Research, Science, & the Human Being

by the Editor

The first “basic” or foundational book by Rudolf Steiner was A Philosophy of Freedom. Already this title invites us into a small research problem, since Steiner indicated that English “freedom” did not adequately translate the German “Freiheit”; its suffix, “-heit,” points to an active capacity, while “-dom” indicated a defining condition. The missing English cognate would have been “freehood”—like “womanhood,” “manhood,” “brotherhood,” “sisterhood.” The suffix “-dom” aligns more with “kingdom” or “fiefdom” or “serfdom.” So the title is sometimes rendered “a philosophy of spiritual activity”—but that loses the “free” to which we Americans feel so connected. Such questions of the human inner life are central to anthroposophy.

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With this issue we take up for the second year the question of anthroposophical research: what is it, how is it faring, where might we lend a hand. Rudolf Steiner’s first foundational book is important to this research in two ways. First, it is a record of his own fundamental research path. Page by page it reflects Steiner’s exploration of his own consciousness. He hoped for the book to be taken up by deeply committed and self-aware seekers: human beings looking for the way forward in human evolution. Americans are misled, again, by the title, since our impulsive culture does not see in the word “philosophy” the forward-driving enterprise which it was for Steiner. Interestingly it was, according to Steiner, some American anarchists in Europe who first “got” what he was saying. (A true anarchism is not mere lawlessness, but a search for how human beings can be both social and free.)

The second importance of 'A Philosophy of Freedom' for research is that it shows us something essential about anthroposophy, as Rudolf Steiner developed it. The word “anthroposophy” had been around, but had never established itself clearly. Meanwhile, the similarly old word “anthropology” was being given its modern sense: a comparative study of human beings and cultures in different places, with emphasis on the exotic and “primitive,” and across different times. This was, as G.K. Chesterton put it later, a science not so much of human beings as of anthropoids. In the dominant culture, that body of concerns and that view of the human being which would be a true inquiry into our own human place and significance in the cosmos was dismembered and parceled out among a dozen or more emerging sciences, with no central unifier.

So anthropology fit itself into a modest place in a broad and materialistic scientific enterprise, being neither more comprehensive nor more central to “science,” to human understandings, than zoology or botany. It could not be otherwise under materialism, when the specifically human elements that differentiate us from animals and plants and minerals are located in consciousness, mind, spirit. Moreover, since the early 1600s “hard” science sought to pull the human being back to the sidelines of research, a cool and detached observer. “The experimenter stands apart from the experiment!” That was the hopeful cry of those trying to objectify science and free it from petty human emotions and personal ambitions.

It was a further problem in Steiner’s youth that this “objective” science had come to certain limits. In 1872, when he was eleven, the German physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond gave a famous lecture On the Limits of Natural Science (Über die Grenzen des Naturerkennens) and followed in 1880 with a speech to the Berlin Academy of Sciences where he presented seven “world riddles,” three of them “transcendent” or insoluble. Essentially these “boundaries” remain today in the questions, “What is matter?” and “What is consciousness?” They defy science’s hope to make all of reality knowable, thinkable.

With his scientific training and natural clairvoyant experiences from childhood, Rudolf Steiner set out to find a way through these limits, and A Philosophy of Freedom is his research report and guidebook. What he found was that the dead-ends of modern natural science can be overcome only by placing a view of the human being back in the central, fundamental position of all research. To solve the riddles of the world, we must solve the riddles of the human being, as he states plainly in the 1918 preface to the revised edition.

Turning from the beginning to the end of his life’s work, at the end of 1923 Rudolf Steiner established a School for Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum in Switzerland. In this school and in the Anthroposophical Society which supports it, ancient, esoteric knowledge flows together with the fruits of modern natural and human sciences on the basis of an evolutionary strengthening of the human being’s soul forces. Rather than exclude the human being, include it—and take personal responsibility for that choice! So after three centuries of pushing the essentially human to the side, it is a science of mind and spirit —a Geisteswissenschaft, where “Geist” means both mind and spirit (but usually rendered in anthroposophical writings just as “spiritual science”)—which assumes a new, central role in overcoming the limits to knowledge.

A Call for Research

by Henry Barnes

In 1991 Henry Barnes, one of the preeminent figures in the first century of anthroposophy in America, recalled and repeated Rudolf Steiner’s 1923 appeal for this new research to be developed as rapidly as possible.

It was the next to the last morning of the Christmas Conference for the Founding of the General Anthroposophical Society, December 31, 1923. The two morning talks dealt with aspects of scientific inquiry. The first, by Rudolf Maier, concerned “The Connection of Magnetism with Light,” and the second, by Dr. Lily Kolisko, dealt with the “Physical Proof of the Working of Microorganisms.” Rudolf Steiner introduced Dr. Kolisko’s talk with the following observations:

If it should become possible for anthroposophy to give to the different branches of science impulses of method which lead to certain research results, then one of the main obstacles to spiritual research existing in the world will have been removed. That is why it is so important for work of the right kind to be undertaken in the proper anthroposophical sense.

After her talk he continued:

These experiments are, from an anthroposophical point of view, details leading to a totality which is needed by science today more urgently than can be said. Yet if we continue to work as we have been doing at present in our research institute, then perhaps in fifty, or maybe seventy-five years we shall come to the result that we need, which is that innumerable details go to make up a whole. This whole will then have a bearing not only on the life of knowledge but also on the whole of practical life as well.

People have no idea today how deeply all these things can affect practical daily life in such realms as the production of what human beings need in order to live or the development of methods of healing and so on. Now you might say that the progress of mankind has always gone forward at a slow pace and that there is not likely to be any difference in this field. However, with civilization in its present brittle and easily destructible state, it could very well happen that in fifty or seventy-five years’ time the chance will have been missed for achieving what so urgently needs to be achieved...

Rudolf Steiner concluded by saying what it would mean if it were possible for anthroposophical research to achieve in five or ten years what, he foresaw, would take fifty to seventy-five years at the speed at which work was then going forward. And he ended by saying:

I am convinced that if it were possible for us to create the necessary equipment and the necessary institutes and to have the necessary colleagues, as many as possible to work out of this spirit, then we could succeed in achieving in five or ten years what will now take us fifty or seventy-five. The only thing we would need for this work would be 50 or 75 million francs, then we would probably be able to do the work in a tenth of the time.

Henry Barnes followed this recollection with a forceful appeal, sixty-eight years later (and just after the fall of the Soviet empire in East Europe), for this research work to be taken up more energetically in the USA.

Two questions immediately arise: What is spiritual-scientific research? and: How can it be furthered?

In response to the first question, we should bear in mind Rudolf Steiner’s observation quoted above that it is the “impulses of method leading to research results that are so badly needed.” Once the method of inquiry has been opened up, it then becomes possible for colleagues in the field, who are of open mind and of good will, to share in the detailed investigations. As we know, the methods of spiritual-scientific research have been described by Rudolf Steiner in many places and, especially, in such fundamental works on the path of knowledge as Knowledge of Higher Worlds and its Attainment, and Occult Science, Chapter V.

In these descriptions we find three stages: in the first, we take the results of spiritual-scientific investigation and, as students, make them our own through the activity of clear and selfless thinking, which we have prepared to become the first instrument for higher knowledge. These living thoughts are ours because we have experienced them. In the second stage, we enter the realm of life, and, through meditative exercise, we acquire the capacity to perceive the living world as it begins to reveal itself in the language of imagination. At this stage of experience, the living images we perceive are the projections of supersensible reality, mirrored within our soul, not yet the immediate reality of spiritual experience itself. It is only when the third stage is reached and we have the inner strength of activity to erase the pictured world from consciousness that we are able to enter that stillness of being, deeper even than outer silence, in which the spiritual world itself begins to speak and sound within our soul. Beyond this experience of inspiration, as Rudolf Steiner describes it, there lies, as we know, the realm of experience in which being knows being in the immediate cognitive experience of intuition.

As one becomes familiar with the anthroposophical path of inner schooling, one discovers that what distinguishes spiritual-scientific research from the investigations of natural science is that, in the former, it is the researcher himself who is both instrument and knower, whereas in natural science the data is supplied by sense perception, extended through the use of technical instruments and theoretical models, which are then analyzed by the intellect, itself also a “given.” Responsibility, therefore, rests with the spiritual-scientific investigator to a degree unknown in natural scientific research. With these brief reflections on the nature of the method of anthroposophical research in mind, let us turn to the second question: how can it be furthered?

In a certain sense, everyone who is working with anthroposophical insights, whether as an individual on the path of self-knowledge, or as a colleague in some one of the practical enterprises which have their origins in anthroposophy, is already engaged in spiritual-scientific research! However, we are rarely conscious of this fact. We are constantly learning, comparing the results of previous investigations with the next new insights we have gained, and through this activity also expanding our capacities as a “knower,” as one who is engaged in research! Clearly, however, Rudolf Steiner had something else in mind when he spoke to the members gathered in Dornach nearly sixty-eight [now eighty-eight] years ago. He was pointing to the urgent need to free qualified individuals from their daily tasks so that they could devote themselves on a full-time basis to the work of research. He was thinking of institutes in which teams of individuals would work together, approaching the same questions from different sides, with the needed equipment at their disposal.

Where We Stand in North America

As reported in our first research issue (Evolving News, 2010, #2, p.17), a fund for anthroposophical research has been created in Henry’s name. This helpful stimulus joins other significant developments since 1991, some of them reflected on the following pages:

First, a Collegium in North America of the School for Spiritual Science has grown to maturity and is carrying consciousness and fostering collaboration for all the sections of the school in our continental context.

Second, independent research institutes have been established: the Water Research Institute of Blue Hill, Maine (1991), the Research Institute for Waldorf Education (1996), and the Nature Institute, in Ghent, New York (1998). More recently, the Threefold Educational Center has resumed a research role. For many years Ehrenfried Pfeiffer had a research laboratory at Threefold for his work in biodynamics.

Third, practical research is done by anthroposophical pharmacies, doctors, therapists, biodynamic groups, RSF Social Finance, and small initiatives; by faculty at Rudolf Steiner College, training institutes, and Waldorf schools, in Camphill, the Rudolf Steiner Fellowship Community, and other intentional communities.

Fourth, there are notable efforts by individuals (Dennis Klocek, Frank Chester, and Richard Tarnas, for example), and by artists whose research flows into and is expressed by their creative work.

And finally, it is all documented and disseminated by SteinerBooks, small publishers, and libraries. Anthroposophy fosters a culture of research based in personal responsibility. As Henry Barnes noted in 1991, it begins with the individual student, of whatever age, who is “raising” and enlarging her consciousness. And this new approach to research flows together from disparate fields—natural science, social science, humanities, arts, esoteric streams, spirituality—around one unifying element: the strengthening of human consciousness by meditation and exact imagination, inspiration, intuition.

Research Institute for Waldorf Education

In direct response to Henry Barnes’ appeal there emerged a research initiative for Waldorf education in North America. Though devoted to one field of initiative, its value is very broad. Education, after all, is central to all human becoming.

Education is also the focus of tremendous social pressures. Financially it is a big business. Being sponsored in the USA largely by local, state, and federal governments, it is also an area of accountability for politicians and public servants. And tens of millions of parents and grandparents take education very seriously, because it enhances or limits the lifetime possibilities of their children and grandchildren. The children, too, take an interest!

Waldorf education is immediately appealing to many parents, especially those with young children. Even so, the beautiful concepts underlying Waldorf need serious research to support them. Douglas Gerwin and David Mitchell are co-directors of the Research Institute for Waldorf Education, which receives “support and guidance from the Pedagogical Section of the School of Spiritual Science and financial support through the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America (AWSNA), the Midwest Shared Gifting Group and the Waldorf Schools Fund and The Waldorf Curriculum Fund.” It has supported research on “essential contemporary educational issues such as attention-related disorders, trends in adolescent development and innovations in the high school curriculum, learning expectations and assessment, computers in education, the role of art in education and new ways to identify and address different learning styles.”

The institute’s work takes shape in a twice-yearly Research Bulletin, colloquia, conferences, extensive free resources at waldorfresearchinstitute.org and the Online Waldorf Library at waldorflibrary.org, and further notice in Renewal magazine. It has supported the hugely challenging work of Waldorf teachers and given the movement and its schools a significant grounding and credibility. Asked on short notice for a few recent samples of the Institute’s work, we received a wonderfully diverse collection. Pride of place must go to “Standing Out without Standing Alone: Profile of Waldorf School Graduates.” This extensive survey of North American graduates gives a very definite sense of what Waldorf has to offer.

For teachers, there is “Creating a Sense of Wonder in Chemistry,” an excerpt from David Mitchell’s book. There’s a review by Dorit Winter of 'The Age of Wonder' by Richard Holmes, the noted biographer of Romanticism, “academically impeccable” but also “making the life of the subject experiential for the reader.” From a different angle comes “Soul Hygiene and Longevity for Teachers.” Waldorf teaching expects much of teachers, and the article gives a series of concrete self-development and hygienic processes to support them. For educators and parents there is “Social-Emotional Education and Waldorf Education,” bringing home the broadly if intermittently recognized truth that “Children’s social-emotional development is as important as their intellectual and physical development.” And another essential and very “hot” topic: “Assessment without High-Stakes Testing: Protecting Childhood and the Purpose of School.” Finally there are “reflections on a recent visit” to Russia where a hopeful first growth of Waldorf education is now learning to live with challenges from government, church, and economic and social dysfunction.

In the chaos of Europe, the millions for investment that Rudolf Steiner once hoped for did not materialize. Human-centered spiritual research—creative and deeply responsible—has still, tenaciously, taken root in North America. May we all participate and help it to flourish!

Douglas Gerwin and David Mitchell