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Human Moral Development and the Future Evolution of Nature
By Andrew Luisi
In the times when an intuitive feeling was present that afforded our ancestors the ability to live in nature and feel what it needed to progress, moral development was not actualized, but rather felt. In terms of anthroposophical study, returning to these old instincts is no longer necessary; we must now develop a spiritual understanding of ourselves and how we develop as moral human beings in relation to nature. We must utilize a deeper spiritual insight to discover why these increasingly unreliable instincts are presently unable to be accessed and to go beyond them to grow as individuals and as a society.
A spiritually awakened humanity must seek these insights because nature is in a process of dying and the forces of nature are withdrawing themselves from their previous roles. The only way to awaken nature is if we awaken ourselves. For the future evolution of nature, we must continue to develop morally, and the time is at hand.
It is becoming increasingly difficult for us to realize our tasks in the natural world because of our emancipation from the cosmos; plants and animals, however, are still very much dependent on their earthly surroundings. To live in this world is to come to the awareness that what is taking place on the earth is a reflection of what is taking place in the cosmos. Nature is a macrocosm that is united with forces working from all sides. Science in our present age focuses on the microcosm: By carefully putting something in a little glass plate and peering at it through a microscope, the macrocosm is unaccounted for. *
* Steiner, Rudolf. Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture, 129.
Drawing conclusions of the small-scale activities of life utterly ignores the total scope. If intellect has exterminated instincts, then the age of materialism has made us very clever, but we now lack true wisdom. Looking at the macrocosm, the broadest dimensions of nature begin to be understood, and this is a tremendous task of spiritual science today.
Rudolf Steiner poses two kinds of investigations into nature: first, that human beings may remain “mere observers of the material phenomena that comes toward them”; second, that we can “digest our impressions spiritually by thinking about them, by forming concepts about underlying spiritual foundations of the world.” *
* Klünker, Wolf-Ulrich. Introduction to Nature Spirits by Rudolf Steiner, 3.
We must not simply gaze at nature, but muse over nature; in doing so, we may feel the beauty in all things, and this enables our impressions. This is no ordinary perception, but intentionally thinking on morality. By doing so, we learn to develop a moral disposition that recognizes the unity and value between our nature and the natural world. This moral disposition, coming out of a philosophy of German Idealism, is being lucidly concentrated on the potentials for the future development of humanity; we are incessantly drawing out of ourselves this will, and we must try determinedly to uphold it. It is not enough to grasp the world with the intellect, but strive to understand it artistically, for outer nature always tallies to what is within.
Steiner advises that we must study the entire being in relation to our innermost nature, in order to apprehend what is lively and operating in the cosmos. “To find and know yourself, look all around you in the world. To find and know the world, look into all the depths within yourself.” [Steiner, Rudolf. Harmony of the Creative Word, 180.] Mutual understanding for humanity and nature is a true source of morality and spirituality in the most intimate chasms of the human being. Steiner uses language such as “what is behind” and “awakening” to reorient the human being to what was forgotten. [Lindenberg. Rudolf Steiner – A Biography, 7.] At the age of seven, he began to have inner questions on spiritual experiences and began to realize what lives behind nature.*
* The landscape of his home in Pottschach revealed not only the true disposition of nature, but what lives behind nature that speaks to the soul. Here is where a life within the soul was starting to become realized for Steiner.
Johannes Scotus Erigena, 1st century Irish theologian, Neoplatonist, and poet, postulated two realms of nature: the region above and the region below. The region above is characterized by a true knowledge, understanding, and moral conduct. The region below is characterized by vanities, false imaginings, and moral errors and mistakes. In order to re-orient the human being to what was once known but is no longer instinctual, and more importantly to take this knowledge and expand on it, moral development must be accomplished with enthusiasm, for great things can be accomplished with enthusiasm.
Erigena defined nature by composition of what is and what is not become. Nature is most commonly perceived through the senses, in the products and results of what is tangible. But nature also has potential aspects to evolve through our soulful and spiritual organs of perception. These are not physical organs that are inside the human, but rather the set of organs that can only be worked through moral development. In this sense, “moral” is defined as spiritual determination, the idea of ethics in German Idealistic Philosophy, that humanity can take its development further when it reaches out beyond natural and biographical aims toward spiritual aims. Through these spiritual aims, which could also be described as becoming free, the evolution of nature is also furthered. In discussing the mystery of Golgotha, Steiner explains that “when one can look back and perceive what once occurred naturally, which now needs to occur morally” is to understand what it means to be free, and the future evolution of nature depends on humanity becoming free.*
* Steiner, Rudolf. Man in the Past, Present and Future, 43.
Humanity must acquire knowledge by setting its thought processes free from its breathing processes. Thought processes, here, are not described as “ordinary thinking” or past, dead thoughts, but as “living thinking” or “before thinking becomes thoughts – thinking without an object of ‘attention.’” *
* Steiner, Rudolf. Start Now! A Book of Soul and Spiritual Exercises, 61.
When we can achieve living or creative thinking, the thought processes then enter and live within a rhythm of nature, for the true being of humankind lies hidden and, by strengthening moral forces, these thoughts become so mobile that they can access the hidden worlds around them, thus growing them. There must be a change from analysis to synthesis.*
* Steiner considered psychoanalysis dilettantish because it is only descriptive and analytical. There must be a constructive psychology that is creative and should generate the Soul. Psychosynthesis believes that a direct experience and pure self-awareness of the Self is true; it studies the person as both personality and Soul. In Psychosynthesis Roberto Assagioli states that the spiritual goals of Self-realization need social integration: “the harmonious integration of the individual into ever larger groups up to the ‘one humanity.’”
This is truly the beautiful dichotomy of what was earlier noted: going out-side to go in-side, and vice-versa. Ultimately, we must mature our moral character in order to set and further the evolutionary course of nature:
* Steiner, Rudolf, and delle Grazie, Marie Eugenie. “Nature and Our Ideals.”
Becoming free becomes of absolute importance when considering Goethe’s fundamental rule of life: that if we do not gain mastery over ourselves, the freeing of the spirit will become harmful. The first of his three motivating principles in organic nature, which Steiner referred to as the “three Goethean laws,” is that of metamorphosis or constant change of form. This refers to two types of knowing: ordinary consciousness, which is sense perception where perception is abstracted into an object. The second, and the more favorable, is to avoid the object entirely and to focus on the continual process of metamorphosis. The first will shoot the object down, so to speak, while the second flies with it. The second becomes a transition of physical realty; it is an ensuing transformation into soul existence, which raises itself into spirit. One must view Goethe’s rules through a spiritual lens: It is to understand that corporealities do not have a form perceptible to the senses. Creative thinking must be applied.
Goethe’s second motivating principle is that of polarity: that everything in nature itself is composed of opposites. His third is that there is a specific climactic development in organic nature, otherwise known as enhancement. From an alchemic perspective, this enhancement is toward a moral and spiritual rebirth of human kind. In the words of Mary Anne Atwood, a 19th century English writer on hermeticism and spiritual alchemy, the goal of alchemy is to ferment “the human vital spirit in order to purify it, to dissolve it, so that the essence can be reconstructed through a regeneration or transmutation.” This is summed up quite beautifully by Schiller:
* Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Notes.
Schiller wanted to build a bridge from everyday reality to the ideal human being, as a task to free oneself.
Both sensual and rational impulses, if developed in a one-sided fashion, hinder human nature from becoming free and morally developed. If the sensual is more dominant, a human being is conquered by drives and desires. And when the rational impulse is prevailing, drives and desires are suppressed and commit an abstract necessity.
* Allen, Paul Marshall and Joan DeRis. The Time is at Hand, 159.
It is only when both impulses are in harmony that freedom is achieved. Schiller’s “Aesthetic Letters” significantly inspired Goethe—so much so that thoughts arose in him that fashioned his Conversations of German Emigrants. In this fairy tale, two central conceptions are formulated: “Conceptions which lead to belief that there is a connection between events of life that cannot be explained by laws of the visible world” and “conceptions with human morality.”*
* Allen, Paul Marshall and Joan DeRis. The Time is at Hand, 160.
The second infers that we do not draw our impulses from the discernible world, but from motivations that elevate our impulses beyond what the sensible brings forth in them.
It is no surprise that the concept of Nietzsche’s “Übermensch” is also deeply rooted in the ideas of becoming morally free. French Philosopher Henri Bergson in his Superhuman and Creative Evolution, while not using the term “Übermensch,” discourses on the “superman” ascending from the human, much as the human has arisen out of the animal. In Steiner’s own research on the evolution of consciousness and becoming free, he discussed both theories.
Nietzsche’s notion of the superman was paraphrased by Steiner as: “The animal bore man in itself; must not man bear within himself a higher being, the superman?”*
* Gidley, Jennifer M., The Future, 108.
In this light, real self-knowledge is not circumscribed in one’s past, but in the soul’s future. The human being reaches the limits of knowledge through the senses; a bird cannot submerge itself in the water and live forever in the ocean for it lacks the physical and aquatic organs, Steiner said. The human being, when reaching the limit of knowledge, must realize his spiritual organs, “where the soul can live in an element that goes beyond the horizon of the senses.”*
* Steiner. Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts, 14.
This is an important factor in our moral development and the future evolution of nature. In Steiner’s Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts, he develops an influential apprehension that humanity, beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, has sunk into the lowest realms of nature; technology, thus, becomes a sub-nature. We “must find the strength, the inner force of knowledge” to overcome how far humanity has sunk below in technology. “The age requires a knowledge transcending nature” which will enable humanity to climb as far as spiritual knowledge—to what is beyond earth and above nature.*
* Steiner. Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts, 218.
Beyond earth and above nature
In climbing to what is beyond earth and above nature, we must discuss the three overriding aspects of nature: past, present, and future. Past nature can be seen as the physical, which appears to sense perception and has concluded its development. Present nature, or the etheric, continues to develop and continues to pass into past nature. However, a future nature is a morality which human beings are creating now.
* Klünker, Wolf-Ulrich. Introduction to Nature Spirits by Rudolf Steiner, 15.
This is the future nature that Steiner referred to as rising as far as into super-nature. Thus, humanity’s task is to develop particular attitudes towards the world: an attitude of mind, soul, life, and a religious attitude. The last produces a quality missing in nature, and is not an inner reaction, as are the first three; it is not merely observing outer phenomena but rather bringing forth intentional inner activity. Goethe discusses that everything in nature lives by giving and taking. Plants give and live by giving off air and warmth, and animals take and live by taking in earth and water. While plants give and take, animals take and hold. But human beings have the ability to not only do both, but to also nurture and further develop themselves and nature.
“If man is to be rightly man on earth, earth cannot be rightly earth because of man.”*
* Steiner, Rudolf. Harmony of the Creative Word, 51
Human beings and earth are mutually inclusive, but cannot mutually support each other. We need to rise above our own moral development in order to lead nature’s future evolution. We reach this realization not merely through sense perceptions, but through a moral disposition that does not take into account only the physical—because then one studies only corpses—but the soul-spiritual. Goethe often describes how we live in nature but are strangers to her. Our aim, therefore, is to strive to mend the split, for doing so frees the human being and evolves nature.
Thinking unites us with the world, feeling brings us back into ourselves and makes us individuals. An awakened humanity participates consciously in its own development and the future evolution of nature, as free agents to create a world of our choosing. We are on a level of spiritual existence that is incomplete and imperfect, but we can be in the process of being led to a stage of completion that will determine the future evolution of nature. The development of our consciousness lies at the heart of this changed perception.
Citations
Assagioli, Roberto. Psychosynthesis. Aquarian/Thorsons, 1993. Gidley, Jennifer M. The Future: A Very Short Introduction . Oxford UP, 2017.
Lindenberg, Christoph. Rudolf Steiner: A Biography. Trans. Jon McAlice. Great Barrington, MA: SteinerBooks, 2012.
Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von. On the Aesthetic Education of Man Trans. Reginald Snell. Angelico, 2015.
Steiner, Rudolf. Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts. Trans. George Adams and Mary Adams. London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1999.
Harmony of the Creative Word: The Human Being and the Elemental, Animal, Plant and Mineral Kingdoms. Trans. Matthew Barton. London: Rudolf Steiner, 2001.
Man in the Past, Present and the Future. Rudolf Steiner Press, 1982.
– and Marie Eugenie Delle Grazie. Nature and Our Ideals. Mercury, 1983. Nature Spirits: Selected Lectures. Ed. Wolf-Ulrich Klünker. Comp. WolfUlrich Klünker. London: Rudolf Steiner, 1995.
Start Now!: A Book of Soul and Spiritual Exercises. SteinerBooks, 2004.
Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture. Trans. Creeger and Gardner. Kimberton, PA: Biodynamic Association, 1993.
Andrew Luisi (andrew.e.luisi@gmail.com) in an American living in Germany. He studied at the Alanus Hochschule under Prof. Dr. Wolf-Ulrich Klünker, the first professor of anthroposophy, researching “The Philosophical Justification of Anthroposophy and Its Spiritual Dimensions.” He is interested in how community building, centered on biodynamic agriculture and sustainability, may alleviate various natural and spiritual ailments, and how anthroposophy must be integrated into the modern age of pluralism.
