Steiner's name for the inner counter-process by which human beings continually dissolve the mechanical, physical, and chemical syntheses of outer nature, the ground of the experience of freedom.
Contra-Materialisation in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the reversing work the human interior performs on outer nature: a continual dissolving of the mechanical, physical, and chemical syntheses that causality builds up outside us. Steiner coined the term in Dornach on 24 July 1921, in the lecture cycle published as Man as a Being of Sense and Perception (GA 206), where he unfolds it as three counter-processes, contra-mechanisation, contra-physicalisation, and contra-chemicalisation, carried by the metabolic and will organisation of the lower man. Where nature synthesises, the human being analyses: protein formation already shows carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and sulphur combining not by ordinary chemistry but by passing into chaos. For Steiner, the lived awareness of this counter-process is exactly what a person expresses in the words I am free. Philosophers of biology such as Hans Jonas later argued, on independent grounds, that metabolism itself is the first form of freedom.
Contra-Materialisation names the battle Steiner saw at the centre of human life: outer nature builds by causal synthesis, and the human interior takes those syntheses apart again. The head receives the finished world; the metabolism un-makes it. In that constant un-making, Steiner located the real, non-theoretical ground of freedom, the process a person points to whenever they say the words I am free.
In Steiner's Own Words
We are not here merely in order, through living, to sense this contradiction, but our inner life is a continual process of destruction of what develops as causality in outer nature. We men really dissolve natural causality within ourselves. What outside is physical process, chemical process, is developed within us in a reverse direction, towards the other side. Of course we shall see this clearly only if we take into consideration the upper and the lower man, if we grasp by means of the upper man what emerges from metabolism by way of contra-mechanisation, contra-physicalisation, contra-chemicalisation. If we try to grasp the contra-materialisation in the human being, then we do not have merely a logical, theoretical contradiction in ourselves, but we have the real process.
What it Means Today
Forty-five years after the Dornach lectures, the German-born philosopher Hans Jonas arrived at a strikingly similar position from within academic philosophy. In The Phenomenon of Life (1966), written during his years at the New School for Social Research in New York, Jonas argued that freedom does not first appear in human consciousness; it appears already in metabolism. An organism persists only by continually exchanging the very matter that composes it, holding its form against the drift of its own substance, and Jonas named this condition needful freedom. He argued from biology and phenomenology, not from spiritual science, which makes the convergence with GA 206 more instructive rather than less.
Both thinkers refuse the standard picture in which life simply obeys chemistry, and both locate the germ of freedom in the body's ongoing argument with its own material. Thalira synthesis: what Jonas found at the threshold of the living cell, Steiner followed to its human summit, reading the metabolism as a continuous analysis of nature's syntheses whose inner echo is the certainty I am free; freedom is not an exception smuggled into causality but the felt reverse side of a real physiological counter-current. Anyone who wants a first foothold can start with digestion, the daily place where every person un-builds the outer world.
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