Today marks the first meeting of the fourth UrphΓ€nomen reading cycle, this time focused on Occult Scienceβa foundational text in the corpus of Rudolf Steiner. In his introduction to the text, Matthew Barton described its contents as issuing from the βmacroscopeβ of Steinerβs spiritual vision, a device the latter claimed to be endogenous to all human beings and which his anthroposophical method aims to actualize in its earnest practitioners. As Barton writes, βSteiner emphasizes that our scientific instrument in this case is ourselves, our own developing awareness.β1 For Steiner, a rigorous training of the mind is key for honing the instrument of our being; his written works attempt to exercise readers to that end. βI wrote in such a way,β says Steiner in the 1925 preface of Occult Science, βas to make it necessary to exert oneβs thinking while entering into the content of these books.β2
Steinerβs earlier text, The Philosophy of Freedom, is a rigorous introduction and exercise in such thinking; through language, Steiner challenges his readers into the realization that thinking and perception constitute an undivided continuum. Everything we perceive outwardly is always already permeated and ordered by concepts; if it werenβt, no world would appear to usβall would be chaos. We are usually unaware of this, but when we intentionally think about the thinking involved in our perception, we reach what Michael Wilson translates of Steinerβs German as the βexceptional state.β From here the reader also discovers that, rather than something we generate on our own, thinking is something we can participate in if we can be sufficiently receptive to its revelation through contemplative observation of what meets us initially at the end of perception. In contrast to thinking that is restricted to memory and sense perceptionβor what Steiner and Barfield both refer in various contexts to as βbrain-thinkingββThe Philosophy of Freedom aims to induce living thinking in the reader and to thereby expand perception, for, as Steiner writes at the end of Chapter 7 (βAre There Limits to Knowledge?β) in the 1918 edition,
the idea of percept developed in this book is not to be confused with the idea of external percept which is but a special instance of itβ¦ [rather] βperceptβ here is taken to be everything that approaches man through the senses or through the spirit, before it has been grasped by the actively elaborated concept. βSensesβ, as we ordinarily understand the term, are not necessary in order to have percepts in soul- or spirit- experienceβ¦ such an extension [of the meaning of βperceptβ] is absolutely necessary if we are not to be prevented by the current sense of a word from enlarging our knowledge in certain fields. Anyone who uses βperceptionβ to mean only βsense perceptionβ will never arrive at a concept fit for the purposes of knowledge.β3
With this expanded meaning of βperceptβ Steiner paves the way for a closer rapprochement of thinking and perception, a kind of active resumption of the picture-thinking characteristic of earlier modes of consciousnessβonly this time it must be intentionally willed by the individual. For both Steiner and Owen Barfield, another name for this capacity of living thinking is imaginative perception, the cultivation of which leads further on to what Barfield called final participation, a concept that encompasses the horizon of spiritual development laid out by Steiner throughout his works, βthose further stages of participationβInspiration and Intuition,β says Barfield, βto which systematic use of imagination may lead.β4 And, as Barfield writes in Saving the Appearances, it is in The Philosophy of Freedom that βthe metaphysic of final participation is fully and lucidly set forth.β5 Though it consists of more than his account of the contours of cosmic evolution, Steinerβs Occult Science can be understood as a concrete extension of the method set forth in The Philosophy of Freedom to the historical past and potentialities of the future. Accordingly, his expanded definition of βperceptβ should inform oneβs interpretive reception of the so-called facts reported in Occult Science.
By putting his purported research into words, Steiner sought to give his readers a vicarious perception of non-phenomenal beings, activities, and past eventsβfor words are percepts after all. Β And because words include a conceptual or meaningful component (otherwise they would mere sounds), Steiner could also claim that, in reading texts like Occult Science, we open ourselves to the potential for genuine knowledge of cosmic evolution. Unlike standard accounts of the pre-historical, pre-human past, Steinerβs approach can be read as more consistent with the epistemological claims of classical and contemporary physics given philosophical articulation by Kant. In other words, as Barfield writes, βthe participation of manβs own mind [is involved] in the creation, or evocation, ofβ the phenomenal world.β6 There is, as Galileo, Kant, and others stressed, a gulf between what we perceive in everyday experience and the atomic/subatomic worlds modeled by physicistsβwhat Barfield will refer to as the βunrepresentedβ (because unperceived). In the introduction of Saving the Appearances, Barfield says that one of his major aims will be to remedy the omission of this gulf in the theorizing of other disciplinesβin history, for example. If awareness of this gulf were kept in mind when considering the worldviews of ancient cultures, the tendency to tell what Charles Taylor has called the βsubtraction storyβ of historyβa narrative of unilinear, rational progress from naΓ―ve enchantment to sober enlightenmentβcan be curtailed. Rather, by keeping the gulf in sight, we might be led instead to relativize the materialistic worldview of the last few centuries as just the latest expression of an ongoing transformation of human thought and perception. As Thomas Kuhn pointed out, paradigm change is not merely an outcome of rational progress; we are not justified in assuming that the way we experience the world today is more correct than the more enchanted reports of bygone cultures. Rather, by incorporating the gulf between the world of appearancesβwhich history suggests is in fluxβand the world modeled by physicists into the theoretical reflections of a discipline like history, we might be led to the view that human consciousness is involved in an evolutionary process that expresses itself in changes of perception and thought. Steinerβs approach incorporates this insight. In contrast, models of the pre-historical past such as Darwinian evolution and standard accounts of the Earthβs development assume that the structure of human perception and thought is static: the models reflect only contemporary habits of perception and thinking, not those of prior epochs. And, in addition to this, Barfield writes,
when attention is expressly directed to the history of the unrepresentedβ¦ it is invariably assumed that the behaviour of the unrepresented has remained fundamentally unchanged. Moreover (and this is, to my mind, more important), for those hypothetical βhuman beings with collective representations [i.e., βworldviewsβ] characteristic of the last few centuries of western civilizationβ we might choose to substitute other human beingsβthose, for instance, who lived one or two or three or more thousand years ago. We should then have to write a different pre-history altogether. And we are not entitled to assume without inquiry that, as an indirect means of suggesting the truth about pre-historic goings-on in the unrepresented, such an alternative βmodelβ would be any less efficient than the one we have in fact chose. It might be very much so.7
What is striking about Barfieldβs suggestion here is that the image-based consciousness of prior epochs might somehow provide a more βefficientβ model of the pre-historical than that produced by modern technoscience. Such models, reflected in mythologies the world over, might be more efficient because they arise out of a more participatory consciousnessβa form of consciousness wherein perception and thinking are more closely united. But in criticizing prehistorical models that absolutize the more dualistic arrangement of contemporary habits of perception and thought as well as models that presuppose the principle of uniformitarianism (the idea that the laws of nature currently operative have always been so), Barfield is not merely saying such models have no value. Rather, he insists that they be recognized for what they are: models contingent on contemporary habits of thought and perception. As he writes,
Even if the usual way of recording what, in the absence of man, was going on in the unrepresented must be criticized as a dubious extrapolation, the descriptions may still, as I have suggested, be valuable as notional βmodelsβ. What is important is, to remember that that is all they are. (Especially will this because the case, if we should ever have to assess the merits of this approach against those of any other possible way of acquiring knowledge of the pre-historic past.) For their nature is that of artificial imagery. And when the nature and limitations of artificial images are forgotten, they become idols.8
I surmise that it was Steinerβs method of spiritual development and the view of cosmic evolution he claimed it could lead to that Barfield had in mind when he referenced other possible ways of acquiring knowledge of the pre-historic past. The difference between models like the Big Bang, which many treat as the truth (rather than a means to the truth) and the pictures Steiner presents in Occult Science is that the author of the latter is conscious (even painfully so) of the fact that it consists of artificial imagery. Rather than idols to be worshiped, they are images intended to be participated by the reader. Whether or not they are accurate is another question, one many of us may feel ill-equipped to answer. Even so, we should not shy away from employing a respectful hermeneutics of suspicion alongside that of the charitable approach many of us typically take to Steinerβs claims. We should not, for example, avoid scrutinizing Steinerβs methodological claim to be free of influence when conducting and articulating his researchβshould not take on faith his insistence that he was βable to eliminate such things completely while engaged on supersensible research.9 But neither should we, as contemporary habits of thought might incline us to do, reject such claims outright. As one participant pointed out during our first meeting, Steiner was keenly aware of the limitations posed by language in communicating such realities; as a techne enabled by our physical embodiment and so reflecting it, language is both a help and a hindrance. A poetic vigilance is therefore necessary for encountering the realities Steiner sought to disclose, for in spite of the limitations of language, it will only be βthrough the help of an invented or man-made imagery,β says Barfield, that one can begin to transform oneβs materialistic conditioning.10 For artificial imageryβmediated by languageβis, as Barfield continues, βthe first, wavering stepββi.e., Imaginationβ"on the road that leads to final participation.β11
It is the aspiration of UrphΓ€nomen to consider open-mindedly the works that embody the βfirst wavering stepβ on that road; to reflect on them in community and work them over in the alembic of our individual soul lives. And, though this be much more aspirational, to illuminate the road further to the extent that genuine insight alights within.
Matthew Barton, Foreword in Rudolf Steinerβs Occult Science, 5th English ed., trans. George and Mary Adams, (Forest Row, England: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2011), xii.
Rudolf Steiner, Occult Science, 4.
Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Freedom, 8th English ed., trans. Michael Wilson, (Forest Row, England: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2011), 112.
Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, 2nd ed. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 141.
Barfield, Saving the Appearances, 140.
Barfield, Saving the Appearances, 12.
Barfield, Saving the Appearances, 37-38.
Barfield, Saving the Appearances, 39.
Steiner, Occult Science, 6.
Barfield, Saving the Appearances, 181.
Barfield, Saving the Appearances, 181.