by Colin Wilson
Where Steiner was concerned, the problem went back to that day in Vienna when he accompanied his friend to the railway station, and the friend maintained that thought is merely a result of processes in the brain and nervous system. As the train pulled out, Steiner shouted: ‘Your very consciousness proves that your theory is a lie.’
But does it? Not according to the reductionists, one of whom, the psychologist J. B. Watson, even went so far as to say that he had never observed such a thing as consciousness. What he meant, of course, was that in his laboratory, studying rats and guinea pigs, he had never observed anything that could not be explained as a mechanism of the brain and nervous system. And if someone had replied: ‘But what about your consciousness—are you telling me that doesn't exist?’, he would have replied: ‘No, but I am telling you it is a mechanism of the brain and nervous system.’
So the central problem is to prove that some psychological process cannot be explained in terms of mechanisms—that it involves free will.
The question is: does it matter? Watson would have said no. But many highly intelligent men of the nineteenth century would have passionately contradicted that view, for they knew that reductionism can cause insanity and death. Fichte described his own deep depression when he read Kant and concluded that ‘we can know nothing’. He escaped the dilemma by recognizing that man does not know himself fully until he launches himself into action. (To this, of course, Watson would reply: ‘That proves nothing—we all know a car works better when the engine has had time to warm up.’) The poet Kleist came close to insanity as a result of reading Kant, and ended by committing suicide. The philosopher William James plunged into a state of profound depression in which he felt permanently frightened and exhausted. He rescued himself by recalling Renouvier's definition of free will—that I can choose to go on thinking about something, or I can decide to think about something else. That finally convinced James—he could see no way that the reductionists could get around that particular argument. He recovered from his nervous breakdown and began to work on his definitive Principles of Psychology.
All subsequent arguments, by Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Popper and the rest, depend basically upon this argument about freedom of thought. What they are attempting to show, basically, is that creative thinking cannot be explained in ‘mechanical’ terms, as if the brain is merely a computer. Creativity involves hovering above the subject, like a bird, and seeing many possible choices. Then the bird plunges, like a hawk, and seizes one of these possibilities—when it might just as well seize another. And we are, of course, talking about the difference between ‘left-brain thinking’ and ‘right-brain thinking’. In order to demonstrate that man possesses genuine freedom of choice, we only have to grasp the way in which he thinks creatively, with the right brain using its ‘bird's eye view’ to perceive a hundred possibilities, and the left deciding which of these it will choose.
Steiner, of course, knew nothing about the left and right hemispheres of the brain, or even about Hudson's objective and subjective minds. He goes, nevertheless, straight to the heart of the problem:
Materialism can never offer a satisfactory explanation of the world. For every attempt at an explanation must begin with the formation of thoughts about the phenomena of the world. Materialism thus begins with the thought of matter or material processes. But in doing so it is already confronted by two different sets of facts: the material world and the thoughts about it.
So thought has, in a sense, come out of nowhere—or out of freedom.
The sad truth is, of course, that for the thoroughgoing materialist, this argument would be equally unconvincing. His reply might be somewhat as follows: ‘Look at gnats moving on the surface of a pond. Their movements are so complicated that they seem a proof of freedom of choice. Yet if we knew enough about a gnat's brain and about the situation, we would be able to predict every movement, as we can predict a moth's movement towards a candle flame. Someone who could look into the interior of the brain would see thoughts and feelings swarming like gnats; but this does not prove they are ‘free’; a scientist with enough information could predict every one of them…’.
This sounds like stalemate, until we return to Renouvier's original definition of free will as my ability to sustain a thought or change its direction as I choose. It is impossible to reduce that to a will-less mechanism.
The truth is that Steiner's Philosophy of Freedom would not convert a single materialist, or give him a moment's uneasiness. But from Steiner's point of view, that was unimportant. All that mattered was that, as a ‘scientist’, he had established his own logical foundation. Now if anyone should accuse him of wishful thinking or irrational optimism, he could point to his book and flatly deny the charge.
To Rosa Mayreder, Steiner wrote: ‘I know the exact place where my book belongs in the current of present day spiritual developments, and can point out the exact spot where it carries Nietzsche's line of thinking further.’ Sadly, none of Steiner's contemporaries noticed this. Eduard von Hartmann, to whom Steiner sent one of the first copies, read it carefully, filled it with notes, and still failed to understand a word of it. He sent his copy back to Steiner, evidence that he had no desire to re-read it, with the bewildering statement that it ought to be called Epistemological Phenomenalism and Ethical Individualism.
The problem was simple, and it enables us to grasp just why Steiner baffled so many of his contemporaries. Hartmann believed that what we ‘see’ is a kind of illusion. We might compare this view to the notion that man is trapped inside his own head, watching pictures of the world outside on a television monitor. He can never walk out into the street and see things ‘as they really are’. Hartmann assumed that Steiner started from the same basic premise. But this was untrue. For Steiner, man is already in the street outside. In his autobiography, Steiner expresses his aim with admirable clarity:
I tried to show in my book that nothing unknowable lies behind the sense-world, but that within it is the spiritual world. And I tried to show that man's idea-world has its existence within that spiritual world. Therefore, the true reality of the sense-world remains hidden from human consciousness only for as long as man is merely engaged in sense perception.
This explains why Hartmann failed to grasp Steiner's meaning. He could see that Steiner was admitting that reality usually remains hidden from human consciousness; but he failed to understand the reason. Steiner goes on to say: ‘When to the experience of sense-perception is added the experience of ideas, then consciousness experiences the sense-world in its objective reality.’ In other words, a dog or cat might fail to grasp the true reality of the sense-world, because they are incapable of handling ideas. But man has the ability to stand back from the chaotic reality of the senses, and to see things in perspective.
Steiner was by no means being muddled or conceited when he compared himself to Nietzsche, and claimed to have gone a step further. For Steiner, human consciousness is not a mere passive mirror, at the mercy of the bewildering confusion of sense-impressions. Man is more like the conductor of an orchestra, in charge of consciousness, and of the sense-impressions. Like Nietzsche's Zarathustra, Steiner felt that man can afford to hold his head high; he is stronger than he thinks. Where Steiner goes beyond Nietzsche is in his clear recognition that the source of that strength lies in his ‘access to inner worlds’.
It was Steiner's tragedy that the sheer originality of that message was far beyond his contemporaries.
* * *
*Stewart C. Easton, Rudolf Steiner, Herald of a New Epoch, p.54
*For a more detailed discussion of hypnogogic states, see my Mysteries, Part 2, Chapter 5.
† See Mysteries, Part 1, Chapters 1-4.
*Witness, p. 254–5.
Five
Rebirth
HIS book The Philosophy of Freedom marked a turning point in Steiner's life. ‘During the first chapter of my life I was destined to experience the riddle of the universe as it faced modern science; in my Philosop
hy of Freedom I formulated the ideas demanded of me by this experience…Now I faced the task of formulating ideas that would present the human Soul's experience of the spiritual world itself.’
And on the threshold of this new epoch in Steiner's life we must ask the fundamental question: how did he go about gaining access to the ‘spiritual world’?
A vital clue is offered by his friend and disciple Friedrich Rittelmeyer:
In earlier years, it seemed to me that when he was giving advice to people, he liked to sit where he would not be obliged to look against the light. When he began to use his faculties of spiritual sight one noticed a certain deliberate adjustment of his being, often accompanied by a lowering of the eyes. One remembered then what he says in his books, namely that the physical body of a man must be wiped out before the ‘higher members’ can be perceived.’*
In other words, Steiner deliberately withdrew ‘into’ himself, ‘wiping out’ his perception of the external world. He says elsewhere:
When, with spiritual perception, I observed the soul-activity of man: thinking, feeling and willing, a picture of a ‘spiritual man’ became clearly perceptible to me…I saw these inner manifestations of life as creative forces and they revealed to me ‘man as spirit’ within the spirit. If I then looked at the physical appearance of man, I saw it supplemented through the structure of spiritual forces, active within the physically perceptible.
Steiner adds another interesting clue: that in these moments of spiritual perception, he experienced a flood of warmth. This is important because it is an experience that most of us have shared. Listening to music, reading poetry, kissing a baby, listening to rain pattering on the windows, can all bring that strange, exhilarating flood of happiness and warmth. And in the case of a favourite piece of music or a poem, it is not difficult to see how it happens. The music or poem has certain associations, and as we relax and enjoy it, these associations come flooding out. This in turn describes the experience described by Proust: ‘I had ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal…’.
Even more significant is the experience of the Hindu saint Ramakrishna. As a child, he was crossing a paddy field when a flock of white cranes flew across a black storm cloud: the sight struck him as so beautiful that he collapsed in a faint. Undernourishment may, of course, have had something to do with it, but this does not obscure the central point. Ramakrishna was born with a tendency to ‘spirituality’; the beauty of the cranes against the storm cloud brought a flood of ‘associations’, and a sense of ‘access to inner worlds’ that produced a sudden and total relaxation—and loss of consciousness. As a young priest, Ramakrishna fell into a state of despair because he had ceased to experience these floods of insight; he seized a sword with the intention of killing himself when ‘suddenly the Mother revealed herself to me…The buildings…the temple and all vanished, leaving no trace; instead there was a limitless, infinite shining ocean of consciousness or spirit.’
From this time on, any mention of the Divine Mother or of Krishna could send Ramakrishna into this total ecstasy which the Hindus call samadhi. The name itself was enough to conjure up the flood of associations.
Steiner tells no similar story about how he first learned to gain ‘access to inner worlds’, and we may infer that there was no single event, but a great number of experiences of this inner-warmth. Music, for example, played a central part. ‘Music became all-important for the kind of spiritual experience I wished to establish on a secure foundation within myself.’ So did poetry, particularly that of Goethe and Schiller. So at a fairly early stage, by his mid- or late-teens, Steiner had acquired the same basic knack as Ramakrishna: of being able to retreat into himself and cause an instantaneous flood of inner warmth.
The career of the Silesian mystic Jacob Boehme affords another clue. His biographer records that, when Boehme was twenty-five (in 1600), his eyes fell on a pewter dish whose dark surface reflected the sunlight. Like Ramakrishna, he went into ecstasy, and experienced the sensation that he was looking into the heart of nature. He went out into the fields, and felt as though he could see into the trees and grass, as if they were made of glass and lit from within. Steiner's own account of ‘spiritual vision’, while more down-to-earth in tone, reveals that he is speaking about the same thing:
While in earthly life man develops from birth onward, he confronts the world with his power of cognition. First he gains insight into the physical sphere. However, this is but the outpost of knowledge. This insight does not yet reveal everything the world contains. The world has an inner living reality [my italics] but man does not reach this living reality at first. He shuts himself off from it. He forms a picture of the world which lacks inner reality because his own inner reality has not yet faced the world. The world-picture he forms is, in fact, an illusion. As man perceives the world through his senses he sees an illusion. But when, from his own inner being, he adds sense-free thinking to sense perception, the illusion is permeated with reality; it ceases to be illusion. Then the human spirit experiences itself within man and meets the spirit in the world; the latter is no longer hidden from man behind the physical world; it weaves and moves within it.
The last phrase—italicized by Steiner—makes it clear that the experience he is describing is identical with Boehme's vision of the ‘signature of all things’ (by ‘signature’ Boehme meant the inner reality). Steiner is asserting that once man has learned to create that curious glow of inner warmth and to retreat into it, the world ceases to be an ‘illusion’, and becomes a spiritual reality, permeated with its own vital spirit.
Most of us can grasp what he means. Every nature poet has described the sensation: the feeling that the earth is alive with meaning. We experience it ourselves on a spring morning, when everything seems to glow with a new life. But we are inclined to dismiss this as a ‘manner of speaking’. We feel that our own sense of warmth and excitement is conferring warmth and excitement on nature. Steiner is denying this view, and stating that what we see in these moods is closer to the reality than what we see in ordinary perception.
What emerges very clearly is that Steiner's attitude is fundamentally romantic, as romantic as Keats, or Shelley, or Hoffmann. This is nowhere more apparent than in his next major work, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom. Steiner had come across Nietzsche's writings in Vienna in 1889, and had become increasingly fascinated by his ideas. This in itself is difficult to understand, since it would be hard to find two thinkers with less in common than Steiner and Nietzsche. Steiner was convinced of the existence of a spiritual world that somehow runs parallel with this one; Nietzsche was convinced that the only world is the one we live in, and that people refuse to face this reality because they are too weak. According to Nietzsche, if people had more strength, more courage, more willpower, they would glory in the existence of ‘this world’, and recognize that all ‘other worlds’ are delusions conjured up by weakness and neurosis. This conviction was not the result of intellectual analysis, but of a number of experiences of overpowering ecstasy, moments in which Nietzsche was swept away by a Dionysian flood of strength and optimism; it was after one such moment, on a Swiss mountainside, that Nietzsche conceived the idea of Zarathustra, and wrote on a slip of paper ‘Six thousand feet above men and time’. It seems a fair assumption that Nietzsche would have dismissed Steiner as what he liked to call an ‘other-worlder’.
Steiner, for his part, admits that he was at first repelled by Nietzsche and by his self-assertiveness: ‘I loved his style, I loved his daring, but I did not love the way he spoke of the most significant matters without entering into them.’ But then, Nietzsche was a visionary who was convinced that he had seen the truth about human existence. That truth is that man is slowly evolving towards the Superman, and that the sooner he recognizes this and directs all his efforts towards it, the sooner he will forget the religious fairy stories that keep him weak and deluded.
The rather more dubious side of Nietzsche's ‘evolutionism’ is his glorification of th
e warrior—particularly when, as an exemplification of the warrior-hero, he chooses an archetypal ‘spoilt brat’ like Cesare Borgia. Nietzsche's own physical weakness and consequent inability to escape the atmosphere of the study leads him to take a rather unrealistic view of the man of action.
Then how could Steiner bring himself to admire Nietzsche? The answer can be found in the Autobiography:
I felt him to be a personality who was compelled by disposition and education to live intensely in the cultural and spiritual life around him, but who also felt: ‘What has all this to do with me?—so much repels me. There must be a different world, a world where I can live.’ This made him a fiery critic of his time, but a critic made ill by his own criticism.
This view seemed to be confirmed when Steiner met Nietzsche. The philosopher's sister, Frau Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, came to the Goethe Archive to ask advice about founding a similar Nietzsche archive—her brother had been insane since 1889—and took a liking to Steiner. He was invited to her home, and that of Nietzsche's mother, in Naumburg. On the first visit, he was taken in to see Nietzsche. ‘He was lying on a couch. His exceptionally beautiful forehead was that of a thinker and artist. It was early afternoon. His eyes, though dying, still reflected his soul; they took in his physical surroundings, but this no longer reached his mind. One stood there, but Nietzsche was not aware of one's presence. Observing his intelligent features one could believe they belonged to someone who had spent all morning engaged in thought and now wished to rest awhile.’
Steiner now experienced another of his ‘spiritual insights’:
The inner shock I experienced led to what I can only describe as an insight into the genius of Nietzsche whose gaze, though directed towards me, did not meet mine. The very passivity of this gaze, resting upon me for a long time, released my inner comprehension…In inner perception I saw Nietzsche's soul as if hovering over his head, infinitely beautiful in its spirit-light, surrendered to the spiritual worlds it had longed for so much but had been unable to find before illness had clouded his mind…Previously I had read Nietzsche. Now I saw the actual bearer of ideas from the highest spirit realms, ideas that even here shone in their beauty despite having lost their original radiance on the way. A soul who had brought from former lives on earth golden riches of great spirituality but was unable to let it shine fully in the present life. I admired what Nietzsche had written; now I saw his radiant spirit behind what I so greatly admired.