GA 76: The Stimulating Effect of Anthroposophy on the Individual Sciences

Themes and Structure

The opening address sets the tone by reworking the Delphic motto. Steiner argues that self-knowledge alone belonged to the Greek position and that a modern person needs the injunction doubled: know yourself, and become a free being. The present, he says, is a time of unresolved questions, and the honest alternative to working on them is despair about the continuation of Western civilisation.

The philosophy lecture works through a case study before it works through a doctrine. Steiner takes the obscure figure of Ludwig Haller, whose thinking Eduard von Hartmann had reviewed, and shows a philosopher discovering that his concepts had begun to move by themselves without his direction. From there he turns to Kant, and states the diagnosis compactly: "Kant's problem is not a problem of truth, nor of knowledge, but of certainty." The lecture closes with an argument about the senses, comparing a healthy sense organ to colourless glass that cancels its own contribution rather than manufacturing sense qualities.

The mathematics lecture begins with philology, noting that mathesis once simply meant knowledge, and then examines the passage from analytic to synthetic or projective geometry. The analyst calculates; the synthetic geometer works with straightedge and compass and with what appears directly to inner viewing. Steiner walks through an elementary construction of intersecting connecting lines and draws attention to the moment when the geometer says "and assume," because that gesture, he claims, is where free mathematical construction begins to be constrained by something objective. The same passage in miniature, he suggests, is the passage from mathematics into physics and onward toward imaginative cognition.

The lecture on organic science and medicine is the densest of the seven. It opens with the nineteenth century history of the life force, its collapse after the laboratory synthesis of organic substances by Wöhler and Liebig, and its partial return as neovitalism, which Steiner regards as a repetition rather than a repair. His objection is precise: the life force was never a phenomenon, so an intellect trained to arrange phenomena side by side could only smuggle it in. He then offers three worked examples of what imaginative observation would change. The heart is read as responding to the blood rather than driving it. The human head is read as a transformed spinal organisation, older than the animal form, with the vertebral column joining later. Intellectual cognition is read as accompanied by a mineralising process in the nerve and sense apparatus, which he then relates outward to root, leaf and flower in the plant, and so to a rational path from pathology to therapy.

The linguistics lecture stages a collision between an eleventh century saying about the tongue drawing the word out of the teeth and Wilhelm Scherer's remark that the modern age laughs at such a sentence. Steiner uses Scherer's own complaint, that physiology and philology cannot meet, as his opening. His proposal runs through the two great bodily turning points of childhood: the change of teeth and sexual maturity. Speech, he argues, is an earlier metamorphosis of the same process that later appears at puberty, and the residue of the connection is still audible in the breaking of the voice. From this he draws a working rule for philology: what falls silent in things as they become outwardly material begins to sound inwardly in the human being as speech.

The social science lecture connects the threefold picture of the human being to the threefold picture of society, and explains why Steiner thought supersensible knowledge has moral consequences at all. Concepts drawn only from the sense world stay inert and cannot move the will; knowledge won through imagination and inspiration reaches the limb and metabolic side of the person, where willing lives. He also warns his hearers against the habit of carrying a formula found in one field straight into another. The closing address restates the aim of the week and then turns satirical, working through a contemporary pamphlet on university reform whose author admits he will pass over teaching itself in silence.