Toward a Goethean Physics (Part 2 of 3)
Reading Rudolf Steiner’s "Light Course" (GA 320) through Alfred North Whitehead’s Organic Realism
Part 1 focused on Lectures 1-3 is available here:
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 v into 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 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 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).