There are three possible answers to this principal epistemological question, only one of which can be true, and these three options, together with their propensity to create confusion, were clearly stated by Alfred North Whitehead:

“Thereby modern philosophy has been ruined. It has oscillated in a complex manner between three extremes.  There are the dualists who accept matter and mind as on an equal basis, and the two varieties of monists, those who put mind inside matter, and those who put matter inside mind.  But this juggling with abstractions can never overcome the inherent confusion introduced by the misplaced concreteness to the scientific scheme of the seventeenth century."(From Science and the Modern World (p.55), by A.N. Whitehead (1861-1947).

The three options cited in bold above, are abstract in that they are purely rational, because while they may appeal to experience they do not in themselves contain any. This is essential in that it offers a common starting point for epistemology in which our own likes and dislikes play no part. Which one of the three we choose to defend, then depends upon a second important question in which our own likes and dislikes do play a role, namely: how do weknowwhich came first? The traditional procedure, therefore, has been to first select one of the three principal options, and then to treat that choice as a ‘given’ and attempt to construct a critical argument that will convince others of the truth of that choice. In the history of philosophy there have been very many attempts to critically justify all three options — but none of those attempts, whether they be true or false, can ever constitute a fourth option: i.e. no answer to the second question can ever replaces the first three (most fundamental) epistemological options. Were it to do so there would by now be thousands of primary options.

The principal question, therefore, must always remain: “which came first in the history of the universe, mind or matter”? in response to which a critical argument is developed. The failure to understand this distinction, by confusing the principal question with any number of consequent critical arguments belonging to the second question, has been and remains the source of very much unnecessary philosophical confusion — including “the misplaced concreteness to the scientific scheme of the seventeenth century." (ANW)

The primary question — the three possible options — and the secondary question — a proposed critical theory of knowledge, must, therefore, never be confused, because they are two entirely different entities. A critical ‘concept of mind’ can address one or more of the three rational options, but it can never replace them. Simply put there is no fourth option, and to suggest that any critical argument constitutes one is an error that must be strenuously avoided.

This then leaves us with the two opposing monisms — only one of which can be true:

(1)    “mind inside matter” results in a spiritual monism, and “matter inside mind” results in a material monism — otherwise known as a ‘mechanical’ monism.

It should here be noted that option (1) is teleological and its ultimate source is God, whereas for option (2) there is no God, and teleology will of necessity have been replaced by chance or cosmic randomness. Moreover, any attempt to put God, or creative intelligence of any kind, back into (2) — even unconsciously — will immediately create an unscientific dualism, because a genuine monism must always be ‘absolute’ and totally uncontaminated by even a hint that its opposite plays a primary causal role. However, that which I shall later call ‘secondary causality’ is permissible to both, but only if it in no way supplants the role of primary causality.This distinction is true of either monism, and is one of crucial importance that will be developed later, for as the well-known Darwinist Richard Lewontin so forcefully states — referring to (2): "…we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce mental explanations, no matter how counterintuitive…. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door."

Whether (2) represents the one true monism remains for most an open question, but Darwinism began as a monist/materialist worldview (2) and it must always remain so. Indeed should it in any way be contaminated by its opposite (1), then it ceases to be either scientific or rational, whereupon monism (1) will win by default — a thought that terrifies both contemporary science, and much of modern philosophy.

So it is that in this age of scientific materialism only one of these two monist options has received much attention, and that, of course, is (2). The underlying reason for this is simple enough; it is that if this monism were proven untrue then Darwin’s theory (but not evolution itself) must of necessity also be false; and even many modern idealists will tend to balk at this eventuality.

The role of critical argument is completely Independent of the ‘principal question’

After several centuries of effort, there has as yet been no critical epistemological argument to prove the truth of (2). This deficiency was the subject of John Horgan’s book The Undiscovered Mind, and it has also been confirmed by many others, including Noam Chomsky, who has stated that in his opinion philosophy can never solve this riddle — although he has not given up on science itself solving it at some distant point. He is referring, of course, only to (2), option (1) having been effectively ruled out, for him and for others by Darwinism, which with the above deficiency in mind, today becomes materialism’s principal bulwark.

Where (2) is concerned, there remains the interesting question: why is it termed ‘mechanical’? The answer is disturbing, and will prove a key to its eventual undoing, it is because this ‘word’ provides an explanation for natural complexity without which option (2) cannot even be considered. ‘Mechanism’ is a word that denotes intelligent human creativity (not divine), so that by using it in this way we have effectively put a largely unnoticed humanly creative “foot in the door” — and yet to substitute human for divine creative intelligence in this way is simply a rationally unacceptable proposition, especially when used as the foundation for a supposedly critical worldview — because obviously we did not create the universe. And yet this from the very outset has been the supposedly rational foundation underlying Darwinism, the theory of origins that has today substituted itself for the lack of any sound critical support of option (2).

There remains, however, the long neglected option (1), which since Darwinism especially has been largely ignored. It does, however, number among its supporters some significant thinkers, Gottfried Leibniz, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Samuel Butler and Alfred North Whitehead to name only a few. Indeed (1) was for a long while the principal focus of German idealism, but since then it has been gradually supplanted by (2), starting perhaps with the ‘positivist’ views of Auguste Comte 1785-1857), and then gradually and all but totally after the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859.

Matter seems to lose out radically on this front, because as quantum physics has long demonstrated, the realm of sub-atomic particles now appears to simply dissolve into consciousness, as was observed long ago by Sir James Jeans:

Today there is a wide measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science approaches almost to unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter…

Thinking (consciousness), on the other hand, does quite well for itself in this crucial test for being a self-supporting activity, as was observed by Prof. Bo Dahlin:

“Thinking can be explained by nothing other than itself, because it is always thinking that does the explaining.”

Dahlin draws here upon the work of Dr. Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), primarily on Steiner’s 1892 doctoral thesis Truth and Science, but also on the first five chapters of his Philosophy of Freedom, where one can find a consummately developed epistemological argument establishing the primacy of consciousness over matter (1). In Chapter 3 of this work Steiner states the following:

 “... The whole situation I have described here presents itself to us on the stage of history in the conflict between the one-world theory, or monism, and the two-world theory, or dualism.” He then decries dualism but adds that: “Up to the present, however, monism is not in a much better position. It has tried three different ways of meeting the difficulty. Either it denies spirit and becomes materialism; or it denies matter in order to seek its salvation in spiritualism.”

To put this last quotation into context, however, it must be added that “spiritualism” with its denial of matter, is not by any means the only answer to monist option (1), and that while option (2) always denies the spiritual, option (1) need not deny the physical, as it does say with Fichte. There are many modern critical thinkers who insist that one can still be a spiritual monist in and yet take matter very seriously indeed. Owen Barfield’s name comes immediately to mind here. But more to the point perhaps, is the fact that when seen in the light of the ‘principal question’ Steiner’s own answer to it also belongs clearly under (1).

Rudolf Steiner
Steiner stood in the tradition of Goethean science, and had been the editor of the Kurshner national edition of Goethe’s scientific works, and even the deeper question of how consciousness creates matter is dealt with in some considerable depth in many of his later anthroposophical works, In them the possibility of a scientifically acceptable approach to ‘higher knowledge’, i.e. knowledge of supersensible (not ‘supernatural’) realities is developed. He also gives us an unequivocal answer to the question “which came first in the history of the universe?” when he tells us that a student of “higher knowledge”:

“…has long since outgrown the preconception that the super-sensible world has grown out of the sense-world.... the supersensible world existed first, and everything physical evolved out of it.” (Knowledge of the Higher Worlds p.204)

 

Haeckel was twenty-seven years Steiner’s senior, and they met at a time in Steiner’s own life when he was striving very hard to fully appreciate all of the possible aspects of any philosophical issue, materialism included — in this he appears, to my knowledge at least, to have been far more open-minded than has any materialist before or since. Haeckel was without question a ‘mechanical monist’ (2), but he first presented himself to Steiner as a theist (pantheist), which may well have caused Steiner to initially place him under option (1). However, Haeckel at the time was not being quite frank, because as he later wrote: ” Pantheism is only a polite form of atheism."

An example of this is to be found in Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom, because he was still writing Chapters 11 and 12 during the period of this relationship, with the result that he there defends Haeckel’s monist stance while seeming to ignore the fact that it was the exact opposite to his own, In Chapter 12 he writes: “Ethical Individualism [as the basis for human morality] …is the crowning glory of that edifice to which Darwin and Haeckel aspired for natural science. “ which leaves one with the distinct impression that for Steiner at that time Darwinism was a spiritual worldview.

At the time that Haeckel had presented himself to Steiner as a theist (pantheist), yet it was certainly the case that for him to be a monist and a Darwinist he had also to be an atheist, because as Darwin himself had declared “God in an unnecessary hypothesis” — so that Steiner was unfortunate enough to be caught up in what was for Haeckel a necessary transition from theism to atheism. Haeckel was by good report a rather dominating personality, and a man who did not take kindly to being thought wrong on any subject — as his later conviction for fraud by an academic court in Jena would indicate (see Chapter 5 in Jonathon Well’s Icons of Evolution). This has left Steiner’s followers in a considerable quandary, because his writings at that time tell us that he had fully believed Haeckel’s declared pantheism to be genuine, and that it meant that they shared the same monism (1), and given Haeckel’s remarkable artistic proclivity this was not so unreasonable an assumption.

"Pantheism is only a polite form of atheism." Ernst Haeckel The Riddle of the Universe (p.291)

Haeckel was, of course, the German-speaking world’s strongest exponent of Darwinism, and as such he described himself as a ‘mechanical monist’ (2). However, because earlier he had initially included God in his scheme of things, it was perhaps difficult for Steiner to not take him at his word and to place him in option (1), which has the effect of seeming to turn Darwinism into a spiritual theory.

Here again it must be stressed that any attempt to combine these two opposing monisms unavoidably results in a logically and ontologically untenable dualism — in which mind and matter are seen to be ‘equal’ and so to have apparently come into existence — simultaneously? — but without one having created the other, an option that Steiner’s “monism of thought” and his earlier noted response to question (1) very definitely rule out, Moreover, adding spirituality to Darwinism both defeats Steiner’s purpose, and makes the Darwinian theory irrefutable, and thereby unscientific.

At that time Haeckel had come under attack for his Darwinian views from religious sources in Vienna, and Steiner, no doubt also in the name of friendship, and perhaps also in the interest of human freedom, came strongly to his defense (see ‘Haeckel and his Opponents’), even though their epistemological positions were in reality the exact opposite. This situation made it necessary for Steiner to appear to defend Darwinism, and do so in a way that he later must have regretted — thereby lending apparent support to materialism — because if Darwinism had not been a materialistic theory, science at that time would have rejected it out of hand, as it did the vitalist evolutionary theories of Bergson, Lamark and others that were then available to it, because it was Darwinism alone that permitted a purely materialistic interpretation.

Steiner in supporting Haeckel was not overtly trying to spiritualize Darwinism — he seemed just to be accepting at face value Haeckel’s initially pantheistic interpretation of it. He discusses his motive in the 1923 Preface to his work Riddles of Philosophy:

“Superficially considered, it might, however, seem as if the person who wrote about Haeckel as I did…. Had gone through a complete transformation of spirit when he later published works like Knowledge of Higher Worlds and its Attainment…. Whoever intends to acquire for himself [spiritual] intuition of this kind must develop the ability to suppress his own sympathies and antipathies and to surrender with perfect objectivity to the subject of his contemplation. He must really, in presenting Haeckel’s mode of thinking, be capable of being totally absorbed by it. It is precisely from this power to surrender to the object that he derives spiritual intuition…..One must be capable of thinking idealistically with the idealist, and materialistically with the materialist. For only thus will the faculty of soul be awakened that can become active in spiritual intuition.”

From this it is clear that Steiner’s motivation in supporting Haeckel in part reflected a salutary developmental concern, and so cannot be dismissed as having been just a critical failing — although it does appear to have had that long-term effect. Nothing in this relationship, however, contradicts the statement made at the beginning of this essay, i.e. that only one of Whitehead’s three epistemological options can be true. However, Steiner then makes his concerns yet more specific:

“It cannot be the task of an historical presentation to fight materialism or to distort it into a caricature, for within its limits it is justified. It is right to represent materialistically those processes in the world that have a material cause.”

What processes then are these? Even if we accept that in describing Haeckel’s thought Steiner is being deliberately non-critical, this still leaves us with the question: In what sense can a mode of enquiry based upon a worldview that one holds to be epistemologically false (2) be nevertheless scientifically valid? This important question requires a longer treatment than I can give it here, but this short extract from the work of a modern writer may help bring it into clearer focus.

In his book The Edge of Evolution (p.205), Michael Behe briefly compares the universe to a pool table, using the following videotape analogy to explain how all of the balls (atoms or molecules) have all ended up in the same pocket:

“As the tape begins, all of the numbered pool balls are motionless, scattered on the table apparently at random. Then, in slow motion from the corner, the cue ball appears (you can’t see the cue stick or the shooter, they are all off camera). The cue ball hits a numbered ball, then another, which hits several others. After bouncing around for a short while, all the balls line up and role one after another, in numerical order into the side pocket.” (physical consilience).

Clearly what happens to the balls once motion has begun, can be worked out in terms of physical causes only, their weight, velocity and direction of motion combined with their varying coefficients of friction etc. etc., but to then avoid asking why it happened in such a remarkably orderly manner, and whether any intelligence lay behind it, one would need to find a way of negating all such questioning entirely, by substituting ‘chance’ or ‘randomness’ for intelligence, and as Owen Barfield asserts:

“Chance in fact equals no hypothesis, and to resort to it in the name of science means that the impressive vocabulary of technological investigation [associated with evolutionary biology] was actually being used to denote its breakdown; as though, because it is something that we can do with ourselves in the water, drowning should be included as one of the different ways of swimming”.

Or, we must choose to step beyond physical causes into the realm that is “off camera” — because then one is dealing with the cue and the shooter, or more simply put one is then genuinely entering into the ‘supersensible’ realm of ‘origins’ (1) in which causes are spiritual rather than material. A rationally necessary step, since option (2) can only be made to even appear plausible if one finds a subtle way to falsely imbue the billiard balls themselves with all of the attributes of human consciousness — by the anthropomorphic misuse of creative language (‘selfish’ or ‘altruistic’ genes etc.etc.).

But if in going ‘off camera’ one is equipped with a critically sound theory of knowledge, capable of explaining what knowledge is in terms of it being the outcome of a spiritual activity, and not of mere bodily processes, then one can reasonably hope that science can eventually proceed critically beyond the limited realm of physical causes into that of spiritual causes, and especially so if this cognitive development is seen in terms of an ongoing ‘evolution of human consciousness’. The concept of primary and secondary causes is not a dualistic distinction, in that only primary causation (1) is epistemologically founded — as in the first five chapters of Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom. Secondary causation is concerned with physical events, but is not ‘materialistic’ in that it is non-reductionist and lacks its own epistemological foundation — except when it is seen as an extension of (1). It is a way of emphasizing that that both thought and sense perception can lead to knowledge, but that thought is always its primary source, because without it sense perception would be meaningless. And for a ‘science of origins’ in particular to be genuine, it must always concern itself first with the cognitive development of thinking as a means of access into the spiritual world that is its source, and with the immense hidden potential behind its disciplined development as it extends beyond the merely intellectual and into the creative realms of imagination, inspiration and intuition — as defined by Rudolf Steiner. A science of origins is different from all other areas of science, in that in its essence it must appeal either to monism (1) or (2), but never to both, and whenever we try to force it to accommodate both, it simply ceases to be science.

That the academic world has managed to dismiss Rudolf Steiner's works as inconsequential and irrelevant, is one of the intellectual wonders of the twentieth century. Anyone who is willing to study these vast works with an open mind (let us say, a hundred of his titles) will find himself faced with one of the greatest thinkers of all time, whose grasp of the modern sciences is equaled only by his profound learning of the ancient ones. Steiner was no more of a mystic than Albert Einstein, he was a scientist, rather - but a scientist who dared enter into the mysteries of life.

And it should by now be very clear that to “enter the mysteries of life” means to help humanity as a whole, and academia in particular, to develop a genuine science of origins, one that owes its critical content to the concept of’ ‘higher knowledge’ — so that as the evolution of consciousness progresses we may become capable, as scientists, of studying primary (spiritual) as well as secondary (physical) causation. And it goes almost without saying that this can only result, epistemologically speaking, from a correct and critical approach to option (1) — together with a detailed understanding of how such ‘higher knowledge’ can be developed — and that guidance in both realms Steiner offered, and did so with meticulous regard for human freedom, a fact that, ironically perhaps, was further accentuated by his friendship with Ernst Haeckel. Indeed, when viewed in the light of the evolution of human consciousness, Darwinism can be seen as a kind of stopgap, but one that has now served its purpose.

Three alternatives suggest themselves; first, that Steiner who himself stood firmly in the tradition of German idealism, was deceived by Haeckel’s initially declared pantheism into believing that they both shared the same monism; second, it is possible that Steiner’s support for him was just a matter of personal friendship, and third; that it was in part because he understood that Darwinism, at the beginning of the twentieth century, still had an important historical task still to perform — that of freeing human thought from the grip of religious dogma — and that it was much too early to call it philosophically into question. Perhaps it was the case that another century needed to pass before that could rightly be undertaken.

Nevertheless, his relationship with Haeckel has created serious problems for the anthroposophical approach to Goethean science. So much so that the modern Goethe scholar Henri Bortoft has rejected that approach as being ‘psuedo positivist’ (dualist), and Ernst Lehrs in his well-known work on Goethean science Man or Matter, has had to directly contradict Steiner (but without mentioning him by name) by stating of Darwinism’s connection to Goethean science, that they are in fact “exact opposites” as is unquestionably the case. Add to this Owen Barfield’s insightful work on the spiritual origin of language, when compared to Darwinism in which language arises out of animal grunts, and one must immediately ask how that which is spiritual in origin (language) can ever be rationally employed to prove the truth of materialism? Obviously it cannot, and yet this is the deceptive practice that has kept Darwinism alive now for 150 years (see my article on David Stoves’s book Darwinian Fairytales).

This contradiction has also hurt Steiner’s philosophical reputation, as was recently observed by Gary Lachmann in his 2007 biography Rudolf Steiner: An Introduction to his Life and Work, wherein he states: “Steiner published an article in The Society passionately defending Haeckel’s Riddle of the Universe, a book that he would later ridicule, thus adding to the confusion about this important thinker.” (p.111) Whatever the underlying reason for this problem, whether it be developmental or historical, it does not help matters when still today, more than one hundred years later, many supporters of Steiner’s deeply insightful works continue to present Darwinism as both a philosophically and anthropomorphically acceptable worldview, thereby turning Steiner’s very genuine ‘monism of thought’ (1) into at best a disguised form of dualism. One way of doing this, is to attempt to spiritualize’ Darwinism by putting back into it, in any number of rather devious ways, the pantheism that Haeckel had almost surreptitiously removed. If Darwinism had been a genuinely spiritual theory, then 19^th century science would most certainly have rejected it outright, and to now try to put spirituality in any form back into it can only turn it into a scientific travesty, i.e. into a ‘theory of origins’ that can never ever be disproved, and therefore cannot be science.

Another way to do this is to attempt to view Steiner’s ‘monism of thought’ as a third or ‘neutral’ monism. Those who attempt this often argue that Steiner tells us that spirit and matter are always to be found together, which today may very well be the case — but the correct epistemological question still remains: ‘which came first in the history of the universe, matter of mind?’ about which, as we have seen, Steiner answered unequivocally in favor of (1). Steiner’s “monism of thought” is not a ‘third or ‘neutral’ monism, it is the name that he gives to a sound cognitive approach to option (1).

That Steiner had begun to have serious doubts concerning his earlier pro-Haeckel Darwinian stance, is clear in this excerpt from a 1912 lecture series.

“The objection might be raised here that any inclination toward present-day natural-scientific conceptions might put spiritual science into an awkward position for the simple reason that these conceptions themselves rest upon a completely uncertain [epistemological] foundation. It is true: There are scientists who consider certain fundamental principles of Darwinism as irrefutable, and there are others who even today speak of a “crisis in Darwinism.” The former consider the concepts of “the omnipotence of natural selection” and “the struggle for survival” to be a comprehensive explanation of the evolution of living creatures; the latter consider this “struggle for survival” to be one of the infantile complaints of modern science and speak of the “impotence of natural selection.” — If matters depended upon these specific, problematic questions, it were certainly better for the anthroposophist to pay no attention to them and to wait for a more propitious moment when an agreement with natural science might be achieved.” (from the Karma and Reincarnation lectures)

This might well be described as a ‘wait and see’ attitude on Steiner’s part, the recognition perhaps that something is seriously wrong, but not yet a task that he feels any need to address. It is as if he wants to stand aloof from the debate for a while, but there is no suggestion either that he wants to spiritualize Darwinism, Much later in his life, Steiner no doubt well understood that Darwinism was materialism; and that, as the entire scientific world today knows, it was destined to become materialism’s principal theoretical support. And also that in order to sustain it ”no divine foot in the door” could be permitted. All that we accomplish by trying to spiritualize a materialistic theory, is to prevent it from being legitimately criticized on its own terms, i.e. that by giving it a totally false spirituality we help to make it immune from criticism, because then either way, be it up or down, the theory appears to win out — even though it is the case that no theory that is immune from criticism can ever be called ‘scientific’ (see Sir Karl Popper) a development that Steiner would never have supported, indeed today it must be stressed that the time for open-mindedness on this issue is past, and that any support now given to Darwinism invariably works to defeat Steiner’s greater purpose.

Darwinism belongs entirely to (2), whereas anthroposophy and Goethean science when supported by Steiner’s critical ‘monism of thought’, belong entirely to option (1). But Steiner’s seeming attempt to combine the two, for whatever reason, can be seen as an example of the kind of conceptual confusion that has “ruined“ modern philosophy — and it may well have temporarily worked to lessen our understanding of Steiner’s vitally important contribution to the riddle of epistemology.

Let it be clear that there are no further monist options, and to try to in any way, other that that demonstrated above, to combine the two monisms in a science of origins, is to make a very serious mistake, and one that does Steiner’s anthroposophy itself a great deal of harm; that Steiner by supporting Haeckel appears to have been the first to make this error, is doubtless something everyone can all learn to live with, but not by uncritically accepting it — because he would have been the last to ask for anything approaching uncritical ‘belief’ on the part of others, and I am sure that he was depending upon future students of his work to set this matter straight, and to lift this burden from anthroposophy when the time was uniquely right to do so — now!

This problem does not detract from the fact that Steiner, in the first five chapters of his Philosophy of Freedom, does indeed solve the great epistemological riddle, as I believe that any serious thinker must in time come to appreciate. This accomplishment will, I’m sure, be very widely recognized in the future, once materialism and Darwinism have been defeated, and its factual status will certainly become very clear to anyone who reads Owen Barfield’s excellent essay ‘Rudolf Steiner’s Concept of Mind’ (see <difficulttruths.com>) which omits any mention of Darwin, and thereby helps accentuate the important fact that Darwinism stands in opposition to Steiner, and has played no role in his remarkable attempt to solve the great epistemological riddle.

His accomplishment was far greater than mine, but the two do belong together, because while Darwinism survives materialism does also, and also by simply ignoring Steiner, as science and philosophy have attempted to do for the past one hundred years. It is indeed ironic that they may seem to have been aided in this by Steiner himself, in his contradictory attitude towards Haeckel, but once Darwinism is gone, it will not be anywhere near as easy for science and philosophy to go on ignoring him in the way that they have — however, if he is presented to the world as having been infallible that rejection will very likely continue, and might even be justified.

Monism (1) is now due for a significant rebirth, and Rudolf Steiner, perhaps with the aid of Owen Barfield for the English speaking world, can help to show us how.

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