In the chapter "Future development of man as a practically active being" on the page 58 I am describing two approaches to man´s activity. Steiner´s one which know man more like result of practical activity of Jahve Elohim and less like practical activity subject. Steiner reduce man´s activity on theoretical activity - spiritual activity. And on the other hand Marx´s one approach which is different because he is emphasize practical activity of man. He do not speak that now we are transforming our astral body like Steiner, but he is speaking about instruments which are produced by man and which become the organs of his activity - the extension of his natural body. By Marx "Earth" epoch creates the physical body of the technical organism. If we use Marx´s practically active being which is self determined by means of its externalization, there is no other way to understand reality but through the belief that we are building technical organisms now. The "mineral development of man" as described by Steiner must be understood as the establishment of the physical body of the technical organism.
However, as such objectification – the establishment of the technical organism – affects the acting subject in a backward direction and results in de-objectification, spiritualization and ascending: after the “mineral-like development” is completed, man ascends to a higher level and becomes an angel, the Holy Spirit, the God of technical organisms. Man created a relatively independent nature, the “ecology” of technical organisms, “physical” bodies, and thus he ascends as his own creation to the upper Devachan from which his physical body is maintained. And from this plane he will be able to continue affecting the evolution of technical individuals. It is similar to the adaptive guiding of the “anarchy” of living nature by spiritual beings.
Furthermore, the next, plant-like development of man, cannot be naively understood as resulting in the plant composition of our excrement, as Steiner did.(see page 58) We have to understand that man, who created the “physical body” of technical organisms, analogically instiled the etheric body into these organisms under “plant-like development”. Nowadays, man living in the kingdom of inevitability, overcomes his mineral-like being via the creation of organisms ("which will later process the entire mineral substrate of the Earth" - Steiner). In the distant future, he will ascend to the forces which maintain his etheric body.
Steiner dealt with the evolution of higher beings in impressive detail, but where is man stranded in his concept? Steiner’s man secretes, so to speak, plants and later even animals instead of gradually losing the lower members of his being!
Steiner does not assume that man, similar to God, will start creating an organism in his own image; he does not assume that in the Volcano epoch, which means within “three and a half days”, the result of his work will attain the level of current man and current man will ascend to the level of God the Father by that time. Man on his way to God, which is also the way to the creation of the new human being, gradually gets rid of his body and hands it over to his piece of work – to the man which is under creation, to the man that was the producer – the technical organism at the beginning. We believe that the statement “let us create man in our own image” makes real sense in this way.
The Technical Organism
OK, this looks like good material, and I think we should probably all look at it.
Currently I'm reading Ray Kurzweil on the Technological Singularity. He thinks things are going to change sooner rather than later. He thinks the technical organism is no more than fifty years ahead of us. He thinks we're about to be outclassed by our technological creations, and that these will supplant most of the things human beings do today - entertaining individuals, administering institutions, managing economies, governing planets.
Valdi, what is exactly is the conception of the technical organism you have? I don't see a definition of this anywhere. Let's start with that question.
The Technical Organizm - definition
Yes it is the best and moust important question, because who would like to understand the New Paradigm which I sometime also call anthroposophical, rosicrucian or ontological Paradigm, at first he have to understand what really under Technical Organizm I mean. Please see the chapter "The distinction between man and the producer, a new paradigm of thought " I do not know Ray Kurzweil´s definition of the technical organizm (it would be interesting for me to read it) but I am afraid that his meaning is different. In the chapter "Abolition of the Law of Death by the species-life" I try to explain this notion. There you can also find this definition of technical organizm there: [1] Understanding the notion of the “producer” is crucial for this essay. To make this understanding easier for the reader, we use different synonyms at various places, such as “producing individual”, “factory”, “company”, “technical organism” – depending on the historical context in which this issue is mentioned. The thing is that the producer is in a state of flux and changes its development forms in the course of human history. And we do our best to keep step with its development. We can see the producer emerging from nature and establishing primitive communities – a primitive communal clan which, in fact, had to be fully physically personified in man. Later we can see the division of labour turning production into craftsmanship, or a craftsman representing a personification of the producer in his stage of craftsmanship. If we keep following the producer in his historical development, we can see him turning from an individual craftsmen into a manufacturer and later from a semi-automated producer into a people-less, fully automated factory. In this essay, we have chosen the synonym best corresponding to the respective stage of the producer’s development. For example, we use the notion of “technical organism” for the automated factory with its nearly negligible share of human labour. On the contrary, the more we go back in history and the closer the moment of human personification, i.e. the embodiment of the producer, comes to the fore, the more often we use the notion of the producer (the artisan producer or individual producer). And finally, we are trying to leave the attributes of a biological organism to the producer emerging from nature and use the notion of a “biological superorganism”. This means that the producer evolves from the biological to the technical organism and we have tried to use specific notions to continually follow this historically changing form of the producer.
I would like to make point that the notion Technical Organism is not simply the robot.
The Producer
OK, Valdo, it looks like you're using 'producer' in a very broad way. It seems to mean something like 'alienation' or Schadenfreude, and at the same time to mean something like 'corporatism' in today's context. But you have a cosmic-spiritual idea here that I don't fully get yet. What does the Producer have to do with Ahriman?
I've just posted something on 'Contractualism,' which seems relevant to what you want to say about the Producer.
I think the Kurzweil notion of the 'spiritual machine' is probably going to line up with your idea of the Producer. Kurzweil thinks that in the foreseeable future artificial intelligence is going to be able to 'produce' reality for us human beings by projecting the virtual reality of consciousness and self-conscious imaginations into the physical world.
Producer Ahriman and Christ
Carl - I am seeing in developing technical organism two proceses first one is "coming of Ahriman" and second one is coming of Christ. Please have a look at chapter"The coming of internal Christianity": The current Christianity representing the first coming of Christ will be step-by-step replaced by a new impulse by Christ, by a new Christianity, which will not come from outside, from “heaven”, but directly from the hell of production as a function and requirement raised by production.
Yesterday I have received similar question like you gave me from John Ralph: What do you see as the essential differences between technological development driven by market forces and life's development driven by life forces? I have ansvered him in journal post "A new way od initiation" but problem with Ahriman is a litle bit diferent. - it is conection between evolution of technical organizm and humanization proces. Yesterday I have wrote a litle about it in my journal entry "What force us to the love". We have to ewerytime think that Christ and Ahriman are coming together - they work together. That menas that personal development of man (Christ - love) is coming with technological development. Now I would like to quote from my book from chapter "The religion of the Father, the law of objectification and deobjectification": "It is necessary to say a few more words on the objectification of man and the parallel process of his deobjectification – his divinization. In the current phase, production is raising continuously increasing requirements on our intellect and on the development of reason and knowledge. However, as we have briefly stated before, the development of production forces, production and producers does not only mean the utilization of human intellectual potential maturing for a long period of time in living nature – the maturing of a new human force and the development of production is also the process of humanization and emancipation. The level of human relationship is derived from the level of relationships among people in production, and these are, as explained before, continually changing. The relationship between man and the producer is changing as the producer gradually ceases to be just the source of human subsistence and becomes the means of human development. At a specific moment, man stops improving the technical organism only inside. He starts looking for the future of the technical organism and for its position within the entire “ecosystem” of producers and starts regulating its directioning (evolution) also from the outside."In the case of the evolution of industry, man is the spiritual potency, the subject of these changes. It is he, as the species being, who will search on behalf of technical organisms for their orientation and strategy of living in their external “natural” environment. Marketing will thus obtain a qualitatively new level and the feeling of responsibility for the future of producers will arise. It might sound unbelievable, but in the relationship of man towards producers a qualitatively new element will arise – fatherly love. This moment is extremely important as it is implied in the new paradigm of Christian thought. We have moved from the nature of Christianity expressed in solidarity among humans to the solidarity of man with the world of producers. It is the extension of the religion of Christ the Son to the religion of the Father. We replace the ideal of universal brotherhood by the higher paternal principle."..."Thus the future development of producers will utilize not only human intellect and reason as it does today, but it will also warm up and strengthen the human soul allowing it to gain the upper hand over its physical nature – matter. We will thus be able to exercise power over matter thanks to the increasing requirements of producers towards us, humans. The truth is that any of our objectifications any technical change, even though it is aimed at making our physical life easier, will be reflected in an increasing requirement for human spiritualization, i.e. it functions as the deobjectifying force. Changes in technology are brought about by the desire to make our physical life easier, but they also entail increasing requirements towards the development of human will, emotions and intellect. The biological needs of our physical body, or to be more precise, the endeavour to maintain our balanced health condition, force us to continuously objectify ourselves into new types of production, and, on the other hand, the production needs, in their response to the initial incentive, make us to deobjectify ourselves. To summarize we can say: the pressure resulting from the needs of our physical body in the continually changing environment instead of our spirituality will become the driving force of development.
Later we will deal with the historical moment in which reason trades places with its consequence and in which a new, emancipated human spiritual potency becomes the fate of producers, the Father of producers. In that moment, human spirituality will become the driving force of development.
It would be naive to expect that we will no longer need to make the life of our physical bodies easier in the near future and that we will have plenty of everything and suffer endless boredom. The reverse is true, as any new technical product, i.e. any of our objectifications, damages the original environment and imposes an additional (for example chemical) burden on the human organism. Even a solar collector transforming solar energy to another, more suitable type, allegedly brings environmental harm rather than benefit. Even the ecological benefit of this product is not enough to balance the inevitable interference with nature due to its production. This means that the law of objectification will escalate this race instead of bringing it to its end. The damage to nature entailed in our objectification will impose a burden on the human organism and man will defend himself against this burden by means of new production. New production launches will subsequently bring additional damage to nature and will entail an additional burden on the human organism, and so on, and so on, as man will continue defending himself against the additional environmental burden by a generation of additional production. For example, let us take a look at new industrial machinery, in terms of the large number of new industries, which have appeared within the recent years in the field of the production of new medical devices and pharmaceuticals.
Power over matter can be attained neither by self-loving nor by human solidarity which is nothing but an expression of the overcoming of the etheric body. Nothing but love for our continuation on the physical level can lead us to the power capable of setting us free from our being “under the spell of matter” and helping us to overcome our physical body. It is like in a fairy tale: to set the enchanted princess – the etheric body – free we must first kiss the frog – matter. Our spiritual relationship to the nature of technical producers is of primary importance; the development of this relationship is the guarantee that the mutual spiritual relationship among humans stained by blood so far will improve. To kiss matter means to complete the technical organism, to release it from physical human personification, i.e. from human blood, which ties technical organisms to the old state (species) forms of blood relations. To say it in other words: releasing the producer means setting the producer free from human blood, from human embodiment. Spirituality thus has to grow from a practical level. The preconditions for its release are present in matter and they are in the hands of the objective process of the development of technical organisms. However, Steiner understands this the other way round: he considers man the active factor, the subject of development instead of assigning the function of the driving factor to the objective process of the development of technical individuals acting as the active subject. Steiner did not search for this liberating element in production, but in its outcome instead, as in his opinion, the liberating element is the activity of man relating to the development of spiritual science. We can see that Steiner’s reasons for considering spiritual science as the source of power enabling us to overcome matter cannot hold water. Nothing but the responsibility for the changes in our new physical body, this means for the technical improvement of the producer which represents the continuation of our physical body or, as Marx would say, our “non-organic body”, can became the power enabling us to conquer matter including our biological body. Steiner’s love for spiritual science, his glorification of spiritual science as the spiritual nourishment for people lost in the material world, is a purpose in itself. The belief that our improved analysis of gospels and deeper understanding of the structure of the spiritual world will increase
our love for spiritual beings and spiritualize us to such an extent that the strength of our love for the truth and spiritual beings will enable us to overcome matter is a dead end; it is naive, false, and insufficient first of all.
Steiner deals with human activity only within the framework of spiritual science – on the level of theoretical freedom, which is insufficient for us to become free on the practical level. Man, in his nature, is a practically active being interconnected with nature due to metabolism. Therefore, man also needs to become free on the practical level. Definitely, blood relations cannot be replaced by a spiritual relationship among people only by means of spiritual knowledge. We have to understand that the opposite is true: the progressing completion of “blood relations” of technical organisms will exclude (condition) spiritual relations among people! In fact, the progressing completion of technical organisms setting them free from their cyclicity, from heredity, which in fact means the appropriation of their own “blood relations”, also means the transformation of human relations based on love in blood into love in Spirit. The more technical organisms get their “blood” –
i.e. individual life – under their control, the more human relations turn from love in blood, from egoism, to love in spirit. The state (blood) forms of the development of producers gradually change its forms so as to finally leave their position to the released spiritual potencies of production.
Under some circumstances, spiritual science can set some scientists dealing with spiritual research free. However, it is a moot point. In practice, students dealing with spiritual science reach the opposite results, even though Steiner’s self-improvement instructions are really great and true. Steiner admitted that a person wishing to take a step forward in the search for secret truth needs to take three steps forward in character improvement. This means that if you want to move forward in secret science, you have to search for the source of power somewhere else, outside of science. In our opinion, the work process understood as a service to others is the best school of improving one’s character. We know that a number of arguments can be raised here – we have also come across them in Marx’s great description of the way in which man is depraved and estranged from himself in the work process. But we have to bear in mind that the work process is historically changing and the
process which had been just the source of useful work skills and self-discipline before will become the process of initiation. The work process will one day become the coming of Christ, to Golgotha (see the Gospel According to Luke).
Like Christ, the work process will raise the same requirement: “Who hath not left father, or mother, or wife, or children, or brethren or sisters, he shall not become my disciple.” This requirement underlines what we already know today: that “nepotism” is but an obstacle for the prosperity of a producer. The process of “mystical death” hidden for hundreds of years in secret temples will now take its place on the large stage of the world history of industry. If man feels no moral responsibility for the future of mankind, if he takes no practical part in the “fight” against nature for the survival of his biological body by means of technical improvement, the mere studies of spiritual science will not make his 16-petal lotus flower rotate."
Valdi