A Whiteheadian Approach to Rudolf Steiner's Spiritual Science

Transcript and audio of my talk at the 100 Years of Rudolf Steiner Conference at Harvard Divinity School

Wonderful to be with you all today. Wonderful also to go after Ryan Boynton [who also spoke about Whitehead and Steiner]. I want to begin with a quote that some of you may recognize:

“One is constrained to respect the perfection of this world, in which our senses converse. How wide, how rich, what invitation from every property it gives to every human faculty. … What am I, and what is? asks the human spirit, with a curiosity new-kindled, but never to be quenched?”

That’s Emerson, of course, from the Divinity School Address (1838). I begin with it because it reminds me of something Johann Wolfgang von Goethe says about the human being and the study of nature: the healthy human senses are the most well-proportioned instruments for the study of nature.

Emerson’s question, which he asks in many essays—“Who am I?” and “What is this?—strikes me as one of the primal burdens human beings carry. We ask, and yet we never find final satisfaction in any answer.

It also reminds me of something Kant says — engraved on his tombstone, from the Critique of Practical Reason: “Two things fill the mind with ever-renewing wonder and awe: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.” Kant says we experience reverence for this moral law, reverence for our freedom.

Despite all of Steiner’s disagreements with Kant, I think Steiner follows Goethe in taking this thread seriously. Goethe asks: if Kant allows us to pierce into the spiritual world through our experience of freedom, why can’t we, through a similar intuitive process, come to understand the formative forces of nature, so as to participate in the primal being as it manifests in the natural world?

So, taking Goethe’s statement seriously that the human being is the most perfect instrument for the observation of nature, I want to begin with myself and my own journey into Steiner’s work.

As a graduate student, I studied with Robert McDermott. In a course he taught called Krishna, Buddha, and Christ, we read Steiner’s Gospel of Luke. That was my introduction — and it is an invitation to jump right into the deep end: the two Jesus children and all of that. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of Steiner’s reading of the gospels.

But then I started to read Steiner’s work on Goethe, and I started to understand the context of his inheritance from German Idealism and Romanticism. And I realized: here was a way, within my own Western tradition, to discover a path into spiritual reality that didn’t require appropriating Indigenous traditions, and didn’t require appropriating Asian traditions, but arose within a stream of thought I felt I belonged to. That was valuable to me.

I also learned at the same graduate school from the cosmologist Brian Swimme, and from the writer Carolyn Cooke, who developed—out of Ursula Le Guin’s work—this idea called autocosmology. It’s very Goethean in a sense: all cosmology, all attempts to study the universe, are autobiographical, because we ourselves are expressions of the universe.

If we take Steiner’s view of the human self, the human I, seriously, then it’s important to recognize that the only way to get to the truth of the universe is through ourselves. That is not to say each of us has a separate truth, but rather that each of us has a personal relationship to the cosmic process out of which we have arisen. To fully understand it, we can’t know it from the outside; we have to know it from within. That requires a totally different kind of science.

And as Steiner tells us (in light of his engagement with Fichte): the I, the human self, is the one element in the world that is never simply given to us. The I is something we must create—or destroy—moment by moment, thought by thought, feeling by feeling, deed by deed. We are creating ourselves and others. The self is not isolated; it is discovered in relationship, but we each have a unique responsibility to participate in its realization.

Coming into Steiner’s work as a graduate student, and then finding my way into scholarship through Alfred North Whitehead, left me with a dilemma. On the one hand, I think Whitehead offers a way into natural science in the twentieth century— responding to revolutions in physics in the early twentieth century: relativity theory, quantum theory—and building on them to articulate a view of the world that is organic, living, and, because of his mathematical and scientific background, potentially taken seriously in the academy.

On the other hand, I have Steiner, who has been important for my personal spiritual life. For the last ten or fifteen years, I’ve often been hesitant to bring him too much into my scholarly work because of the risk of scorn from fellow academics.

So when I heard about this conference, I was delighted and terrified. I’ve already cited Steiner in some footnotes in my publications—but to really come out and say, “I take this perspective seriously,” is a gift of this conference. I’m delighted to be here.

I know my abstract says more about Goethe, but I don’t want to miss the opportunity Ryan has given me to deepen into Whitehead, since he offered such a helpful introduction.

Let me share what Whitehead says about the task of philosophy. This is from Process and Reality (p. 15):

“Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial ex­cess of subjectivity. Each actual occasion contributes to the circumstances of its origin additional formative elements deepening its own peculiar individuality. Consciousness is only the last and greatest of such elements by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies. An actual in­dividual, of such higher grade, has truck with the totality of things by reason of its sheer actuality; but it has attained its individual depth of being by a selective emphasis limited to its own purposes. The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection. It replaces in rational experience what has been submerged in the higher sensitive experience and has been sunk yet deeper by the initial operations of consciousness itself.”

That’s a lot. What I want you to note is the way Whitehead speaks to our modern sense of isolation from the life of the cosmos—what anthroposophy would call the condition of the “consciousness soul,” where we feel intensely separated and individualized. Whitehead says philosophy aims to correct this “excess of subjectivity.”

In anthroposophical terms: this excess is the result of an evolution of consciousness that limits perception to the sensory world and to abstract intellectual reflection. It is also a limitation of purpose. Even if individuals strive beyond materialism, we live in a materialistic culture that cuts us off from deeper spiritual currents.

So what I want to share, briefly, is how Whitehead’s participatory epistemology helps us take Steiner’s methods seriously—even if we still want to be critical of specific claims. The challenge, for me, is: how do we become peer reviewers of someone who was clairvoyant, or claimed clairvoyance? Steiner’s own challenge to us is that if this is a science, we need peer review. But if only one person can see the spiritual world… you can see the problem.

One of the things Whitehead says is that epistemological difficulties are disguised ontological problems. If we only focus on “how we know” while assuming we’re already clear on what reality is, we get stuck in paradoxes and contradictions. Whitehead reimagines ontology such that human consciousness is a special form of something that pervades the universe.

He says we feel cut off from the external totality, but we still “have truck with the totality of things.” There is traffic between us and the universe. The ground of consciousness and the ground of the cosmos are one ground. That makes speculative metaphysics possible—and the promise of anthroposophy is that it need not remain speculative; it can become experiential.

Many of you know Steiner’s Light Course (late 1919/early 1920), delivered to Waldorf teachers. Steiner says something then that he thought would be impossible about thirty years earlier when he was editing Goethe’s scientific works: it is now possible for there to be a Goethean physics. In the 1880s he didn’t think it was possible because the Newtonian paradigm was still solidly in place. By the 1920s, relativity and quantum theory had destroyed the foundations of mechanistic physics. Steiner realized: now we can sow seeds in children to maintain an experiential connection to phenomena like light, color, warmth, sound—and later teach them the relevant mathematical models. It was crucial, for Steiner, to have experiential grounding first, lest we mistake the mathematical models for the phenomena themselves.

Whitehead was concerned with the same problem. In 1920 he delivered lectures later published as The Concept of Nature. There he distinguishes two types of thought about nature. On the one hand, there is homogeneous thought about nature; on the other, heterogeneous thought about nature, which includes the fact that we are thinking about it.

Homogeneous thought about nature is what natural science does, studying nature and bracketing the fact that we perceive and think about it (he reserves that kind of heterogenous inquiry into nature of metaphysics). Whitehead defines nature for scientific purposes as what we are aware of in perception. Nature is what we are aware of in perception. That differs from how Newtonian physics often treated nature, as a mathematical mechanism behind the scenes—a “bloodless ballet of numbers,” as Whitehead puts it.

In The Concept of Nature he discusses the bifurcation of nature: the modern tendency to posit a conjectured system of particles or fields beyond phenomena that is supposed to cause phenomena, while treating the blue of the sky, the feel of velvet, the melody of birdsong as secondary psychic additions, a mere dream. Whitehead says we must return to the phenomena. Science should study what we are aware of in perception, seeking systematic patterns in the perceptual world—not seeking to go behind perception to something unperceived, or even unperceivable in principle, as an explanation. That would not be to explain or elucidate our experience of nature, but to explain it away by reduction to an abstract model that we’ve conjure up.

In this way Whitehead aligns strongly with Goethe.

Steiner, of course, intensifies Goethe’s method: he turns sympathetic observation of formative forces back upon the observer and calls for a metamorphosis of the researcher. Our virtues as selves—our interior moral qualities—affect how nature shows itself. The modern dichotomy between fact and value cannot stand. Loving attention directed toward a phenomenon allows it to reveal more than it otherwise would. This means we cannot bracket consciousness; we must consider the quality of consciousness if we hope to deepen knowledge of ourselves and our relation to the natural world.

Let me read a few more lines from Whitehead so you can hear how close his sensibility is to Goethe’s, even though he wasn’t consciously influenced by Goethe. Whitehead writes (from his first lecture at Harvard in 1924):

“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.”

He’s saying: there is more to be seen in the process of becoming than what is first revealed. But what we gain through deepened sensitivity is richer perceptions, not something “behind the veil.”

Consider an analogy: if you want to understand a play, you don’t seek to rip back the curtain and look into the dressing room for “naked truth.” That misses the point. The point is the drama happening on stage, where observer and observed meet and mingle. There are layers upon layers of meaning that require sustained attention—but we should abandon the old dichotomy between “reality” and “appearance.”

In that sense, Whitehead’s ontology is an aesthetic ontology. We often separate aesthetics and ontology, but Whitehead suggests reality is more like an artistic process. Human consciousness is both a product of and, through our creative work, a participant in that aesthetic process.

One last point: Whitehead and Steiner share a sense that we need to overcome the idea of space and time as containers we exist in. In the Light Course, Steiner reflects on the formula velocity = distance/time. He says we’re led to think distance (or space) and time are the real things out there, while velocity is a construct of our calculations. Steiner suggests the reverse: velocity is more concrete; space and time are ways our organism measures and coordinates itself in relation to others.

Whitehead says something similar: “the extension of space is the ghost of transition.” Rather than imagining ourselves “inside” space and time like bodies in a container, what is fundamentally real are creative events—our consciousness among them—composing an ongoing cosmogenesis.

This is a perspective (questioning the fundamentality of space-time) that many physicists are now adopting, so there is convergence between physics and these more speculative and esoteric perspectives. Whitehead says “the physical world is, in a sense, a deduced concept. Our problem is to fit the world to our perceptions, not our perceptions to the world.” Modern science, despite its empirical intent, became divorced from experience and began to treat mathematical constructs as the “real world,” then wondered how that construct could “cause” experience. Whitehead, like Goethe and Steiner, rejects that as entirely the wrong way around.

Once we reverse it, anthroposophy—Steiner’s spiritual science—begins to make more sense.

Steiner ends the Light Course by warning that the materialistic picture of nature, the technoscientific approach to studying nature—already prevalent in his time—was destroying the world. Science is not value-free. Science has a kind of religious interest in truth. If we can reclaim science as an inquiry through our humanness into truth—truth not behind appearances but as an enrichment or elucidation of appearances—then we can avert not only technoscientific destruction of the living planet but also the transhuman destruction of the human being, since these methods are increasingly being turned onto ourselves.

Thank you for your attention. I hope we have time for questions. I’m really glad to be here with you.

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Q&A

• Question 1: You quoted Whitehead saying something like, “the extension of space is the ghost of transition.” I’ve been interested in this because Whitehead was both philosopher and mathematician, and both he and anthroposophy have points of contact with line geometry, which he helped systematize. That quote made me think of line geometry immediately. Does Whitehead ever explicitly connect these two aspects of his work?

Great question. I wish we had longer. But in Part IV of Process and Reality, Whitehead develops what later came to be called a point-free, region-based or mereotopological approach. He thought we needed to move beyond the idea that there is one geometry that correctly represents the physical world. Different geometrical schemes are useful for different purposes.

He thought projective geometry was a kind of Rosetta Stone — a non-metrical geometry that can translate between other, metrical geometries. That relates to the point about Steiner and Whitehead converging on whether distance and time are fundamental, or whether velocity is more concrete. For Whitehead, as for Steiner, velocity is concretely real. We can choose different geometries to measure distances as a matter of convention.

In Part IV of Process and Reality, he develops a “point-free” geometry. He thought the idea of point-instants in nature was undermined by quantum theory, and even by relativity. We need to think in terms of events—more like regions. We can approximate a point-instant, but we shouldn’t imagine we’re dealing with concrete point-instants in nature. When you make that shift, it opens a new vista for scientific inquiry.

Whitehead also debated Einstein face-to-face about whether spacetime should be treated as something physically warped—as if spacetime were itself a physical thing. Whitehead thought it wasn’t: spacetime is a way we measure what is physical. And what is physical, for him, are concrete events—happenings, occurrences, “actual occasions.” There’s more to say, but I hope that indicates the direction he wanted to take physics.

• Question 2: Steiner gave many exercises for fine-tuning our inner attitudes. You said Whitehead was very humble. Was he so humble that he didn’t provide methodologies or practices for the interior realm?

Whitehead says, at one point, that the sole justification for any thought is the elucidation of practical experience and engagement with life. He’s a pragmatist, a radical empiricist in that sense. He doesn’t give specific exercises, but as a mathematician and geometer he understood, as Steiner did, that geometry can be an example of a mode of knowing reality that is nowhere found directly in the sensory world. I think of Plato: “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here.” You need that discipline.

Finally, Whitehead says every science has its instruments, and the instrument of metaphysics is language itself. We ought to experiment upon language in order to alter perception. I think of Owen Barfield on language and the evolution of consciousness. So experimenting with language — in speculative metaphysics and in poetry — is one practice Whitehead leaves us with. And he does both quite well.