Toward a Goethean Physics (Part 1 of 3)
Reading Rudolf Steiner’s "Light Course" (GA 320) through Alfred North Whitehead’s Organic Realism
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. In Part 2 I’ll share reflections on lectures 4-6, and in Part 3, lectures 7-10. 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 novel indications 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 explores[1] the metamorphic sequence of phenomena, finding their true relations and thereby distilling the archetypal phenomenon linking them together. This is akin to a move Whitehead made as part of his reformulation of Einstein’s tensor equations and natural philosophy in Principle of Relativity(1922). While Einstein had already replaced the luminiferous ether with a “new ether,” namely, his gravitational field[2], Whitehead rejected outright both “the shy ether behind the veil” hypothesized by 19thcentury physicists as well as Einstein’s identification of a curved geometrical manifold with the physics of gravitation.[3] In line with his earlier criticisms of the “bifurcation of nature” and affirmation that “everything perceived is in nature” (Concept of Nature, 1920), Whitehead argued that “the ether is exactly the apparent world, neither more nor less” (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 seemingly 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; https://wrl.whiteheadresearch.org/items/show/2093)
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 as if they were 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 make sense of. 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 local 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 our 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, that is, to better predict how nature will respond to our prodding. 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 (or toxic waste). 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.
[1] On the difference between Goethe’s exploratory and Newton’s hypothesis-driven approach to scientific experimentation (despite the latter’s claim to “feign no hypotheses” in the study of gravity, it is clear that in his study of optics, he began his experiments seeking to prove the corpuscular theory of light and to explain color geometrically as a consequence of diverse refrangibility), see Neil Ribe, Friedrich Steinle; “Exploratory Experimentation: Goethe, Land, and Color Theory.” Physics Today 1 July 2002; 55 (7): 43–49. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1506750
[2] Einstein’s 1920 Leiden lecture, “The Ether and Relativity.”
[3] Einstein's gravitational field does not constitute the perceptual world directly but is a theoretical construct that explains how masses interact with each other through the geometry of space-time.
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).
Goethean physics is walking on water? Your seemingly AI generated illustration is curious. Reminds me of the replacing of the Harvard motto and now - the Chinese co-opting the whitehead - the pimp el.