Steiner and Whitehead on the true relationship between Sun, Moon, and Earth

Below is a slide from my summary at this morning’s Urphänomen reading group. We are reading Rudolf Steiner’s “Interdisciplinary Astronomy” lecture cycle (GA 323), originally delivered in January 1921. A video of my summary of Lecture 14 is also embedded below. Here’s a link to the text of Steiner’s lecture. In this particular lecture, Steiner dwells on the nature of our perception of heavenly motions and the non-linear evolution of the earthly kingdoms of nature in relation to the Sun and Moon.

tl;dr The human being is the last creature God created, but we are not fully baked. We are free, self-leavening. The completion of creation awaits our realization of this freedom.

For those lacking a basic familiarity with Steiner’s approach, which is rooted in Goethean science/participatory epistemology, you may want to read my article introducing Goethe’s scientific method in connection with Whitehead’s cosmology. Otherwise much of what I share in this video may be incomprehensible or even absurd. But this is (I hope!) not just metaphysical speculation. It is grounded in careful, intimate phenomenological observation of concrete natural processes. The problem is that modern people have become very used to thinking of abstract models as if they were concrete realities (Whitehead’s fallacy of misplaced concreteness). Thus, when first presented with a more concrete rendering of the facts, it is easy to feel quite disoriented. Accustomed to the shadows of the cave of materialism, exposure to direct sunlight is initially blinding.

Did life emerge from matter? Well, what is “matter”? You’ve never seen it or touched it (you see colored surfaces, you feel temperatures and textures, etc.). “Molecules and atoms,” you say? The particles known to physics are mathematical constructs. So in some sense, matter is all a matter of “form.” But of course the math corresponds to real experimentally verified causal powers; however, what those powers are is obviously not just a bunch of numbers calculating themselves. The real physical powers are activities, processes with agentic qualities all the way down to the Principle of Least Action. The claim about mineralization due to plant life is not all that radical. Think of coal and oil deposits. Think of the way the calcium rich skeletons of microscopic sea creatures accrete on the ocean floor and drive plate tectonics. This is just Earth Systems Science taken a step further, recognizing that the current composition of the lithosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere have been almost if not entirely reorganized and recomposed by the activity of the biosphere over billions of years. Life does not adapt to already existing environments, but makes its own environments.

Does the Earth revolve around the Sun? Sure, in a way. But what is it that you actually observe, and what is added by hypothetical speculation and construction of abstract models that we know are just approximations to what is observed? (Even our best contemporary astronomical models of planetary motions in our solar system are approximations whose predictions are only valid so far into the future).