Bartholomaeus von Carneri (1821-1909) was the Austrian philosopher who tried to build ethics on Darwinism; Steiner judged his system an instinctive, spiritualized materialism, honest to its core.
Bartholomaeus von Carneri in Anthroposophy is the Austrian philosopher (1821-1909) whom Rudolf Steiner examined across three Berlin lectures of From Central European Intellectual Life, GA 65 (1915-1916), as the nineteenth century's most honest attempt to build an ethics out of Darwinism. Born in Trento in 1821 and a member of the Austrian Parliament, Carneri, author of Sittlichkeit und Darwinismus (1871), held that spirit can appear to the human being only in matter. Steiner's verdict runs the other way: because Carneri lets the division of the sensible run finer than any sense can follow, so that only thinking can grasp what lives in the differentiated material, his system is really an instinctive spiritualized materialism, even purest spiritualism in atheist clothing. Moral impulses become, on this reading, a sum of higher natural laws planted in the soul like natural impulses. The same question returns today in evolutionary ethics, from E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology (1975) onward.
Bartholomaeus von Carneri stands in Steiner's Berlin lectures as the figure in whom nineteenth-century materialism confesses its own hidden idealism. Half paralyzed from birth, a parliamentarian feared for his wit, blind at eighty yet dictating a Dante translation from memory, Carneri wanted morality grounded in natural law alone. Steiner honoured the striving and named the deception: the ethics Carneri drew from Darwinism was spirit all along.
In Steiner's Own Words
Yesterday I spoke about a thinker, and from what I said you will have gathered that I have the highest regard for this thinker. He is the Austrian philosopher Bartholomäus von Carneri. I respect Carneri because he, with such a strong spirit, tried to develop an ethic, a moral teaching, out of Darwinism. But he stands on ground that produces thoughts which naturally oppose what spiritual science says, because he himself does not understand, because he presents things that contradict what he asserts.
What it Means Today
Carneri's project did not die with him; it slept for sixty years and woke in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1975 the Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson opened Sociobiology: The New Synthesis by proposing that ethics be removed, for a time, from the hands of the philosophers and 'biologicized'. Wilson's program, and the evolutionary-ethics debate it reopened through papers such as Michael Ruse and Wilson's 'Moral Philosophy as Applied Science' (1986), is Carneri's Sittlichkeit und Darwinismus restated in the vocabulary of population genetics: moral feeling as adaptation, conscience as a sum of higher natural laws. The objection that has dogged sociobiology ever since, that no ought can be read off an is without smuggling in a valuation the biology never supplied, is the very deception Steiner had already named in Berlin in 1915. Steiner did not refute Carneri; he diagnosed him. The man who divides matter finer than any sense can follow, then grasps the remainder with pure thinking, has quietly changed instruments: he is doing spiritual work with a naturalist's conscience.
Thalira synthesis: Carneri is the test case of the honest materialist's confession, the moment when a thinker's practice affirms the spirit his theory denies, so that the atheist ethicist becomes, in Steiner's reading, an unknowing witness for the independence of the soul. Read this way, the sociobiology debate is not a threat to spiritual science but its waiting room.
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