, man inwardly did not experience his
threefold orientation — up-down, left-right, front-back —
in such a manner that he attributed it solely to himself. Instead, he
felt himself within the universal whole; hence, his own orientations
were to him synonymous with the three dimensions of space. What he
pictured of knowledge to himself, he experienced jointly with the
world. Therefore, with no uncertainty in his mind, he knew how to
apply his concepts, his ideas, to the world. This uncertainty has
only arisen along with the more recent civilization. We see it slowly
finding its way into the whole of modern thought and we see science
developing under this condition of uncertainty. This state of affairs
must be clearly recognized.
A few examples can illustrate what we are dealing with . Take a
thinker like John Locke, who lived from the seventeenth into the
eighteenth century. His writings show what an up-to-date thinker of
his age had to say concerning the scientific world perception. John Locke
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divided everything that man perceives in his physical
environment into two aspects. He divided the characteristic features
of bodies into primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities
were those that he could only attribute to the objects themselves,
such as shape, position, and motion. Secondary qualities in his view
were those that did not actually belong to the external corporeal
things but were an effect that these objects had upon man. Examples
are color, sound, and warmth. Locke stated it thus: “When I
hear a sound, outside of me there is vibrating air. In a drawing, I
can picture these vibrations in the air that emanate from a
sound-aroused body and continue on into my ear. The shape that the
waves, as they are called, possess in the vibrating air can be
pictured by means of spatial forms. I can visualize their course in
time — all this, belonging to the primary qualities, certainly
exists in the external world, but it is silent, it is soundless. The
quality of sound, a secondary quality, only arises when the vibration
of the air strikes my ear, and with it arises that peculiar inner
experience that I carry within me as sound. It is the same with
color, which is now lumped together with light. There must be
something out there in the world that is somehow of a corporeal nature
and somehow possesses shape and movement. This exercises an effect on
my eye and thus becomes my experience of light or color. It is the
same with the other things that present themselves to my senses. The
whole corporeal world must be viewed like this; we must distinguish
between the primary qualities in it, which are objective, and the
secondary qualities, which are subjective and are the effects of the
primary qualities upon us.”
Simply put, one could say with Locke that the external world outside
of man is form, position, and movement, whereas all that makes up the
content of the sense world exists in truth somehow inside us. The
actual content of color as a human experience is nowhere in the
environment, it lives in me. The actual content of sound is nowhere
to be found outside, it lives in me. The same is true of my
experience of warmth or cold.
In former ages, when what had become the content of knowledge was
experienced jointly with the world, one could not possibly have had
this view because, as I have said, a man experienced mathematics by
participating in his own bodily orientation and placing this
orientation into his own movement. He experienced this, however, in
communion with the world. Therefore, his own experience was
sufficient reason for assuming the objectivity of position, place,
and movement. Also, though in another portion of his inner life, man
again had this communion with the world in regard to color, tone, and
so forth. Just as the concept of movement was gained through the
experience of his own movement, so the concept of color was gained
through a corresponding internal experience in the blood, and this
experience was then connected with whatever is warmth, color, sound,
and so forth in the surrounding world. Certainly, in earlier times,
man distinguished position, location, movement, and time-sequence
from color, sound, and warmth, but these were distinguished as being
different kinds of experiences that were undergone jointly with
different kinds of existence in the objective world.
Now, in the scientific age, the determination of place, movement,
position, and form ceased to be inward self-experience. Instead, they
were regarded as mere hypotheses that were caused by some external
reality. When the shape of a cannon is imagined, one can hardly say:
This form of the cannon is actually somehow within me. Therefore its
identification was directed outward and the imagined form of the
cannon was related to something objective. One could not very well
admit that a musket-ball was actually flying within one's
brain; therefore, the hypothetically thought-out movements were
attributed to something objective.
On the other hand, what one saw in the flying musket-ball, the flash
by which one perceived it and the sound by which one heart it, were
pushed into one's own human nature, since no other place could
be found for them. Man no longer knew how he experienced them jointly
with the objects; therefore, he associated them with his own
being.
It actually took quite some time before those who thought along the
lines of the scientific age perceived the impossibility of this
arrangement. What had in fact taken place? The secondary qualities,
sound, color, and warmth experience, had become, as it were, fair
game in the world and, in regard to human knowledge, had to take
refuge in man. But before too long, nobody had any idea of how they
lived there. The experience, the self-experience, was no longer
there. There was no connection with external nature, because it was
not experienced anymore. Therefore these experiences were pushed into
one's self. So far as knowledge was concerned, they had, as it
were, disappeared inside man. Vaguely it was thought that an ether
vibration out in space translated itself into form and movement, and
this had an effect on the eye, and then worked on the optic nerve,
and finally somehow entered the brain. Our thoughts were a means of
looking around inside for whatever it was that, as an effect of the
primary qualities, supposedly expressed itself in man as secondary
qualities. It took a long time, as I said, before a handful of people
firmly pointed out the oddity of these ideas. There is something
extraordinary in what the Austrian philosopher Richard Wahle
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wrote in his Mechanism of Thinking, though he himself did not
realize the full implications of his sentence: “Nihil est in
cerebro, quod non est in nervis.” (“There is nothing
in the brain that is not in the nerves.” It may not be possible
with the means available today to examine the nerves in every
conceivable way, but even if we could we would not find sound, color,
or warmth experience in them. Therefore, they must not be in the
brain either. Actually, one has to admit now that they simply
disappear insofar as knowledge is concerned. One examines the
relationship of man to the world. Form, position, place, time, etc.
are beheld as objective. Sound, warmth, experience and color vanish;
they elude one.
[ 45 ]
Finally, in the Eighteenth Century, this led Kant
[ 46 ]
to say that even
the space and time qualities of things cannot somehow be outside and
beyond man. But there had to be some relationship between man and the
world. After all, such a relationship cannot be denied if we are to
have any idea of how man exists together with the world. Yet, the
common experience of man's space and time relationships with
the world simply did not exist anymore. Hence arose the Kantian idea:
If man is to apply mathematics, for example, to the world, then it is
his doing that he himself makes the world into something
mathematical. He impresses the whole mathematical system upon the
“things in themselves,” which themselves remain utterly
unknown. In the Nineteenth Century science chewed on this problem
interminably. The basic nature of man's relation to cognition
is simply this: uncertainty has entered into his relationship with
the world. He does not know how to recognize in the world what he is
experiencing. This uncertainty slowly crept into all of modern
thinking. We see it entering bit by bit into the spiritual life of
recent times.
It is interesting to place a recent example side by side with Locke's thinking.
August Weismann,
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a biologist of the Nineteenth Century,
conceived the thought: in any living organism, the interplay of the
organs (in lower organisms, the interaction of the parts) must be
regarded as the essential thing. This leads to comprehension of how
the organism lives. But in examining the organism itself, in
understanding it through the interrelationship of its parts, we find
no equivalent for the fact that the organism must die. If one only
observes the organism, so Weismann said, one finds nothing that will
explain death. In the living organism, there is absolutely nothing
that leads to the idea that the organism must die. For Weismann, the
only thing that demonstrates that an organism must die is the
existence of a corpse. This means that the concept of death is not
gained from the living organism. No feature, no characteristic, found
in it indicates that dying is a part of the organism. It is only when
the event occurs, when we find a corpse in the place of the living
organism, that we know the organism possesses the ability to die.
But, says Weismann, there is a class of organisms where corpses are
never found. These are the unicellular organisms. They only divide
themselves so there are no corpses. The propagation of such beings
looks like this:
One divides into two; each of these divides into two again, and so
on. There is never a corpse. Weismann therefore concludes that the
unicellular beings are immortal. This is the immortality of
unicellular beings that was famous in nineteenth-century biology. Why
were these organisms considered immortal? Because they never produce
any corpses, and because we cannot entertain the concept of death in
the organic realm as long as there are no corpses. Where there is no
corpse, there is no room for the concept of death. Hence, living
beings that produce no corpses are immortal.
This example shows how far man has removed himself in modern times
from any connection between the world and his thinking, his inner
experiences. His concept of an organism is no longer such that the
fact of its death can be perceived from it. This can only be deduced
from the existence of something like a corpse. Certainly, if a living
organism is only viewed from outside, if one cannot experience what
is in it, then indeed one cannot find death in the organism and an
external sign is necessary. But this only proves that in his thinking
man feels himself separated from the things around him.
From the uncertainty that has entered all thinking concerning the
corporeal world, from this divorce between our thoughts and our
experience, let us turn back to the time when self-experience still
existed. Not only did the inwardly experienced concept exist
alongside the externally excogitated concept of a triangle, square,
or pentagram, but there were also inwardly experienced concepts of
blossoming and fading, of birth and death. This inner experience of
birth and death had its gradations. When a child was seen to grow
more and more animated, when its face began to express its soul, when
one really entered into this growing process of the child, this could
be seen as a continuation of the process of birth, albeit a less
pronounced and intensive one. There were degrees in the experience of
birth. When a man began to show wrinkles and grey hair and grow
feeble, this was seen as a first mild degree of dying. Death itself
was only the sum total of many less pronounced death experiences, if
I may use such a paradox. The concepts of blossoming and decaying, of
being born and dying, were inwardly alive.
These concepts were experienced in communion with the corporeal
world. No line was drawn between man's self-experience and the
events in nature. Without a coastline, as it were, the inner land of
man merged into the ocean of the universe. Owing to this form of
experience, man lived himself into the world itself. Therefore, the
thinkers of earlier ages, whose ideas no longer receive proper
attention from science, had to form quite different ideas concerning
something like what Weismann called the “immortality of
unicellular beings.” What sort of concept would an ancient
thinker have formed had he had a microscope and known something about
the division of unicellular organisms? He would have said: First I
have the unicellular being; it divides itself into two. Somewhat
imprecisely, he might have said: It atomizes itself, it divides
itself; for a certain length of time, the two parts are indivisible;
then they divide again. As soon as division or atomization begins,
death enters in. He would not have derived death from the corpse but
from atomization, from the division into parts. His train of thought
would have been somewhat as follows: A being that is capable of life,
that is in the process of growth, is not atomized; and when the
tendency to atomization appears, the being dies. In the case of
unicellular beings, he would simply have thought that the two
organisms cast off by the first unicellular being were for the moment
dead, but would be, so to speak, revived immediately, and so forth.
With atomization, with the process of splitting, he would have linked
the thought of death. If he had known about unicellular beings and
had seen one split into two, he would not have thought that two new
ones had come into being. On the contrary, he would have said that
out of the living monad, two atoms have originated. Further, he would
have said that wherever there is life, wherever one observes life,
one is not dealing with atoms. But if they are found in a living
being, then a proportionate part of the being is dead. Where atoms
are found, there is death, there is something inorganic. This is how
matters would have been judged in a former age based on living inner
knowledge of the world.
All this is not clearly described in our histories of philosophy,
although the discerning reader can have little doubt of it. The
reason is that the thought-forms of this older philosophy are totally
unlike today's thinking. Therefore anyone writing history
nowadays is apt to put his own modern concepts into the minds of
earlier thinkers.
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But this is impermissible even with a man as recent
as Spinoza. In his book on what he justifiably calls ethics, Spinoza
follows a mathematical method but it is not mathematics in the modern
sense. He expounds his philosophy in a mathematical style, joining
idea to idea as a mathematician would. He still retains something of
the former qualitative experience of quantitative mathematical
concepts. Hence, even in contemplating the qualitative aspect of
man's inner life, we can say that his style is mathematical.
Today with our current concepts, it would be sheer nonsense to apply
a mathematical style to psychology, let alone ethics.
If we want to understand modern thinking, we must continually recall
this uncertainty, contrasting it to the certainty that existed in the
past but is no longer suited to our modern outlook. In the present
phase of scientific thinking, we have come to the point where this
uncertainty is not only recognized but theoretical justifications
have been offered for it. And example is a lecture given by the
French thinker Henri Poincaré
[ 49 ]
in 1912 on current ideas
relating to matter. He speaks of the existing controversy or debate
concerning the nature of matter; whether it should be thought of as
being continuous or discrete; in other words, whether one should
conceive of matter as substantial essence that fills space and is
nowhere really differentiated in itself, or whether substance,
matter, is to be thought of as atomistic, signifying more or less
empty space containing within it minute particles that by virtue of
their particular interconnections form into atoms, molecules, and so
forth.
Aside from what I might call a few decorative embellishments intended
to justify scientific uncertainty, Poincaré's lecture
comes down to this: Research and science pass through various
periods. In one epoch, phenomena appear that cause the thinker to
picture matter in a continuous form, making it convenient to conceive
of matter this way and to focus on what shows up as continuity in the
sense data. In a different period the findings point more toward the
concept of matter being diffused into atoms, which are pictured as
being fused together again; i.e. matter is not continuous but
discrete and atomistic. Poincaré is of the opinion that
always, depending on the direction that research findings take, there
will be periods when thinking favors either continuity or atomism. He
even speaks of an oscillation between the two in the course of
scientific development. It will always be like this, he says, because
the human mind has a tendency to formulate theories concerning
natural phenomena in the most convenient way possible. If continuity
prevails for a time, we get tired of it. (These are not
Poincaré's
exact words, but they are close to what he really intends.) Almost
unconsciously, as it were, the human mind then comes upon other
scientific findings and begins to think atomistically. It is like
breathing where exhalation follows inhalation. Thus there is a
constant oscillation between continuity and atomism. This merely
results from a need of the human mind and according to
Poincaré,
says nothing about the things themselves. Whether we adopt continuity
or atomism determines nothing about things themselves. It is only our
attempt to come to terms with the external corporeal world.
It is hardly surprising that uncertainty should result from an age
which no longer finds self-experience in harmony with what goes on in
the world but regards it only as something occurring inside man. If
you no longer experience a living connection with the world, you
cannot experience continuity or atomism. You can only force your
preconceived notions of continuity or atomism on the natural
phenomena. This gradually leads to the suspicion that we formulate
our theories according to our changing needs. Just as we must breath
in and out, so we must, supposedly, think first continuistically for
a while, then atomistically for a while. If we always thought in the
same way, we would not be able to catch a breath of mental air. Thus
our fatal uncertainty is confirmed and justified. Theories begin to
look like arbitrary whims. We no longer live in any real connection
with the world. We merely think of various ways in which we might
live with the world, depending on our own subjective needs.
What would the old way of thought have said in such a case? It would
have said: In an age when the leading thinkers think
continuistically, they are thinking mainly of life. In one in which
they think atomistically, they are thinking primarily of death, of
inorganic nature, and they view even the organic in inorganic terms.
This is no longer unjustified arbitrariness. This rests on an
objective relationship to things. Naturally, I can take turns in
dealing with the animate and the inanimate. I can say that the very
nature of the animate requires that I conceive of it
continuistically, whereas the nature of the inanimate requires that I
think of it atomistically. But I cannot say that this is only due to
the arbitrary nature of the human mind. On the contrary, it
corresponds to an objective relating of oneself to the world. For
such perception, the subjective aspect is really disregarded, because
one recognizes the animate in nature in continual form and the
inanimate in discrete form. And if one really has to oscillate
between the two forms of thought, this can be turned in an objective
direction by saying that one approach is suited to the living and the
other is suited to the dead. But there is no justification for making
everything subjective as Poincaré does. Nor is the subjective
valid for the way of perception that belonged to earlier times.
The gist of this is that in the phase of scientific thinking
immediately preceding our own, there was a turn away from the animate
to the inanimate; i.e., from continuity to atomism. This was entirely
justified, if rightly understood. But, if we hope to objectively and
truly find ourselves in the world, we must find a way out of the dead
world of atomism, no matter how impressive it is as a theory. We must
get back to our own nature and comprehend ourselves as living beings.
Up to now, scientific development has tended in the direction of the
inanimate, the atomistic. When, in the first part of the Nineteenth
Century, this whole dreadful cell theory of Schleiden
[ 50 ]
and Schwann
[ 51 ]
made its appearance, it did not lead to continuity but to atomism.
What is more, the scientific world scarcely admitted this, nor has it
to this day realized that it should admit it since atomism harmonizes
with the whole scientific methodology. We were not aware that by
conceiving the organism as divided up into cells, we actually
atomized it in our minds, which in fact signifies killing it. The
truth of the matter is that any real idea of organisms has been lost
to the atomistic approach.
This is what we can learn if we compare Goethe's views on
organics with those of Schleiden or the later botanists. In Goethe we
find living ideas that he actually experiences. The cell is alive, so
the others are really dealing with something organic, but the way
they think is just as though the cells were not alive but atoms. Of
course, empirical research does not always follow everything to its
logical conclusion, and this cannot be done in the case of the
organic world. Our comprehension of the organic world is not much
aided by the actual observations resulting from the cell theory. The
non-atomistic somehow finds its way in, since we have to admit that
the cells are alive. But it is typical of many of today's
scientific discussions that the issues become confused and there is
no real clarity of thought.
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