Steiner's name for academic thinking that divides the human being into four members the way a carpenter divides a chair into legs, seat and back.
Chair-Philosophy in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's polemical name for academic thinking that treats the fourfold membering of the human being as an arbitrary classification, the way a carpenter divides a chair into legs, seat and back. Steiner used it in the lecture of 22 April 1923 at Dornach, printed in GA 84, after a much quoted philosopher reviewed Occult Science and concluded that physical body, etheric body, astral body and I were merely one more way of cutting a whole into parts. Steiner answered with chemistry: water divides into hydrogen and oxygen, and each behaves differently once released, hydrogen entering hydrochloric acid, oxygen entering lime. The four members are less divisible still. At death the physical body returns to the earth, the etheric body to the ether, the astral body to the second Hierarchy, the I to the first. The term survives today as Anthroposophy's shorthand for a category error in the study of the human being.
Chair-Philosophy names a habit of mind rather than a school. Steiner used it for the reviewer who reads that man consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and I, and files that under classification. The objection is not the count. It is that the four were never parts of one object.
In Steiner's Own Words
When a human being passes through the gate of death and leaves his physical corpse behind, the physical body turns to earth, but the etheric body rises up into the ether. The astral body leaves both and enters those worlds which are the domain of the second Hierarchy. And the I belongs to a different world again, the domain of the first Hierarchy. These four members do not merely represent a division for classification, they belong to quite different spheres of the Universe. At the same time the distinction illustrates the nature of man's being. We have here, on a much higher level, something for which one has to search already when progressing from the comparison of the chair with that of the water.
What it Means Today
Twenty-six years after the Dornach lecture, the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle gave the same error a name that stuck. The Concept of Mind (Hutchinson, 1949) opens with a visitor shown the colleges, the libraries and the playing fields, who then asks where the University is. The visitor has missed no building. He has placed the University in the same logical class as the buildings, and Ryle calls this a category mistake. His own target was Cartesian dualism, the doctrine he mocked as the ghost in the machine, and his remedy was to dissolve the mind back into dispositions and behaviour.
Steiner's complaint runs on the same rails in the opposite direction. His reviewer reads physical body, etheric body, astral body and I as four items on one list, which is exactly a category mistake, and the correction is not to collapse the list but to see that its members answer to earth, to ether, and to two Hierarchies. Ryle removed a ghost. Steiner would say the reviewer never located the machine.
Thalira synthesis: chair-philosophy and the ghost in the machine are one diagnosis read from opposite ends, the first refusing to press four orders of being into a single order, the second clearing a false substance out of a single order. Anyone working with the fourfold today, in a Waldorf child study or an anthroposophic case conference, is doing what Ryle taught philosophers to check for: asking what logical type each part belongs to before counting the parts.
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