Etheric Imagination as Participatory Knowing: A Whiteheadian Reading of Rudolf Steiner's "Light Course"

My presentation at the recent Mysteries of Technology Conference

Transcript:

It’s really lovely to be here this morning, though it’s quite early for me. I’ve been enjoying the last three days of the Mysteries of Technology conference very much, and I’m very grateful to have been invited. I think what Mys Tech is doing is important, not only for the wider world to see the ways in which bringing spirituality into our everyday lives and scientific research is essential, but also for anthroposophists. Some anthroposophists might take an overly luciferic attitude toward technology. We really do need to engage with these developments because, otherwise, a lot will be lost to the materialistic attitudes which are having another moment right now. There’s a large cadre of so-called transhumanists pushing into this new technological age full steam ahead with very ahrimanic attitudes. I think the work that we’re all doing this weekend is an important source of resistance to that. But really, it’s a loving resistance because some of that technological advance is, of course, inevitable and important for our evolution.

My presentation is titled “Etheric Imagination as Participatory Knowing,” and I’ll be attempting a process-philosophical reading of Rudolf Steiner’s light course. Process philosophy is kind of my specialty as an academic philosopher. Most of my research involves engaging in process metaphysics and applying process philosophy to the natural sciences, to the study of consciousness, and to the social sciences. Alfred North Whitehead is the major 20th-century contributor to process philosophy, but other thinkers like Henri Bergson and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin are also often thought of as process philosophers. I also see thinkers like Goethe, Schelling, and Steiner as part of this tradition, as we’ll see.

My first slide features two paintings by J.M.W. Turner. The one on the left is called Shade and Darkness: The Evening of the Deluge. The one on the right is called Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory): The Morning After the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis. These were both exhibited in 1843 in London, I believe. It’s a bit of a tip of the hat to Goethe by Turner. You can sort of see the Goethean color wheel on the right, and the idea is that the meeting of light and dark generates this display. Turner wrote underneath the second painting on the right: “The returning sun exhaled the Earth’s humid bubbles and reflected her lot forms each in a prismatic guise.”

I’m thinking with these three fellows—Goethe, Whitehead, and Steiner. I’ve already written and published a bit about Goethe and Whitehead and their shared scientific methodology. They approach science in a very similar way. Goethe says, “Science helps us before all things in this, that it somewhat lightens the feeling of wonder with which nature fills us.” Whitehead says, “Philosophy begins in wonder, and at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains. There has been added, however, some grasp of the immensity of things, some purification of emotion by understanding.” Elsewhere, Whitehead uses the term “elucidate” to describe the task of philosophy in relationship to experience. The point is not to explain away experience by reference to some hidden mechanism behind experience but to stay with experience and shed light upon it.

Steiner delivered the light course in Stuttgart. It was for Waldorf teachers, the first group of Waldorf teachers, in late 1919 and early 1920—he delivered these lectures over the course of ten consecutive. Here is a photograph of this first Waldorf school. Steiner was asked to provide some direction to the Waldorf teachers as to how to teach physics to their students. What Steiner was really trying to do was sow some Goethean seeds into the next generation of researchers—these young children who might grow up to become scientists. They would be given an educational environment where they would be encouraged to remain in a participatory relationship with their sensory experience of warmth, light, and sound, rather than being educated in such a way that their intellect is all that is addressed and they are rushed to a kind of mechanistic or mathematical explanation without ever having directly encountered the phenomena that are supposedly being explained.

Steiner also points out that when he began researching Goethe’s scientific method and the results of his scientific investigations in the 1880s, as he was editing Goethe’s scientific works, that physics at that point was still locked into the mechanistic world picture. There wasn’t much hope at that point, Steiner felt, for something like a Goethean physics. There was just no way to connect with physicists. But 30 years later, in 1920, as he’s finishing up these lectures, the situation had changed dramatically. Steiner put it, “Physics had found itself caught up in transformation, so much so that there is much we could interpret as the dawn of a new worldview.”

Some of the things Steiner attempts in this light course, which is a kind of Goethean physics, involve shifting us away from understanding natural science as the search for hidden physical causes to an understanding of science as the study of the metamorphosis of phenomena. He wants to help us imagine the etheric and astral layers of the cosmos through spiritual perception of light, pressure, heat, sound, and other phenomena. He wants to help us grasp the fact that space and time are abstractions from concrete experience of nature. Rather than thinking of space and time, as Newton did or even as Einstein still did, as these containers that we as massive bodies exist within, we want to grasp space and time as ways that we divide up our concrete experience and can then geometrically or arithmetically think about them and model abstractly what’s going on in nature. These are very useful exercises, but there’s a gap that Steiner explores between our mathematical abstractions and the physical world itself.

Steiner wants to show us how the human organism is a microcosm, and then he also engages in an esoteric physiology of the eyes, the ears, the larynx, and so forth to show us that our sensory organs and our qualitative sensory experience are not mere secondary characteristics but are really showing us the qualitative essence of nature. We need to bring our sensory experience, our qualitative experience, back into our picture of the physical world if we hope to know it truly.

Whitehead’s approach to the study of nature involves “rescuing the facts as they are from the facts as they appear.” He describes a situation where “we view the sky at noon on a fine day, and it is blue, flooded by the light of the sun. The direct observation is the sun as the sole origin of light and the bare heavens.” He gives the example of “the myth of Adam and Eve in the Garden on the first day of human life. They watch the sunset, the stars appear, and ‘lo, creation widened to man’s view.’ The excess of light discloses facts and also conceals them.” This illustrates how, for both Goethe and Whitehead, as we study the metamorphosis of phenomena in nature, we must make sure that we get the full cycle, the full sequence of metamorphosis. If we didn’t wait until the sun set in our initial attempt to understand the universe scientifically, we would be missing a large part of the phenomena of the heavens. Even though the day is flooded with light, that light not only reveals things to us but also conceals the fact of the night sky.

For both Goethe and Whitehead, there is an insistence that we stay with the phenomena in their full round of archetypal metamorphosis or morphogenesis. We must stay with the evolving relationship between the perceiver and the perceived, not rushing to conjure something behind phenomena—something that would be unperceived but also unperceivable even in principle, which is often the case in contemporary theoretical physics—that would supposedly explain the phenomenon. Theory, in Goethe’s sense, and as Ashton touched on yesterday, should be understood in the original Greek sense of theoria, the original Platonic sense, as a kind of contemplative and participatory observation. We’re not just standing back and watching; we’re just as much an actor on the stage as we are part of the audience. Theory does have the same root as theater. The point here is that when we’re trying to understand the meaning of the drama unfolding on the stage, if we were to pull back the curtain and look at what’s going on in the dressing rooms, I think we would be somewhat dissatisfied if our goal was to understand the drama of perceptible nature, the display on the stage, and the meaning of the action. If we pull back the curtain, we’re going to find a bunch of props, actors half-dressed and half made-up, but we’re not actually going to be satisfied with that if, again, what we’re trying to explain is our participatory engagement, our actual perception of nature.

There’s more to phenomena than what first meets the eye, just as the story from Whitehead about moving from day to night on the first day of creation suggests. There’s more than what first meets the eye. We don’t want to go behind or beyond phenomena, but we may need to look deeper within the phenomena, staying with their metamorphic processes until we’re sure that the whole has revealed itself. As Whitehead reminds us, “In our experience, there’s always the dim background from which we derive and to which we return. We are not enjoying a limited doll’s house of clear and distinct things secluded from all ambiguity. In the darkness beyond, there ever looms the vague mass which is the universe begetting us.”

We can think of this “begetting” in terms of the creative power within us at our core and also the creativity that encompasses us—a kind of peripheral power of unbound potential. There’s some connection between this creative power within us and this creativity encompassing us, which has something to do with the relationship between spirit and nature. We can only understand nature aright when we consider that there is, to our physical senses at least, an invisible creativity that we can come into relationship with through the further development of the scientific method beyond just natural science into spiritual science.

Whitehead brought to his philosophy of nature and cosmology the idea of collapsing the modern distinction between facts and values, which goes back to people like David Hume. After modern science, we were left with a picture of nature as lacking all value. Whitehead says that “when you understand all about the sun and all about the atmosphere and all about the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset. There is no substitute for the direct perception of the concrete achievement of a thing in its actuality [or of a process in its actuality]. We want concrete fact with a highlight thrown on what is relevant to its preciousness.” When we study the phenomena of nature, we are driven by a sense of love for the preciousness of what we are studying. This love reveals the value of a phenomenon to us in a way that merely neutral, unloving observation would not. We might be able to depict the “facts” so-called, but for Whitehead, the facts are really means of conveying values. Every fact is a value achievement, he would say. We have to study nature with a sense of its value or its preciousness.

Whitehead illustrates his alignment with Goethe’s method of phenomenological science when he says, “According to the view which I am putting before you, there is nothing behind the veil of the procession of becomingness, although there is much pictured on that veil and essential to it, which our dim consciousness does not readily decipher. Indeed, the metaphor of a veil of appearance is wholly wrong. Reality is nothing else than the process of becomingness of which we are dimly conscious. Every detail of the process is open for consciousness, though in fact our individual consciousness is only aware of a very small fragment of what is there for knowledge.” Whitehead is challenging this idea that the perceived world, the world of our perceptual experience, is a kind of veil because that implies there’s something hidden behind it that is causing it. He thinks it’s better to think of this appearance, this world of appearance, as a process of becomingness, where at any given time in our own development as scientific researchers, we’re only aware of part of what’s actually displayed. As we cultivate our own consciousness, develop our attention, and, in Steiner’s sense, as we begin to cultivate higher organs of perception, we can see more on this “veil,” if you want—more in the procession of phenomena—than what first met our eyes. For Whitehead, like for Steiner and Goethe, there’s nothing that we can’t know, and know in a concrete experiential way. It’s just that sometimes the phenomena show only partially, and we have to make sure we’re getting the whole picture before we claim to know anything truly.

This procession of becomingness, as Whitehead refers to it, is akin to Goethe’s study of the metamorphosis of phenomena. They’re both, and Steiner with them (influenced by Goethe though not by Whitehead)—they’re all searching for the systematic relations among various perceptions. Rightly arranged, the facts themselves flower into theory, so the archetypal phenomena blossom not behind or beneath what we see but between seer and seen. There’s a relational dimension to this, and that’s also part of the participatory aspect of this approach to science. The phenomena, the archetypal phenomena, are between seer and seen, not just on one side, subject or object, but between.

For part of what’s required in this shift to a more participatory form of science, we can turn to Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, a German idealist who was influenced by Goethe and influenced Goethe in turn. Schelling was much younger than Goethe, Goethe was sort of a father figure for Schelling and brought him down from the heights of idealism into touch with the experimental results that Goethe was finding in his study of color and plant growth. Schelling recognizes that when we talk about forces of nature, we only understand what we mean by a force by reference to our own feeling. He says, and I quote him from his Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, “You can in no way make intelligible what a force might be independent of you, for force as such makes itself known only to your feeling.” He says, “We are not born to waste our mental power in conflict against a fantasy world,” in other words, a world of mere models, “but to exert all of our powers upon a world which has influence upon us, lets us feel its forces, and upon which we can react. Between us and the world, therefore, no rift must be established.” This is Schelling laying out his own approach to the philosophy of nature, which I think is akin to Goethe’s, to Whitehead’s, and to Steiner’s.

The point here is not that we want to be anti-mathematical and reject the idea of mathematical reflection upon what we observe. There’s a misunderstanding, I think, of Goethe as somehow anti-mathematical, which is not the case at all. He himself analogizes his scientific method of staying with the whole sequence of phenomena to the way that a geometer will demonstrate a theorem. You don’t want any gaps in your demonstration, just as Goethe doesn’t want any gaps in the sequence of phenomena.

Whitehead and Goethe were both interested in natural science and said some things about spirituality that we could find interesting, but I don’t know that either of them really considered the possibility of a spiritual science as Steiner put it forward in anthroposophy. But we can of course study not only light but sight itself; we can study sensibility as such, meaning we can turn our scientific attention onto our own consciousness as percipients of nature. But this does mean leaving the limits of natural science behind to begin a complementary but fundamentally new kind of inquiry. Steiner calls this spiritual science. It’s important to remember, though, that spiritual science does not go beyond phenomena but rather recognizes the role of our own conscious, imaginative, inspired, and intuitive thinking activity in disclosing a new kind of phenomenon. As conscious, thinking, feeling, and willing human beings, we can disclose new phenomena both via memory—recollecting ancient epochs—and also via creativity, via our own artistic expression (including conceptual art).

Now, part of our own creativity as individual thinking beings is that we can engage in arithmetic, geometry, and kinematics, and we can develop these mathematical models of nature. But Steiner points out that there is what he calls a “mighty gap” that needs to be leapt in order to connect what exists in mathematics with the physical forces that we actually feel and measure. Whitehead similarly points out that while in our mathematical models we may refer to such entities as point-instants, in concrete nature there is no such thing; there is no “nature at an instant.” Whitehead talks about atomic elements, for example, and he was writing in the mid-1920s just as quantum theory was coming into its own. He analogizes each atomic element to a kind of musical note. Just like a musical note, an element requires its whole period to manifest. It’s a vibratory streaming energy event; it’s not a little BB or billiard ball. It is, in fact, akin to a musical note. Just like musical notes convey a sort of value, they’re an aesthetic achievement of sorts, Whitehead would say the same about the atomic elements: they are the achievements of value, of energy seeking to organize itself so as to express a value.

When we study these physical phenomena, though, Steiner wants us to shift from only considering the “central forces of physics,” as he refers to them, to also consider the peripheral etheric forces. This becomes essential to understand the formation of living organisms. You can get along for a certain amount of time ignoring these peripheral forces in the study of the non-biological world, in inorganic physics and chemistry, but you can only get so far even there because these etheric peripheral forces are essential for understanding self-organization in nature at any scale, even at the physical scale. The task of spiritual science meeting natural science is that we must develop a relationship to the incalculable infinity of the macrocosm—that is, to the way that the whole cosmos is active in shaping every part of itself, especially among organisms, and especially the human being, which for Goethe, for Steiner especially, becomes a microcosm, a living mirror of the cosmos as a whole, such that by studying ourselves we can learn about the whole.

In an attempt to get closer to our concrete experience of the phenomena of nature, Steiner asks in his light course, “What is mass for our experience?” The answer he gives is, “Well, it’s really pressure.” We feel gravity; we feel our own mass as pressure. I feel pressure on my butt right now on the chair. I feel pressure with the top half of my body sitting upright on my neck, and so on. This is how we directly experience gravity and our own mass. Steiner thinks there’s a qualitative ratio that links the quality of our own wakefulness to the intensity of the pressure that we’re exerting or that we’re perceiving in our immediate environment. There’s a link between our wakefulness and this feeling of pressure. As mass or external pressure increases, he says that consciousness is canceled out—we go to sleep. He connects this to the fact that in our willing, where he says we’re also sleeping, we’re united with this cosmic force of gravity. We are only awake to ourselves in our thinking. He says physiologically we’re awake to ourselves in our thinking because of the buoyancy of the brain, because the brain is literally floating in cerebrospinal fluid.

This is part of Steiner introducing his esoteric physiology to explain the way in which, working within and through and around the physical body that is visible to our physical eyes is the etheric body and the astral body. He describes in detail how the etheric and astral bodies relate to the physical anatomy of the eye. He points out that unlike with the rest of the body, where the etheric body is woven more tightly into the physical organs, in the eyes, the etheric body becomes relatively independent. Because of this relative independence of the etheric body, the astral body is, in turn, able to more intimately weave itself into the etheric eye. Steiner describes the eye growing progressively more vital, more living, as you move from the sclera and the cornea to the vitreous body and the retina, more towards the inside and the back of the eye. He tries to dispel the materialistic idea that the nerves of the retina, rather than, say, the astral body, might somehow be responsible for our sensations of light. A physiologist can track the supposed vibrations of light into the eye through the lens, into the retina, and into the optic nerve, back into the occipital lobe in the brain. You can trace the flow of energy here, but at no point does anything like the sensation of light or color appear. You’re not going to be able to explain that physically; you’re going to need, Steiner would say, to make reference to these other layers of reality—the etheric, the astral. He says if it were true that there were some physiological explanation for our sensations of light and color, you would think that we would feel the visual world most strongly where the contact first occurs—namely, on the retina, the surface of the back of the eye—rather than where it is projected out into the colored surfaces of the world all around us. We don’t see color where it makes contact with our body; we don’t see light at all. We see color projected out into the world, and that suggests there’s more going on than just the visible physical body when we’re sensing color phenomena.

Materialistic physicists imagine light by analogy to sound waves, and Steiner thinks this is a mistake. This analogy between light and sound waves is very useful, and it’s where this old idea, this 19th-century idea of luminiferous ether, was invented—that there’s this very subtle medium through which light is vibrating. Einstein is usually credited with having eliminated this luminiferous ether, but we’re still left with the mystery of what medium waves of light might be propagating through. Einstein himself said that his gravitational field, his spacetime manifold, was in fact just a “new ether” in his terms. It’s not so much that he eliminated the ether as he introduced a new kind. Obviously, bringing space and time together is a very valuable insight, but Einstein does so in an overly abstract way. He actually ends up identifying the physics of gravitation with this abstract mathematical model of space and time, and that creates a kind of monster. Whitehead was very critical of Einstein for this reason. He accepted relativity in the sense that we can’t understand space without time. He accepts the conversion of energy and matter; he accepts a lot of Einstein’s science, but he rejects this metaphysical move, really, of identifying the physics of gravitation with a spacetime manifold, a mathematical-geometrical picture of four-dimensional spacetime. For many reasons, this does violence to our concrete experience.

Steiner wants us to consider—let me quote Steiner here—“Consider the difference between the pure perception of the phenomena, that is, remaining within the phenomena and investigating and describing them, and simply making something up about the phenomena. The movement of the ether is, after all, a pure invention. Of course, we can make calculations about something like this which we have made up, but the fact that we can make calculations about it is no proof that the thing is there. The purely kinematic is something purely imaginary, and calculations are also imaginary.” Let’s see what Steiner means when he says this. Steiner elaborates a train of thought whereby space and time are understood to be abstractions from velocity. The formula for velocity is usually written as V = D/T, velocity equals distance divided by time. The materialistic mode of thought habitually interprets this formula as though there was something real in external nature corresponding to a distance in space that has been traveled and a time during which this traversal has occurred. We’re then led to imagine that velocity itself is the abstraction, something that’s arrived at through the calculation of the real quantities of distance and time. But Steiner argues that the reverse is in fact the case. He says, “That is not how it is in nature. Of these three quantities—velocity, space, and time—velocity is actually the only real one. Velocity is the one that is outside us. We arrive at the others, at space and time, only by dividing, by splitting, so to speak, the unified velocity into two abstract things which we create on the basis of the existing velocity.”

Whitehead makes a similar point when he says, “The extension of space is the ghost of transition.” On Steiner’s reading, space and time are only there because of velocity. We create the division between space and time with our own thought processes. Space and time are not for this reason something we can easily dispense with, of course. They’re integral to our perception in a way that external velocity is not, according to Steiner, because it is by means of what Steiner refers to as our “innate instruments” of space and time that we measure velocity. In other words, we’re not measuring space and time as external realities; we’re measuring external realities by means of our ideal constructs of space and time.

I mentioned Whitehead’s intervention into Einstein’s conception of the physics of relativity, and he’s following a similar train of thought to Steiner here. Whitehead writes, “When you think of space alone or of time alone, you are dealing in abstractions, namely, you are leaving out an essential element in the life of nature as known to you in the experience of your senses. Space and time are abstractions. What I mean is that there are no spatial facts or temporal facts apart from physical nature, namely, that space and time are merely ways of expressing certain truths about the relations between events.” So for Whitehead, nature is not made of point-instants; it’s not made of atoms, empty space, or linear time. It’s made of relations among events, or what he calls actual occasions of experience.

A further convergence between Whitehead and Steiner is that after the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries, which followed from the exploration of alternative parallel postulates, it became clear that there are many ways of conceptualizing space. The way we choose to conceptualize space, the geometry that we choose, is really a matter of convention. It depends on what we’re interested in learning. Now, to say that the geometry we choose to measure space or spacetime is a matter of convention doesn’t mean that a 30-mile walk is not a long walk for everyone. That’s not what conventionality means in this case. What it means is that geometries can be developed without any reference to measurement, and thus without any reference to distance or numerical coordinates indicating points. You can have a point-free geometry. Whitehead, like Steiner, was interested in the development and the application of so-called non-metrical projective geometries. There’s a way in which, through projective geometry, you can translate between any of these other metrical forms of geometry that we might use to study the external world.

Steiner realizes that his claims may sound superficially similar to Kant’s idealistic account of space and time in his Critique of Pure Reason, in a section called the “Transcendental Aesthetic,” where Kant describes space as our form of outer intuition and time as our form of inner intuition. Kant connects geometry with spatial intuition and arithmetic with our temporal intuition. Steiner’s point is different, though. It’s not that space and time are in us as though they were mere subjective constructs. Steiner is saying that we are one with space and time in a way that we are not one with velocity, which he says roars right past us. The spatio-temporal quality of our thinking links us with other physical bodies, and Steiner says we float, as it were, in space and time just as other bodies float in it with their various velocities. In a similar way, we float in light as a common space-filling element, but not with our physical bodies. We float in light with our etheric bodies. Steiner says, “We float in light with our etheric body. How are we related to the colors that flit about? The only possibility is that whenever you see colors, you are joined to the colors with your astral body. Although light remains invisible, we are floating in it. In the light, you see colors—colors of the spectrum. There, you have astral relations of a direct nature. Nothing comes between you and these colors you see. The colors of the body—something comes between them and your astral body, and yet you enter into astral relations with the colors of the body.”

From this point of view, when we try to understand what color is, we don’t want to take the physicist’s point of view and say, “Oh, color is the wavelength of light.” We don’t want to take just a merely subjective point of view and say, “Oh, color is made up in our brain.” Color is a relationship—an astral relationship in Steiner’s sense. But it’s a relationship between our own seeing, the light and the dark, or the material world of bodies. It’s a relationship between these, and not simply located just in our eye, say, or just in the body, or just in the wavelength of light.

Steiner then discusses our perception of the sun and our understanding of gravitation, our perception of the movements of the planets overhead. He says, “When confronted with each phenomenon, we have to investigate to what extent it is a reality or only something that has been cut out of a whole. If you look at the sun and the moon or the sun and the earth on their own, naturally, you might as well make up a force of gravity, a kind of gravitation, just as you might invent a kind of gravitation when, say, my forehead attracts my right hand. When you look at the sun and the earth and the moon and all the other planets, you’re looking at things that aren’t whole. Rather, they are,” Steiner says, “the limbs of the entire planetary system.” There’s one organism, and just as I move my arm as part of a single organism, the planets move about as the limbs of a single organism. So Steiner is suggesting that we don’t need to invent this force of gravity to explain that coordinated motion if we understand the solar system organically.

We’re trying to perceive physical spacetime in light of etheric imagination, to see that the sun is not in space—the sun creates space. That would be the idea here, and this follows from Whitehead’s reformulation of Einstein’s relativity theory, as I described earlier, to avoid this nonsensical idea of curved spacetime. Whitehead has a similar point to Steiner’s about velocity also when he’s critiquing Newton’s concept of motion. He points out that Newton leaves out time, basically, and so there can be no meaning given to the idea of velocity in Newton’s theory of motion because his theory refers only to this bit of matter occupying this region at this durationless instant. To understand velocity, Whitehead says, “Matters of fact must involve transition in their essence because all realization involves implication in the creative advance.” Transition, velocity—this is what is real. Space and time are abstractions, and matter is also an abstraction. It turns out that matter is the most abstract idea ever invented by the human mind.

We need to come to our senses in order to see that natural science is not the study of matter in motion. Natural science is the study of living phenomena as they unfold through their metamorphic patterns of relationship. It’s also important to recognize that just as the solar system is a kind of organism, really, for Steiner, for Whitehead, for Goethe, there is no such thing as inorganic matter. Or at least to the extent that there is such a thing as dead matter, it does not precede life. To the extent that there is dead matter, it exists as the skeletal remains of life. It’s the excretion of life. It comes after life, not before it.

Steiner says, “We are not outside of things and don’t just project phenomena into space. We are thoroughly in things with our being, and are in things all the more as we ascend from certain physical phenomena. We are not in colored phenomena with our ordinary bodily nature, but with our etheric and therefore with our astral nature.” As I said earlier, Steiner then returns in the Light Course to the important difference that exists in our perception of light, warmth, and air. We live into each medium at different levels of our being. This is why it’s problematic to analogize light waves to sound waves because our visual experience of light and our auditory experience of sound are quite different.

It is only through our eyes that we dip into light-filled space, whereas our entire organism provides our sense organ for heat. Steiner says, “I am to heat just as the eye is to light.” So we can make these analogies, but we don’t want to take them too far. The whole body floats in heat just as the eye floats in light. Steiner asks us repeatedly, “What is it in us that is floating in each case?” In the case of heat, it is our own warmth body, the heat produced by the metabolic processes that attend and support our organic existence. Our very consciousness lives in this heat, Steiner says, and it is by means of it that we are able to distinguish ourselves from and discern the relative heat signature of our environment.

Steiner later discusses Julius Robert Mayer and the invention of the law of conservation of energy and the study of thermodynamics. He expressed skepticism of the metaphysical claim that a numerical ratio linking mechanical work with heat somehow proves that the latter is reducible to a mechanical process, to vibrating molecules, say. He rejects that idea. Heat is not reducible to motion.

The human being also has these other organs—lungs, larynx, and ears—that allow us to partake in the aerial or gaseous element of nature. We come to participate in the phenomena of sound or tone with these organs in a way that is, again, quite unique from our perception of light and heat.

Natural science has so far been limiting itself to the evidence of the brain-bound intellect, and our task is, if we want to develop a spiritual science, we need to imaginatively descend the etheric imagination into the forces of matter and learn to perceive the etheric life animating nature. What’s the danger if we don’t do this? It’s not just materialism as a false idea. As Steiner says in a lecture from 1920, later in the year that he delivered the Light Course, the problem is not just dealing with a reversal of theories—a spiritual to replace the material. The problem with materialism is that when we think materialistically, our thoughts are brain-bound; we become, in fact, more materialized. There’s a real urgency here. I found this little creature that is a series of wavelengths, sort of in a fractal pattern, and it reminds me of what matter appears to be when we think of it as something self-existent. Steiner suggests in a number of places that natural scientists are kind of fearful of acknowledging what matter really is, spiritually speaking—it’s Ahriman, these little ahrimanic demons. The problem with materialistic science is not only that it materializes us in our own thinking by making us brain-bound, but it relates to matter as a kind of Maya.

Finally, Steiner says, “The whole world apart from the human being is an enigma, and the human being is its solution.” If we imagine matter as something self-existent, independent of our perception, we cannot understand our situation whatsoever. But if we put the human being back into the picture, we recognize that in physical science, we’re never measuring light; rather, we’re measuring everything else with light. In our visual feelings, we do not see light; we see colored surfaces. So to really know light, we must participate in it, which is really just to say we must experience our own thinking activity.