Below are some excerpts and more or less stream of consciousness reflections upon reading the student notes from Rudolf Steiner’s so-called “Light Course” (GA 320; Dec 1919-Jan 1920). The number headings correspond to each of his lectures. These notes are helping me prepare for a presentation next month at MysTech’s “Mysteries of Light” conference.
1.
Rudolf Steiner spent much of the 1880s editing and philosophically explicating Goethe’s natural scientific works, including his theories of color, plant metamorphosis, and animal morphology. At the time he felt fruitful application of the Goethean method to physical science was an impossibility. A new approach would only be possible if physics realized of its own accord that the then current materialistic direction of its research into such phenomena as light, warmth, and electricity, was a dead end. A new start would be necessary on fundamentally different footing.
Three decades later (1919/20), when Steiner delivered the Light Course in Stuttgart, the situation had changed. Physics had found itself “caught up in transformation,” so much so that “there is much we could interpret as the dawn of a new worldview” (LC, p. 16). The theoretical discoveries of electromagnetic, radioactive, quantum, and relativistic phenomena had destroyed the old mechanistic categories. As Whitehead put it in 1925:
“The old foundations of scientific thought are becoming unintelligible. Time, space, matter, material, ether, electricity, mechanism, organism, configuration, structure, pattern, function, all require reinterpretation. What is the sense of talking about a mechanical explanation when you do not know what you mean by mechanics?” (SMW, p. 16).
Science was in search of a new world-picture, and Steiner’s hope was that the Stuttgart Waldorf teachers he was offering some improved suggestions to would be able to sow Goethean seeds into the next generation of scientists and engineers. We should not forget that the real aim of Steiner’s lecture cycle was to help create an educational environment wherein children would be encouraged to remain in a participatory relationship with their embodied, sensory experience of warmth, light, and sound, even as (when age appropriate) more abstract mathematical and classificatory concepts are introduced.
Mechanistic physicists have tended to look for hidden causes behind phenomena. Steiner gives the example of the ether, which in the 19th century was widely believed to be behind the phenomena of light and electricity. Wave movement or vibration in the ether was thought to be the objective cause behind the visible phenomena of color. Goethe does not conjecture hidden causes, as if the unknown might explain the known. Instead, he patiently stays with the sequence of phenomena, finding their true relations and thereby distilling the archetypal phenomenon linking them together. This is akin to a move Whitehead makes as part of his reformulation of Einstein’s tensor equations and natural philosophy in Principle of Relativity (1922). Whitehead rejects “the shy ether behind the veil” hypothesized by 19th century physicists. Instead, in line with his earlier criticisms of the “bifurcation of nature” and affirmation that “everything perceived is in nature” (Concept of Nature, 1920), he asserts that “the ether is exactly the apparent world” (Principle of Relativity, p. 37).
A few years later, in his first lecture as a professor of philosophy at Harvard University, Whitehead further explained his approach to scientific knowledge in a way that is strikingly convergent with Goethe’s natural scientific method and clearly open to Steiner’s spiritual scientific extension:
“According to the view which I am putting before you there is nothing behind the veil of the procession of becomingness, though there is much pictured on that veil and essential to it which our dim consciousness does not readily decipher. Indeed the metaphor of a veil of appearance is wholly wrong. Reality is nothing else than the process of becomingness, of which we are dimly conscious. Every detail of the process is open for consciousness, though in fact our individual consciousness is only aware of a very small fragment of what is there for knowledge.” (“First Lecture,” 1924, p.17)
Whitehead’s process of becomingness is akin to Goethe’s metamorphosis of phenomena. Both thinkers reject the search for hidden forces, as if our experience of color was an epiphenomenal effect of the trembling of an all-pervading but stubbornly invisible ether substance. If there are fields and forces in nature (and there do appear to be!), let us stick with those we can directly feel and refrain from unnecessarily introducing impercepta. It may of course prove helpful to invent hypotheses concerning as yet unperceivedphenomena. There is much pictured in nature’s metamorphosis that we are not yet but could become conscious of. Hypotheses allow us to go in search of new, subtler phenomena. The confusion begins when a hypothesis conjectures not just the unperceived but the unperceivable. When this occurs, purely conceptual phantoms are dressed up to look like they could be actually existing phenomena. The real phenomena are ignored or distorted so as to fit the expectations of the conceptual model. We become wed to the model and increasingly divorced from the life-world it is supposed to help us understand. Physics must remain within the bounds of feeling alone if it “is not to degenerate into a medley of ad hoc hypotheses” (Whitehead, SMW, p. 17).
After all, as Schelling could already remind us back in 1797 (Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, p. 18):
“you can in no way make intelligible what a force might be independent of you. For force as such makes itself known only to your feeling.”
It is worth sharing a few additional lines from Schelling’s Ideas (p. 10-11):
“[we] are not born to waste [our] mental power in conflict against the fantasy of an imaginary world, but to exert all our powers upon a world which has influence upon us, lets us feel its forces, and upon which we can react. Between us and the world, therefore, no rift must be established.”
Instead of attempting to explain the known by something unknown, a participatory, organic science stays with the unfolding phenomena. Thinking activity that can attend to the rhythmic flow of pure experience need never encounter a rift between subject and object. The attempt to explain the perception of a crimson sunset in terms of either electromagnetic waves in space or electrochemical waves in the brain is a textbook case of Whitehead’s “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” Our experience of red is not simply in our head or in nature. Red has no discernable material cause. Colors are better understood as species of ecological relationship between light, darkness, and sight. These three elements cannot themselves be explained by reference to anything else, since they are what is given to us in perception. Natural science is simply the study of the patterns disclosed in perception, ie, the search for systematic relations among percepta. Rightly arranged, the facts themselves flower into theory. The archetypal phenomena blossom not behind or beneath what we see but between seer and seen.
We can study sight itself, turning out scientific attention onto our own consciousness as percipients of nature. But this means leaving the limits of natural science behind to begin a complementary but fundamentally new kind of inquiry. Steiner called it spiritual science. Spiritual science does not go beyond phenomena but recognizes the role of our own conscious imaginative, inspired, and intuitive thinking activity in disclosing novel phenomena. But that is a subject explored elsewhere.
Steiner lists the three typical starting points of natural scientific research: Classification (into species and genera), Causation (in terms of forces or fields), Generalization (into mathematical laws of nature). He contrasts these with the Goethean scientific method. Goethe rejected rigid classification of finished forms, seeking instead to trace the gradual transformation or metamorphosis of one phenomenon into another. Despite not being a “crafty mathematician,” he nonetheless had a very clear idea about the relationship between mathematical ideas and natural phenomena (LC, p. 20). I address this in my article on Goethe and Whitehead (see “Steps to a Science of Organism,” p. 40ff).
Arithmetic and geometry, so important for modern physics, arise entirely out of our own inner imaginative activity. They do not penetrate at all to actual nature. Even our study of motion, kinematics, produces pure constructs only tentatively related to real events in external nature. Abstract motions can be calculated, but as soon as an actual push or pull is referenced, ie, real force, you have to go out into nature and measure it. In classical mechanistic physics, a gap exists between concepts of number, space, and motion on the one hand, and actual masses and forces on the other. The former are often of inordinate value in the study of the latter, but approximations are inevitably required to make “the mighty leap” from math to measurement. Steiner summarizes the situation:
“Mechanics, which deals with forces, not merely with movements, is a natural science, whereas arithmetic, geometry, and kinematics are not” (LC, p. 24-25).
Steiner describes how the old mechanistic physics had developed the habit of searching for point-instants from which central forces radiate (LC, p. 27-28). It has since become obvious that there are no real “point-instants” in nature. Whitehead explains how the new physics reimagined its concept of undifferentiated enduring matter in more processual terms, replacing solid atoms with organized systems of streaming energy:
“Accordingly there will be a definite period associated with each element; and within that period the stream-system will sway from one stationary maximum to another stationary maximum—or, taking a metaphor from the ocean tides, the system will sway from one high tide to another high tide. This system, forming the primordial element, is nothing at any instant. It requires its whole period in which to manifest itself. In an analogous way, a note of music is nothing at an instant, but it also requires its whole period in which to manifest itself” (SMW, p. 35).
Steiner contrasts the mechanistic “central forces” studied by classical physics to the etheric peripheral forces that must be attended to in order to develop an organic science (LC, p. 29-30). To understand the formation of living organisms, and really any self-organization in nature at whatever scale, we must develop a relationship to the incalculable infinity of the macrocosm, ie, to the way the whole cosmos is active in shaping every part of itself, especially the living world, and among organisms, especially the human being.
Machines are made by human hands and do not exist in nature. Classical physics, in projecting the image of the machine onto the entire universe, is thus even more anthropomorphic than the premodern animism it prided itself on outgrowing. Man-made machines can be understood according to the efficient causes of mechanistic physics. But even the inorganic aspects of nature (stars, galaxies, climate) outrun the calculations of our mechanistic models. Steiner:
“In the entire realm of so-called nature we find nothing that is lifeless in the true meaning of the word, with the exception of what people produce artificially” (LC, p. 31).
Mechanistic physics studies only “a lifeless abstraction.” The attempt to explain concrete qualitative phenomena like light, warmth, weight, and color (not to mention time and consciousness) in terms of one or another favored mathematico-mechanical model is impossibly confused. At best, various models enable us to refine our instrumental grasp of an experimental situation. Such refinement has from the beginning of modern science escaped the laboratory to find military and other industrial application in the form of evermore powerful technologies. These technologies have by now irreversibly transformed the very planet under observation. The application of science to nature threatens (or promises) to turn the Earth into Art. Are our city-sized particle colliders discovering nature, or creating it? What about our city-destroying atom bombs? If some segment of civilized humanity manages to survive the already underway climate mutation triggered by modern industry, the question still remains as to whether they will survive the application of technoscience to our own human nature. Physical science and our human use of it demands a new beginning.
2.
In order to have a clearer idea of the reality of the “ether,” we must gain a better understanding of the leap between our inner imaginations of number, space, and motion and our external sense experience (LC, p. 33). Steiner claims that the then existing mechanistic theories of the ether were “contradictory and confused” (p. 34). Until we have a clearer idea of our real relation to the etheric media in which we float (whether light, air, or warmth, etc.), we will have “no real science of the human being, no real science of physiology” (p. 36).
Whitehead, writing five years after Steiner’s Light Course, agrees (SMW, p. 148-9):
“The physiological attitude has not yet established itself. The effect of physiology was to put mind back into nature. The neurologist traces first the effect of stimuli along the bodily nerves, then integration at nerve centres, and finally the rise of a projective reference beyond the body with a resulting motor efficacy in renewed nervous excitement. In biochemistry, the delicate adjustment of the chemical composition of the parts to the preservation of the whole organism is detected. Thus the mental cognition is seen as the reflective experience of a totality, reporting for itself what it is in itself as one unit occurrence. This unit is the integration of the sum of its partial happenings, but it is not their numerical aggregate. It has its own unity as an event. This total unity, considered as an entity for its own sake, is the prehension into unity of the patterned aspects of the universe of events. Its knowledge of itself arises from its own relevance to the things of which it prehends the aspects. It knows the world as a system of mutual relevance, and thus sees itself as mirrored in other things. These other things include more especially the various parts of its own body.”
Steiner is in pursuit of a Goethean physics of light, warmth, color, and other living phenomena. What in the human being corresponds to the m referenced in the equations of physics? What is mass in our actual experience? Steiner: “Mass reveals itself initially in no other way than in its being able to exert pressure” (LC, p. 36). Pressure is a feeling familiar to consciousness. Our embodied experience of gravity comes in the form of pressure on our feet or butt, the strain in our neck. Steiner hypothesizes that a qualitative ratio links our quality of wakefulness to the intensity of pressure we exert or perceive in our immediate environment. As mass or external pressure increases, consciousness is canceled out: we go to sleep (p. 37).
Steiner connects the somnambulance of mass to the way present day human beings are asleep in their willing activity. In our will we are united with the cosmic force of gravity. We are only awake to ourselves in our thinking because of the buoyancy of the brain, the way it literally floats in the cerebrospinal fluid:
“with our intelligence we do not live in forces that pull us downward, but rather in forces that pull us upward…A truly spiritual science seeks the path across into matter by trying to really immerse itself in matter, by pursuing will and intelligence in the soul life right down into the phenomena of pressure and buoyancy” (p. 39, 41).
It is to our feelings that we must turn to etherically mediate between ideas above and facts below. Living nature is the evolving transaction between coincident opposites: light and dark, warm and cold, noise and silence… Discernible form (whether sensual or conceptual) is the product of variable patterned contrasts and harmonizations, not a virtual arrangement of point-instants. Light is neither a material particle nor a wave but the spiritual ocean we breathe and through which we are granted the power to perceive anything at all.
Whitehead (SMW, p. 184):
“Since the time of Newton and Huyghens in the seventeenth century there have been two theories as to the physical nature of light. Newton’s theory was that a beam of light consists of a stream of very minute particles, or corpuscles, and that we have the sensation of light when these corpuscles strike the retinas of our eyes. Huyghens’ theory was that light consists of very minute waves of trembling in an all-pervading ether, and that these waves are traveling along a beam of light. The two theories are contradictory. In the eighteenth century Newton’s theory was believed, in the nineteenth century Huyghens’ theory was believed. To-day there is one large group of phenomena which can be explained only on the wave theory, and another large group which can be explained only on the corpuscular theory. Scientists have to leave it at that, and wait for the future, in the hope of attaining some wider vision which reconciles both.”
Steiner introduces his esoteric physiology to explain the way the etheric and astral bodies relate to the physical anatomy of the eye. Unlike with the rest of the body, where the etheric body is woven more tightly into the physical organs, in the eye “it is relatively independent,” and because of this the astral body in turn is able to more intimately weave itself into the etheric eye (p. 49). We might think of Steiner’s etheric as the equivalent of what Whitehead refers to in Process and Reality (1929) as “entirely living nexūs” (PR, p. 103ff). The astral, then, would be roughly equivalent to Whitehead’s technical definition of consciousness (PR, p. 161-2). Steiner’s spiritual understanding of the I seems to me most closely to resemble Whitehead’s poetic vision of our self-conscious participation in the consequent nature of God (PR, p. 107n17).
3.
Like Goethe, Steiner rejects the fabricated idea of a “ray” of light. Rays are geometric constructs present nowhere in the phenomena. The colored patterns we perceive are edge effects, which Goethe indeed works to great effect. But rays are nowhere in the phenomena. Discussing a common optical illusion having to do with viewing objects through the medium of water, Steiner says:
“Today’s physicists say that first the light arrives at the eye on a bent path, and then the eye projects the image outward. What does that mean? In the end the physicists say, ‘The eye projects.’ They posit a kinematic conception, a conception bereft of all reality, a pure fantasy activity, in place of what immediately presents itself: the resistance of the thicker water to the eye’s power of sight. It’s at just such points that you notice most clearly how abstracted everything is in our physics, how everything is supposed to become kinematics, how they don’t want to go into qualities. On the one hand, they divest the eye of any kind of activity; on the other hand, the eye projects outward the stimulus it receives. What is necessary, however, is that we begin at the outset with the activity of the eye, that we be clear that the eye is an active organism” (LC, p. 63).
In the eye, something in the animal reaches out to live into the light that shines from without. Steiner describes the eye growing progressively more vital as you move from the sclera and cornea to the vitreous body and retina. He tries to dispel the materialistic idea that nerves of the retina (rather than, say, the astral body) might somehow be responsible for our sensations of light. If this were true, you would think we’d feel the visual world most strongly where the contact first occurred, rather than where it is “projected” out onto the colored surfaces of the world around us (LC, p. 66).
4.
Newton’s idea that “white light” is split into seven colors by a prism, with a particular substance identified with each one, simply cannot survive an impartial review of the whole range of phenomena that arise in experiments with prisms. Goethe realized this immediately after one glance through the prism. Color is an edge effect of light mixing with darkness, not a result of the geometrical dissection of light. Newton’s theory of color corpuscles laid out in Opticks (1704) was already challenged by the wave theory of light proposed by Christiaan Huygens in 1690. Thomas Young and Augustin-Jean Fresnel would later expand upon the wave theory. Steiner dwells upon the interference pattern or “lattice” phenomenon produced by Fresnel’s double mirror experiment (LC, p. 74ff). There is no way for a particle theory of light to account for this effect. But rather than give up the materialistic mode of thought, physicists like Euler had the idea of redefining light as the movement of a fine substance, the ether, by analogy to the way sound travels through air in waves of compression. Incidentally, Kant had discussed Euler’s analogy in his Critique of Judgment (1790). The anthroposophically influenced scholar of German Idealism, Eckart Förster, notes that while in the first two editions of the third critique, Kant had written that he doubted Euler’s analogy “very much,” in the third edition he revised the text to say he “did not doubt at all” Euler’s vibratory analogy between tones of music and colors of light (see Förster, Kant’s Final Synthesis, p. 29-30; see also Segall, Crossing the Threshold, p. 185ff). This allowed Kant to argue that colors, like musical tones, could be rationally judged as beautiful, rather than merely pleasurable, given that upon reflection their sensation was apparently traceable to mathematically proportional vibrations in the ether.
There were major problems with this analogy, of course. While sound was transmitted through the air by longitudinal compression waves, it was clear that light’s passage through the ether could not be grasped in such terms. It looked as though light propagated through the fine ether particles vertically, that is, perpendicular, to the direction of the light rays. This was worked out to explain the appearance of a lattice or interference pattern on the screen of Fresnel’s experimental set up. Some vibrating ether particles reinforce one another, producing a bright spot, while others cancel each other out, producing a dark spot. Steiner here asks us to:
“consider the difference between the pure perception of the phenomena—remaining within the phenomena, and investigating and describing them—and simply making something up about the phenomena. The movement of the ether is after all a pure invention. Of course, we can make calculations about something like this, which we have made up, but the fact that we can make calculations about it is no proof that the thing is there. The purely kinematic is something purely imaginary, and calculations are also imaginary” (LC, p. 79).
5.
Steiner elaborates a train of thought whereby space and time are understood to be abstractions from velocity. The formula for velocity is usually written v = d/t (that is, velocity is equal to distance divided by time). The materialistic mode of thoughts habitually interprets this formula as though there was something real in external nature corresponding to a distance in space that has been traveled and a time during which this traversal occurred. We are then led to imagine the velocity itself is the abstraction, something arrived at through calculation of the real quantities of distance and time. Steiner argues that the reverse is in fact the case:
“That is not how it is in nature. Of these three quantities—velocity, space, and time—velocity is actually the only real one. Velocity is the one that is outside us; we arrive at the others, d and t, only by dividing, by splitting, so to speak, the unified vinto two abstract things, which we create on the basis of the existing velocity” (LC, p. 90).
As Whitehead put the same point: “the extension of space is the ghost of transition” (Modes of Thought, p. 96). On Steiner’s reading, space and time are only there because of velocity. We create the division between space and time with our own thought processes. Space and time are not for this reason something we can easily dispense with. They are “integral to our perception” in a way that external velocity is not (ibid.). It is by means of our innate “instruments” of space and time that we measure velocity. In other words, we are not measuring space and time as external realities, but measuring external realities by means of our ideal constructs of space and time.
Whitehead’s intervention into Einstein’s conception of the physics of relativity follows an identical line of thought. As he put it in Concept of Nature (p. 168):
“When you think of space alone, or of time alone, you are dealing in abstractions, namely, you are leaving out an essential element in the life of nature as known to you in the experience of your senses…Space and time are abstractions… What I mean is that there are no spatial facts or temporal facts apart from physical nature, namely that space and time are merely ways of expressing certain truths about the relations between events.”
Further, after the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries which followed from the exploration of alternative parallel postulates, it became clear that there are many ways of conceptualizing space and that which way one chooses is a matter of convention. This doesn’t mean that thirty miles walk is not a long walk for anyone. That is not what conventionality means in this case. What it means it that geometries can be developed without any reference to measurement, and thus without any reference to distance or numerical coordinates indicating points. Whitehead, like Steiner, was interested in the development and application of so-called non-metrical projective geometry (see Adventures of Ideas, p. 137).
Steiner realizes that his claims may sound superficially similar to Kant’s idealistic account of space and time in the Transcendental Aesthetic as forms of our own intuition (see Critique of Pure Reason, 1781/87). Steiner’s point is not that “space and time are in us,” as if they were subjective constructs. We are one with space and time in a way that we are not one with velocity, which “roars right past us” (LC, p. 91). The spatiotemporal quality of our thinking links us with other physical bodies. We float, as it were, in space and time, just as other bodies float in it with their various velocities. In a similar way, we float in light as a common space-filling element, not with our physical but with our etheric bodies. Steiner:
“We float in light with our etheric body. How are we related to the colors [of bodies and] that flit about [as a result of shining light through a prism]? The only possibility is that…whenever you see colors, you are joined to the colors with your astrality…although light actually remains invisible, we are floating in it…In the light you see colors, colors of the spectrum. There you have astral relations of a direct nature—nothing comes between you and these colors. You see the colors of the body; something comes between them and your astral body and yet you enter into astral relations with the colors of the body” (LC, p. 92-3).
6.
Steiner laments that it is extraordinarily difficult for someone who has already received materialistic training in physics to return again to observe the facts in an unbiased way. For example, in optics, the influence of Newton’s model-centrism has led to all sorts of confusion, including talk of “light rays”—which are ideal geometric constructions—as if they were actually present in the physical world. Careful attention to the phenomena themselves should make it clear that there are no “light rays,” any more than there are “dark rays”; rather, there are displaced light images that include the borders or edges of whatever the light is passing through (LC, p. 98). All the color that we see in the phenomenal world is a mixture of light and dark, a function of the deeds and sufferings of light in its encounter with matter, as Goethe had it. It is worth quoting the preface of Goethe’s Theory of Colors (1810):
“In reality, any attempt to express the inner nature of a thing is fruitless. What we perceive are effects, and a complete record of these effects ought to encompass this inner nature. We labor in vain to describe a person’s character, but when we draw together his actions, his deeds, a picture of his character will emerge.
Colors are the deeds of light, what it does and what it endures. In this sense we can expect them to tell us something about light. Although it is true that colors and light are intimately related to one another, we must consider both as belonging to all nature. Through them nature in its entirety seeks to manifest itself, in this case to the sense of sight, to the eye.” (Goethe: Scientific Studies, ed. by Miller, p. 157).
Steiner further laments that it is our lack of a qualitative mode of thought that has prevented natural science from adequately bridging the physical with the soul-spiritual world. Nature is treated purely quantitatively, as though it were a colorless coordinate grid of point-instants the movements of which could be exhaustively calculated. A qualitative approach would mean, as Goethe has it, treating color as a real manifestation of nature to our sense of sight, rather than an epiphenomenal psychic addition added through what could only be the supernatural means of a separate mind.
Steiner indicates the basic qualities of light and dark (which hold also for the light and dark colors):
“We have to progress from merely abstract space to space that is not abstract, but that is in some way positively filled with light, negatively filled with darkness…we feel enriched when we are in a light-filled space. We breathe the light in. What is it like with darkness? That feeling is the complete opposite. Darkness drains us; it soaks us up; we have to abandon ourselves to it” (LC, p. 100).
He points to the inner relationship between the way mass or pressure puts us to sleep and the way darkness drains our consciousness. There is something of great significance in this for understanding the relationship between massless light and matter. He also points to the phenomenological difference we feel between being immersed in a light-filled environment and feeling the ambient temperature of a room. He argues that our warmth-feelings arise from our physical constitution, while our feeling for light arises from our etheric constitution (LC, p. 102). He adds, however, that since the rise of materialistic physics “what we perceive with our etheric body is confused with what we perceive with our physical body.” Thus light, despite being massless, is treated as just another physical phenomenon.
Gravity is similarly misunderstood as a result of excessive abstraction. The Newtonian approach was to make up forces that act at a distance to attract separate bodies. The more concrete approach would require recognizing that the planetary bodies are not actually independent but bear a relationship to one another akin to the limbs of a living body. “Something extraordinarily important follows from this,” according to Steiner:
“It follows that when confronted with each phenomenon, we have to investigate to what extent it is a reality or only something that has been cut out of a whole. If you look at the sun and the moon or the sun and the earth on their own, naturally you might as well make up a force of gravity—a kind of gravitation—just as you might invent a kind of gravitation when my forehead attracts my right hand. But when you look at the sun and the earth and the moon, you’re looking at things that aren’t whole. Rather they are the limbs of the entire planetary system” (LC, p. 105).
Instead of considering the concrete organic life of the planetary system as a whole, materialistic physics has isolated out parts of the total phenomenon and made up various abstract forces and fields to explain how they are related. In truth, there are no isolated parts anywhere in nature, nor is there anything inanimate. Steiner:
“An inorganic inanimate nature doesn’t exist, any more than your skeletal system exists without, say, your circulatory system…Lifeless nature is the dismembered skeletal system of all nature, and it is impossible to look at inorganic nature by itself the way we have been looking at it in Newtonian physics” (LC, p. 106).
We can turn again to Schelling for a similar organic reframing of the scientific view of nature. Viewed from the height of its fundamental organization, that is, from the perspective of the whole:
“the particular successions of causes and effects (that delude us with the appearance of mechanism) disappear as infinitely small straight lines in the universal curvature of the organism in which the world itself persists” (On the World-Soul, trans. by Iain Hamilton Grant in Collapse VI, p. 70).
7.
Steiner explores the possibility of linking two color phenomena: afterimages and colored shadows. In the first case, if you stare at a red surface for long enough before shifting to look at a white surface, you will see green. In the second case, if a red glass is placed between a light source and a rod, the screen behind the rod will catch the light along with the rod’s green colored shadow. The same can be done in either case with any complementary colors. Goethe claimed that in both cases, we produce the contrasting color with our eye, and thus they are subjective. Whether our eye brings forth the color inwardly to meet the external complement in time (as with afterimages) or in space (as with colored shadows), the phenomenon is a subjective one, not something occurring in the external world. Steiner here makes an apparently rather controversial assertion: “This view of Goethe’s is wrong” (LC, p. 113). He claims that holding a tube up to look at an isolated patch of the shadow will reveal it is still green. Thus, even isolated from the spatial context which Goethe thought brought forth the complementary color, the colored shadow remains. However, in a footnote added by the editors they explain that following this claim several experiments were made by others with the tube, producing conflicting results. The most that can be said for now is that there are several factors to control for, including the quality and intensity of the main light sources and ambient lighting, the surface colors of the surrounding environment, and the physiological and psychological response of the observer.
Steiner continues to explain his rejection of the then prevalent ether theory, that “the ether out there makes vibrations whose effect is expressed as color” (LC, p. 115). In place of this materialistic picture, he introduces the occult reality of the etheric body, by means of which we become one with the cosmic ether. Steiner:
“We are not outside of things and don’t just project phenomena into space. We are thoroughly in things with our being and are in things all the more as we ascend from certain physical phenomena…we are not in [colored phenomena] with our ordinary bodily nature, but with our etheric and, therefore, with our astral nature” (LC, p. 116).
Steiner then returns to the important differences that exists in our perception of light, warmth, and air. We live into each medium at different levels of our being. It is only through our eyes that we dip into light-filled space, whereas our entire organism provides our sense organ for heat: “I am to heat just as the eye is to light” (LC, p. 116). The whole body floats in heat as the eye floats in light. Steiner asks repeatedly: And what is it in us that is floating? It is our own warmth-body, the heat produced by the metabolic processes that attend and support our organic existence. Our very consciousness lives in this heat, and it is by means of it that we are able to distinguish ourselves from and so discern the relative heat signature of our environment. Steiner later discusses Julius Robert Mayer and the invention of the law of conservation of energy in the study of thermodynamics, expressing skepticism of the metaphysical claim that a numerical ratio linking mechanical work and heat proved that the latter was reducible to a mechanical process (LC, p. 123).
The human being also has lungs, larynx, and ears for partaking in the airy or gaseous element of nature. We come to participate in the phenomenon of sound or tone with these organs in a way quite unique from our perception of light and heat. As our lungs inhale and exhale, the diaphragm massages our inner organs in such a way that the pressure in the cerebrospinal fluid rises and falls with each breath. Thus there is an airy essence to consciousness that weaves it intimately together with the life rhythm of our breathing. I am reminded of the famous closing paragraph of William James’ article “Does Consciousness Exist?” (1904):
“Let the case be what it may in others, I am as confident as I am of anything that, in myself, the stream of thinking (which I recognize emphatically as a phenomenon) is only a careless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals itself to consist chiefly of the stream of my breathing. The ‘I think’ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‘I breathe’ which actually does accompany them. There are other internal facts besides breathing (intracephalic muscular adjustments, etc., of which I have said a word in my larger Psychology), and these increase the assets of ‘consciousness,’ so far as the latter is subject to immediate perception; but breath, which was ever the original of ‘spirit,’ breath moving outwards, between the glottis and the nostrils, is, I am persuaded, the essence out of which philosophers have constructed the entity known to them as consciousness.”
How do we float in this airy element and distinguish ourselves from the songs of other spheres? We float with our ears, discerning the world’s tones by comparing them with our “wonderfully constructed inner musical instrument.”
Thus there is no such thing as “sensation” in general. The eyes and the ears live in dramatically different worlds.
8.
Steiner situates the materialistic worldview by reminding us that prior to about the 16th century, “people’s entire way of thinking and imagining was different.” It was only after this time that scientists and engineers began to take a serious interest in questions like the speed of sound or the cause of sympathetic resonance.
Pitch can be experimentally shown to be a function of vibrational frequency, which can be measured in terms of wavelengths. But this quantitative way of describing sound is purely numerical and geometrical; it has no actual reality. It is lacking the qualitative nature of sound. We are not justified on the basis of such abstract formulations in the metaphysical assertion that only vibrations exist in nature until ears and brains turn them into sounds.
Steiner:
“My dear friends, we have to follow such things to their logical conclusion. Imagine if I were to treat you who are sitting here in accordance with this physical way of thinking that physicists are accustomed to applying to sound and light phenomena. Then all of you sitting before me would, of course, be in front of me only by means of my impressions, which are completely subjective, like sensations of light and sound. Indeed outside of me none of you would exist as I see you. Instead it would only be the vibrations of the air between you and me that lead me to the vibrations that in turn are in you. This actually would bring me to the point where your entire inner soul life, which of course as far as you are concerned is undeniably in you, wouldn’t really exist. Instead, for me the inner soul life of all of you who are sitting here would merely be the effect on my own psyche. Otherwise, there would merely be some heaps of vibrations sitting on the benches here. It’s the same kind of thinking if you deny light and sound the inwardness that you apparently experience subjectively. It’s exactly the same as when I have you here before me and regard what I have in front of me only as something subjective inside of me, denying that you experience this same inwardness.
What I am saying now is apparently so obvious and banal that physicists and physiologists naturally can’t imagine committing such errors. But they do it anyway.” (LC, p. 129).
Whitehead is also critical of the metaphysics of bifurcation underlying scientific materialism, and not only because of its (un)ethical consequences for practical life. In Process and Reality, amidst a longer criticism of Dave Hume’s philosophy, he makes clear the epistemological consequences for science itself:
“This modern doctrine raises a great difficulty in the interpretation of modern science. For all exact observation is made in these private psychological fields. It is then no use talking about instruments and laboratories and physical energy. What is really being observed are narrow bands of colour-sensa in the private psychological space of colour-vision. The impressions of sensation which collectively form this entirely private experience ‘arise in the soul from unknown causes.’ The spectroscope is a myth, the radiant energy is a myth, the observer’s eye is a myth, the observer’s brain is a myth, and the observer’s record of his experiment on a sheet of paper is a myth. When, some months later, he reads his notes to a learned society, he has a new visual experience of black marks on a white background in a new private psychological field. And again, these experiences arise in his soul ‘from unknown causes.’ It is merely ‘custom’ which leads him to connect his earlier with his later experiences. All exact measurements are, on this theory, observations in such private psychological fields” (PR, p. 326).
We are not outside of things looking in upon the world through a periscope. “What you experience in your soul,” Steiner reminds us, “is not—if I share in the experience—the effect of your brain vibrations on me” (LC, p. 130). The resonance of lyre strings is a generalizable phenomenon. All phenomena exist in sympathy with one another in various ways. This is as true of tuning forks as it is of attuned brains undergoing the coexperience of thoughts.
Steiner then dives with his imaginative thinking deep into the physiology of the inner ear in order to compare it with that of the eye. He reminds us not to remove an organ from its Gestalt. The ear, for example, is only able to hear external sounds by comparing them with the inner rhythm of our breathing and the accompanying oscillation up and down of the cerebrospinal fluid (LC, p. 132). The outer rhythm is differentiated by comparison with the inner.
All this, too, is intimately integrated with our organ of speech. Ears and larynx, hearing and speech, are really aspects of one and the same organ of perception:
“They belong together…the will element, which is pulsing through the larynx [and] the more intellectual and sensual element, which passes through the ear” (LC, p. 133).
Steiner goes even further by offering an account of the metamorphosis of each sense organ into the other. The eye, he suggests, is externally (ie, sclera, cornea, and muscles) a metamorphosed larynx and internally (ie, in the vitreous body and retina) a metamorphosed ear. In order to understand the real relationship between vision and hearing, eyes and ears, we must come to see the ears and larynx as an integrated organ. Then we can come to see, in turn, the way seeing and speaking correspond: “When we see, we are speaking with ourselves etherically. The eye is talking to itself” (LC, p. 135).
9.
Steiner relates how the discovery of so-called “galvanic electricity” around the turn of the 19th century provided an “extraordinarily fertile” soil for the development of materialistic physics. He questions the assumption that electricity produced through various chemical and mechanical means in the inorganic world is the same phenomenon as that observed in every organism as “a state of tension between muscle and nerve, which superficially looks like flowing electricity” (LC, p. 141). Physics is driven by the intuition of some underlying abstract unity, and so it is no surprise that various expressions of superficially similar phenomena were rushed under the same umbrella. But as it turned out, the attempt to make sense of electricity and then electromagnetism eventually led physics into a second scientific revolution. “Physics is basically in the midst of a complete dissolution of the old physical concepts” (LC, p. 144).
Steiner did not live to see the technological spin offs of the phenomena of radioactivity, but he notes the strange correspondence between the three forces physicists have discovered exploding off of radioactive elements—so-called alpha, beta, and gamma rays, each at different speeds and with different powers of penetration—and the spiritual beings known to anthroposophists as Lucifer, Ahriman, and Christ, who also operate as comprehensive world-agents by streaming at different speeds (LC, p. 151).
Steiner claims that radioactivity requires going beyond the law of conservation to recognize a real metamorphosis of matter. Similarly, the phenomena of electricity and magnetism elude mechanistic explanation. While we can consciously take part to varying degrees in the phenomena of light, heat, and sound, something about the qualities alive in electricity and mass lulls us to sleep.
Steiner next rehearses his threefold depiction of the human being as awake in thinking, dreaming in feeling, and asleep in willing to connect it with our perception of the various elements of nature.
“We don’t experience our will phenomena directly; rather we experience what we can imagine of them. We don’t experience the electrical phenomena of nature directly, but what they deliver up into the realm of light, sound, heat, etc. We enter the same lower world when we sleep that we enter in ourselves when we descend from our thinking, conscious life into our will life. Whereas everything that is light, sound, and heat is related to our conscious life, everything that takes place in the realm of electricity and magnetism is related to our unconscious will life. And the appearance of physiological electricity in certain lower animals is only a symptom expressing itself in a particular place in nature of an otherwise imperceptible but general phenomenon: everywhere that the will acts through the metabolism, something similar to external electrical and magnetic phenomena is at work” (LC, p. 153).
He adds that the then current physics made it necessary “to accept that what we believe to be matter is actually none other than fluid electricity” (ibid.).
10.
Steiner claims that the prior 30 years of physics had turned materialism on its head. “Physics has lost nothing less than its very concept of matter in the old form” (LC, p. 155).
It was considered an advance by physicists to link electricity with magnetism, and again to link light with electromagnetic phenomena. The urge to find (or, failing that, to forge) unity in nature is rooted deep in the scientific imagination. Steiner says the latter linkage was achieved by
“eavesdropping…on the course of the electrical current, which, in leaving the wire and jumping to a far distant pole, can’t hide what it contains in the matter that it goes through. Before it had always been shut up in wires and could hardly be studied…” (LC, p. 156).
Magnetism, in other words, shows us how “in its flow electricity as a whole behaves like simple matter” (LC, p. 157).
It is worth quoting Steiner at length:
“the chief reason that the thinking of 19th century physics became sick is that the inner activity by which people sought to pursue natural phenomena was not agile enough in the human being and, above all, was not yet capable of entering into the facts of the external world itself. We could see color emerge in and under light, but we didn’t rise to receive color into our imagination, into our thinking. It was no longer possible to think colors, and we replaced the colors we couldn’t think with something we could think, something that is merely kinematic—the calculable vibrations of an unknown ether. This ether, however, is tricky, because it doesn’t present itself whenever you seek it. And all these experiments actually showed that flowing electricity does indeed reveal itself as something that exists as a phenomenal form in the external world, but that the ether doesn’t want to present itself at all. Now it just wasn’t given to the thinking of the 19th century to penetrate into the phenomena themselves. However, from this moment onward that is exactly what will be so necessary for physics—to go deep into the phenomena themselves with the human imagination” (LC, p. 158-159).
Steiner emphasizes the importance, once again, of distinguishing between what we draw out of ourselves in the form of arithmetic, geometry, and algebra and what we take in from the outer world through our physical senses. The source of our mathematical reasoning is not the physical sense world; rather, our mathematical concepts come from the intelligent part of our will (LC, p. 162). Our empirical concepts are different. The real confusion of misplaced concreteness arises when we forget that we have arbitrarily mixed together our favored mathematical constructs with our real feelings of forces. We come to imagine that the forces are caused by our constructs:
“Imagination became connected with an external phenomenon in a purely symbolic way, not in a form that suited the object. The kinematic concepts that you fetch up out of the unconscious part of your being are connected in a similar way to light phenomena. You draw rays of light geometrically. What you are doing in this case has no more validity than what is expressed in the dream when you imagine symbolically such objective facts as the bang of the falling chair [in the room in which you lie sleeping]. This whole way of processing the optical, acoustical, and heat phenomena of the external world by geometric, arithmetic, and motion concepts is in truth a waking dream, albeit a very sober one…What we believe to be an exact science is modern humankind’s dream of nature” (LC, p. 163).
Steiner calls for a renewed attempt at a mathematical approach to the phenomena of nature that is willing to attend as carefully to its qualitative aspects as 19th century physics was to its quantitative. It will not be enough to retreat into the methods of statistical probability, where “a given regularity can be calculated that lasts for a certain series” until it ceases to work (LC, p. 164).
We must come to see the natural world as it manifests in and through our fully flowered human powers of perception. Sound and light are perceived in our conscious thinking; heat in our feeling; while electricity, magnetism, radioactivity, and gravity are active in our unconscious willing.
“Thus the structure for examining natural phenomena must increasingly become the study of the light and sound element, on the one hand, and of the diametrically opposed electrical-magnetic element on the other” (LC, p. 167).
Steiner draws his Light Course lectures to a close by pointing to the deleterious effects that inadequate or confused ideas in physics can have on human social life. He did not live to see the invention of atomic weapons, but he noted already in the aftermath of World War I the tendency in modern nation-states to fuse scientific research and industry with military ambitions. “My dear friends, the human race must change its ideas” (LC, p. 170).
Footnotes2Plato 
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