Research, Science, & the Human Being by the Editor
Research Science & the Human Being
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. *** 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. summer issue 2011
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