Our Urphänomen reading group is back in action, this time reading Steiner’s lecture cycle titled Interdisciplinary Astronomy (1921, GA 323). Frederick Amrine recently published a wonderful new translation. Earlier this week I summarized lecture 5 (video above). Below is a rough transcript of my reflections:
The key issue here for Steiner is that we need to let go of this desire to find a better model as though the goal would just be to replace the Copernican model with a more mathematically or scientifically adequate mechanistic picture of the cosmos. He is just making sure that we understand at this point that we’re never going to be able to fit the heavens into our head. In other words, we’re never going to be able to intellectually figure out in a mathematical way how to compute the motions of the heavens because inevitably we run into irrational numbers. Instead of a new model, he is trying to coax us into a different feeling for the cosmos, a different way of relating to the phenomena that would not simply be through our sense organs and our ideation or intellect. He then in this chapter goes into his threefold picture of the human being. His basic idea here is that the threefold human being and the various organ systems that establish our humanness are internalizations or in some kind of rhythmic participation with the broader cosmos. Then if we want to understand the cosmos in its totality concretely rather than just making pictures of it in our head, we need to understand the way in which our full human composition – physical, etheric, astral and spiritual – and the way that our various organ systems are in some ways in correspondence with aspects of the universe. Steiner talks about the nervous system and the senses, the rhythmic system – the heart, the lungs – and the metabolic system and the limbs, and the ways in which these different systems relate us to the cosmos. He describes this inward movement related to the nerves and senses, and then he describes a kind of outward movement related to metabolism and the limbs.
I’ll put a body here without a head, and this is the head (all eye), and then in between is the rhythmic system, which is sort of mediating between the inward and outward movements. With the head and senses we get the cosmos streaming into us, and then we go to work on this with our ideas, with our thinking, whereas in our metabolic system and limbs, he says there’s a kind of analogy between the role that ideas play in our thinking and sensory life and the role that fertilization plays in the metabolic system. Steiner says that it’s much easier for us to bring consciousness to the relationship between our breathing, our blood flow and our thinking and sensing. So it’s much easier to illuminate this relationship with our consciousness. For instance, we can easily control our own breathing, and with practice learn to slow our heartbeat. But when we try to turn our attention to the metabolism, things get hazy, as you know Steiner often says we sleep in our will. So it’s much, much more difficult for us to understand or control what’s going on at the level of metabolism and the functions of fertilization which tie us back into the cosmos. Our ideation pulls us deeper into ourselves whereas the sexual reproductive process pulls us back into the cosmos. Steiner says there’s a kind of chaos that we discover at either extreme. So when we take in the motions of the heavenly bodies through our senses, there’s something about the beauty of that scene that leads us to believe there must be some order at work there. But then when we go to work with our thinking trying to calculate a model that might explain that order, we end up with these irrational numbers and so arrive at a kind of chaos. Similarly, the inverse of this occurs when we look at the embryological process of fertilization – there’s a sense in which we move from a chaotic state, an unformed state into something that’s more ordered and more amenable to a kind of geometrical, even mechanical study. So the ovum itself, as it begins to divide after being fertilized into the human form, is something that seems to come out of chaos into order, whereas when we look at the heavens, there seems to be an order displayed, but as we reflect on it more and more, it leads us to chaos. Somehow we need to find and cultivate an organ of perception that would be something like what the ancient Indians developed through their yogic breathing techniques, which Steiner associates with attempts to balance the rhythms of human perception with the rhythms going on in the cosmos, and so to develop a sense of spiritual perception of the cosmos as a whole. But he says we’ve outgrown this particular approach; we can’t do what these ancient Indian practitioners did with their breathing techniques. We need to cultivate a new kind of organ of perception. I thought of a neat connection here between Steiner’s claim that basically astronomy is deficient in reality whereas embryology is deficient in concepts. There’s a way in which our sense perception and intellectual reflection upon sense perception remains too abstract and removed from the real, whereas our metabolic and will life is so immersed in the real that we don’t have adequate concepts for it. There is an interesting correlation here with Whitehead’s theory of perception. One of Whitehead’s important innovations in his study of the history of philosophy, something he is very critical of and something he introduces to try to bring philosophy back to its senses, as it were, is he distinguishes between two modes of perception. One which he calls “presentational immediacy” which would be akin to what Steiner talks about just in terms of sense perception. Empiricist philosophers would describe our sense perception as giving us primarily patches of color that then the mind goes to work associating. Ideas for the empiricists would just be faded impressions, but even the rationalist philosophers still construed sensory perception in this way – that as human beings our most immediate, primordial means of accessing the external world is just through the five senses. That’s the basic idea that all modern philosophers, rationalists or empiricists, would accept even if the rationalists and empiricists have some differences of opinion about the role that thinking might play in ordering those sensory perceptions. What Whitehead introduces is this other form of perception which he calls, instead of sense perception, “bodily reception” or he also calls it “perception in the mode of causal efficacy.” It is that part of our experience which we barely notice because we’re so focused on our sensory experiences. We barely notice the fact that we have this deeper visceral experience which he identifies with causality or causal efficacy. It’s this reality principle that puts us in touch with the rhythms of the cosmos around us, but because these rhythms are generally much slower in their changing, in the degree to which they change in comparison to, say, what we see with our eyes – the visual field is constantly changing – so it captures our attention, whereas these deeper rhythms, which Whitehead is not as explicit about but Steiner really describes these deeper rhythms quite concretely, like the lunar rhythm for example or the day-night cycle, our experience is obviously deeply affected by the shift in light during the course of a 24 hour cycle, and these deeper rhythms of feeling are part of what Whitehead calls causal efficacy. It is part of what modern philosophy and science have totally ignored in its study of the universe and instead focused only on sense experience and developing instruments which extend that sense experience and then spinning all sorts of abstract models meant to explain that sensory experience. It’s as if modern science and philosophy have been operating in an attempt to understand the universe as if the human being were just a head with no body. I think what Steiner is inviting us to discover is very similar to what Whitehead was attempting to do in bringing our attention back to bodily perception of these cosmic rhythms. If we want to understand the universe as a whole, we need to develop a new kind of science which would be attentive to these subtler rhythms not discoverable through our outward facing senses. Steiner sees an intimate relationship between the human being and the cosmos. They are related topologically like the inside and outside of a glove. To fully grasp that interplay requires a new kind of imaginative perception that can perceive the correspondences between our organ systems and cosmic rhythms. Steiner does seem to be influenced by Hegel’s phenomenological method, in that his metaphysics is not an attempt to explain reality independently of the human explainer. For Steiner, metaphysics is participatory – there’s a different metaphysics for each cultural epoch and stage of evolution. It’s not a fixed, final truth, but something open and evolving. This participatory approach to truth and metaphysics aligns with Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of “hyperphysics” and the importance of integrating the human being and human knowledge into our understanding of the cosmos. It requires flexibility rather than fixation on a final answer.