by Colin Wilson
It is hard for us nowadays to grasp just how tormented Steiner felt by scientific materialism—as did so many other great intellects at that time. Yet unless we try to grasp it, we cannot even begin to understand how Steiner came to create the vast system he called ‘occult science’. In past centuries, what was taught in schools and universities was the most advanced knowledge of the time, and students could absorb it without any qualms or doubts. In Steiner's time, schools and universities were teaching ideas that seemed to millions of people outrageously untrue. They were teaching—as the latest word in modern thinking—that man is a machine, that religion is a superstition, and that evolution is a purely mechanical process based on survival of the fittest. This made respectable churchmen see red, but their honest indignation only seemed to make things worse. They always seemed to come off worse in arguments with scientists—as when T. H. Huxley wiped the floor with Bishop Wilberforce in the famous Oxford debate on evolution in 1860. (When Wilberforce asked whether Huxley was descended from an ape through his grandfather or grandmother, and Huxley replied that he would not be ashamed to be descended from an ape, but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used his great gifts to obscure the truth, even hostile members of the audience burst into applause.) So for men like Steiner, who detested materialism yet felt no sympathy with orthodox religion, it was of vital importance to try to find some scientific way of refuting the materialists. This is why dozens of pages in the early part of Steiner's autobiography are taken up with descriptions of the philosophers he devoured. He was seeking some argument that would disprove materialism once and for all.
For Steiner, one of the most important of these intellectual allies was the philosopher Fichte. A century earlier, Fichte had been plunged into despair by the philosophy of Kant, which seemed to prove that our senses are liars, and that we can never know ‘things as they are’. If that is true, then man is little better than a worm. Then Fichte made an important mental leap. He noticed that, when we sit thinking, we often feel confused and uncertain. But the moment a man is launched into vigorous action, his doubts vanish like mists in the morning sun. According to Fichte, mere thinking is bound to tell us lies, because it puts us into a passive state of mind. So when the thinking self says ‘I’, it is not the true ‘I’ speaking, only half an ‘I’. Let the thinker get up out of his armchair and try to find ways of living his thought; only then will his thinking be powerful and accurate.
Fichte's thinking had the bracing effect of a cold shower on the perplexed young student. When some materialist told him ‘The ego is an illusion’, he could retort: ‘Your ego seems to be an illusion because you won't get out of your armchair. Get rid of your lukewarm scepticism and you'll soon see that the “I” is a reality.’
Even more important was the influence of Professor Franz Brentano, who taught at the University of Vienna, and whose public lectures Steiner was allowed to attend. Brentano not only became a major influence on Steiner's thought, but—through the influence of his follower Edmund Husserl—one of the most important influences on twentieth-century philosophy.
Brentano was concerned at the way materialism had come to dominate psychology. The English philosopher Hobbes had declared that the mind does not exist, for it is a contradiction to talk about an ‘immaterial substance’. The Scottish philosopher Hume said that when he looked inside himself, he did not discover some ‘essential David Hume’, but merely a lot of sensations and ideas, drifting around like leaves in the wind. James Mill asserted that the mind is a machine and that its laws are mechanical. His son John Stuart Mill shrank from this extreme view, but suggested that our thoughts are a matter of ‘chemistry’. By the time of Brentano, this view had become known as ‘psychologism’. So, for example, according to psychologism, our ideas of good and evil are due to a kind of mental chemistry, just as our ideas of hot and cold are due to a kind of physical chemistry. If this view is correct, then it is inaccurate to talk about a ‘mental act’; all ‘acts’ are really physical.
Like Fichte, Brentano had one simple and powerful insight. He declared: There is a basic difference between a mental and physical act. If I slip on the snow and fall flat on my back, that is an unintentional physical act. But there is no such thing as an unintentional mental act. When I think, I have to think about something; I have to focus my mind on it. You could compare all mental acts (thinking, willing, loving, trying to remember something) to a searchlight beam stabbing into the darkness. There is an element of will, of ‘intentionality’, in all mental activity. So it is quite inaccurate to compare mental activity to chemistry, or to a kind of drifting, like leaves on a stream. It flows purposefully or not at all.
This is exactly what the young Steiner wanted to hear. His whole life so far had been a struggle for freedom, a fight to escape his poverty-stricken working-class existence. Books and ideas had been the beacons along his road. To tell him that man possessed no free will was an outrage to his common sense. Now Brentano was saying the opposite: mental activity is, by its very nature, purposeful. And anybody who has grasped this can also see that our most rewarding mental activity is that which is most purposeful. Conversely, the least rewarding is the least purposeful—the kind of listless, bored activity we indulge in when we don't know what to do with ourselves. According to the materialists, there was no real difference between highly rewarding mental activity and bored mental activity. Now Steiner could see that this was obvious nonsense. And such a realization was enough to galvanize him into working with a new determination and optimism.
It must have been a strange, rather breathtaking sensation to feel that he, Rudolf Steiner, knew better than hundreds of distinguished scientists and philosophers. But such a sensation has been experienced by every original thinker when he sets out to express his own vision of truth. ‘I must create my own system or be enslaved by another man's,’ said William Blake; and by the age of eighteen, Steiner felt he had laid the foundations of his own system.
It was at this point that he met a man who was to exercise a decisive influence on his future: Karl Julius Schröer, professor of the history of German literature at the Technical Highschool. Steiner found his lectures on Goethe and Schiller a revelation. He had learned about Goethe many years before from his doctor friend; but Schröer's enthusiasm brought it all to life. He made Steiner understand the enormous impact that Goethe's arrival made on the literary scene of the eighteenth century—the same kind of impact made by Wordsworth and Lord Byron in the century of Alexander Pope and Dr Johnson. Steiner read Faust—in Schröer's edition—for the first time and found it magnificent. Flattered to have such an attentive student, Schöer was soon inviting Steiner to his home, and talking to him about the second part of Faust, which he was at present engaged in editing.
Goethe was the single greatest influence in Steiner's intellectual life. Reading Faust convinced him once and for all that he could dismiss the materialist philosophers. What must have delighted him even more was that Goethe had shared his own enthusiasm for science, and had created his own non-materialistic philosophy of science. For Goethe, nature was ‘God's living garment’, and could not be understood except by recognizing that it is constantly in a process of creation. There is a famous story of how Goethe and Schiller met at a meeting of the Natural Science Society. As they left the building together, Schiller remarked that he wished scientists would not make everything so fragmentary and disconnected, because it made it hard to follow. Goethe, who until then had felt no sympathy for Schiller, was struck by this remark, and launched into a description of his own vision of science. ‘There is another way of apprehending nature, active and living, struggling from the whole into parts…’. But when he went on to explain that he believed that all plants had developed from one original plant, Schiller shook his head. ‘That's not an empirical experience. It's just an idea.’
Now, as he learned about Goethe's scientific ideas from Schröer, and began to read some of his writings on science for himself, Ste
iner at last began to develop his own spiritual philosophy.
Before we go any further, it is necessary to take into account another vital thread in Steiner's development. So far, we have considered only his intellectual development and his struggle to disprove materialism; in this respect, his development could be compared with that of many of his contemporaries, from Carlyle and Nietzsche to Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. But there was one important respect in which Steiner differed from these distinguished contemporaries. From the beginning, he had been the possessor of a strong ‘psychic faculty’. As a small boy, he had been sitting in the station waiting room when the door had opened, and a strange woman came in. Steiner observed that she resembled other members of his family. The woman stood in the middle of the room and said to the small boy: ‘Try and help me as much as you can—now as well as in later life.’ Then she walked into the stove and vanished. Steiner decided not to tell his parents; he was afraid of being scolded for superstition. But he noticed that his father was sad the next day. Later, he discovered the reason: a female relative had committed suicide not far away. Her death had occurred at the time Steiner saw the woman in the waiting room.
Describing this later in life, Steiner added:
From that time onward a soul-life began to develop in the boy which made him entirely conscious of worlds from which not only external trees or mountains speak to the human soul, but also the Beings who live behind them. From that time onward the boy lived together with the spirits of nature that can be observed in such a region. He lived with the Creative Beings that are behind objects…and he submitted to their influence in the same way that he submitted to the influence of the spiritual world.
Readers who can accept Steiner's struggle against scientific materialism may find such comments wholly unacceptable. There can be no doubt whatever that most of us feel a healthy reluctance to devote much attention to such matters as ghosts, life after death, the ‘supernatural’. The kind of people who take an interest in these things are often gullible or overimaginative. Yet anyone who decides to study the ‘paranormal’ in a spirit of scientific scepticism soon realizes that it cannot be dismissed as superstition or wishful thinking. The body of evidence for ghosts, poltergeists, ‘second sight’, precognition, psychokinesis, telepathy, and ‘out-of-the-body-experiences’ is simply overwhelming. We have already seen how J. Rhodes Buchanan came to investigate a bishop's claim that he could distinguish brass in the dark by the taste it made in his mouth, and ended by discovering that many of his students could describe the history of an object by simply holding it in their hands. Sensible, ordinary people are always encountering such anomalies, and discovering that they cannot be explained away as delusions.
I have suggested elsewhere* that our remote ancestors probably took these ‘psychic faculties’ for granted (and, as we shall see later, Steiner also believed this). We have deliberately ‘narrowed’ our senses to cope with the highly complex experiences of civilized existence. Our ancestors needed a ‘sixth sense’ to warn them when a wild animal was lying in wait; the modern city dweller would find such a faculty superfluous. The curious case of Peter Hurkos seems to support this view. Hurkos was a Dutch house painter who fell off a high ladder and smashed his skull. When he woke up in hospital, he found that he could read people's minds, and ‘sense’ the history of an object by holding it in his hand. There was one minor problem: he was totally unable to concentrate on the ordinary affairs of everyday life, with the result that he found it impossible to hold down a job. It was not until someone suggested that he should use his psychic powers on the stage that he solved the problem of how to make a living. It seems conceivable that our remote ancestors were as ‘psychic’ as Hurkos—and as unable to focus the mind for more than a few mintutes at a time. In teaching ourselves to concentrate, we have voluntarily abandoned that wider sensitivity to the universe that is still possessed by many primitive tribes. ‘Psychics’ are people who, through some accident of birth or heredity, still possess these primitive abilities.
Yet where Steiner is concerned, this theory raises an immediate problem. Steiner was not in the least unable to concentrate on the affairs of everyday life. His ability to read Kant in his early teens argues a remarkable faculty of concentration. He was an excellent student who gained high marks in science, mathematics, and history. How can all this be reconciled with the ‘atavistic’ theory of psychic abilities?
Here Steiner himself suggests the answer: that his psychic abilities were the outcome of a profoundly meditative temperament. His autobiography makes it clear that he combined his enthusiasm for science with a poetic temperament akin to that of Wordsworth. (In fact, we may recall that Shelley was also a science enthusiast.) Like Wordsworth, he had the ability to enter into profound states of inner peace. He saw no contradiction between these states and his love of science and philosophy: on the contrary, it seemed obvious to him that when we become absorbed in science or philosophy, we retreat into that ‘interior castle’.
It is important to understand why modern man has so much difficulty in experiencing the ‘reality’ of nature as Wordsworth experienced it. In order to cope with his highly complex life, he has developed the mechanical part of his being. We might call this mechanical part ‘the robot’. When I learn something difficult—like driving a car or speaking a foreign language—I have to learn it consciously, with painful effort; then my ‘robot’ takes it over, and does it far quicker and more efficiently than ‘I’ can do it. The trouble with the robot is that he not only ‘takes over’ the things I want him to do, like driving my car and typing this page; he also takes over many things I would prefer to do myself, like listening to music or going for a country walk. When I am in a hurry I may even eat ‘automatically’, without really enjoying it. The robot tends to rob us of experience.
In The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley described his experience with the psychedelic drug mescalin. He was staggered as ‘reality’ suddenly became overwhelmingly real. Everything he looked at seemed to exist with an almost painful reality, as if it was throbbing with its own fullness of being. Even the folds in a piece of cloth struck him as infinitely fascinating and beautiful. The mescalin had put the robot out of action, and allowed the mind to see reality ‘naked’.
But Huxley made another important point. Mescalin also made him aware of the vastness of his own inner world. He wrote:
Like the earth of a hundred years ago, our mind still has its darkest Africas, its unmapped Borneos and Amazonian basins. In relation to the fauna of these regions we are not yet zoologists, we are mere naturalists and collectors of specimens…
Like the giraffe and the duck-billed platypus, the creatures inhabiting these remoter regions of the mind are exceedingly improbable. Nevertheless, they exist…
If I have made use of geographical and zoological metaphors, it is not wantonly, out of a mere addiction to picturesque language. It is because such metaphors express very forcibly the essential otherness of the mind's far continents, and the complete autonomy and self-sufficiency of their inhabitants. A man consists of what I may call the Old World of personal consciousness and, beyond a dividing sea, a series of New Worlds—the not too distant Virginias and Carolinas of the personal subconscious and the vegetative soul; the Far West of the collective unconscious, with its flora of symbols, its tribes of aboriginal archetypes; and, across another, vaster ocean, at the antipodes of everyday consciousness, the world of Visionary Experience…
Some people never consciously discover their antipodes. Others make an occasional landing. Yet others (but they are few) find it easy to come and go as they please…
Steiner, it seems clear, was one of these rare types of human being who can travel without difficulty in this inner universe.
Huxley goes on to say that there are two methods of visiting this strange continent: drugs (like mescalin) and hypnosis. Steiner's method is certainly related to hypnosis. When a patient is hypnotized, he is persuaded to sink into a state of d
eep calm, and to forget his links with the physical world. For modern man, this is an exceedingly rare state, for the outer world clamours for so much of his attention that he finally abandons the habit of trying to leave it behind. He could be compared to a parent who has become accustomed to being awakened a dozen times a night by a teething baby, and acquires the habit of sleeping so lightly that the least sound can draw him back to consciousness.
But to visit our inner worlds—even to the extent of becoming deeply absorbed in a book, or listening to music—we have to get rid of this habit of over-alertness. We need to acquire the habit of deep relaxation, of forgetting all our anxieties (most of which, after all, are quite unnecessary). Steiner seems to have been born with this habit, as Wordsworth was, and the idyllic background of his childhood allowed it to become deeply ingrained.
It is exceedingly difficult to follow Steiner into the ‘supersensible worlds’ that he describes in his work—although the attempt must later be made. But we can at least understand what he means when he writes: ‘To me, the spiritual world was an immediate reality. The spiritual individuality of each person was revealed to me in complete clarity.’ For most of us have developed some degree of being able to grasp a person's essence, and to recognize intuitively the level of maturity they have achieved. But it is altogether more difficult to understand what Steiner means when he goes on to say: ‘When someone died I followed him further on his journey into the spiritual world. One time after the death of a former classmate, I wrote about this side of my inner experiences to one of my teachers at the Realschule. He replied in an unusually kind letter, but with not a single word did he refer to what I had written about the dead school-mate.’ This is hardly surprising. The schoolmaster must have suspected that it was either imagination or an attempt to impress. Steiner goes on: ‘And it was always the same in regard to my experience of the spiritual world. No one was interested to hear about it. At most…people would start to talk about spiritualism. Then it was I who did not wish to listen. To approach the spirit in this way was repellent to me.’