Devolution is Steiner's counter-pole to evolution: the regressive stream of development that holds the human organism back, dimming organic vitality so that consciousness can light up.
Devolution (Regressive Development) in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's counter-pole to evolution: the stream of development that runs backward, un-building organic life so that consciousness can appear. Steiner sets out the idea in The Eternal in the Human Soul (GA 67), in the Berlin lecture of 15 April 1918, where he argues that evolution and devolution work through every animal and human organism, and that vitality and consciousness vary inversely. Conception belongs to progressive development, the highest arousal of organic life, and it dulls consciousness the way a fever does. Death belongs to regressive development, and it brings the moment of brightest consciousness. The human being is the most devolved of creatures: the brain, the eye, the whole head organization have been held back from full animal specialization, and this holding back is what makes the body a bearer of thinking, feeling, and willing. Anthroposophic physicians still work with this catabolic pole today.
Devolution is the concept Steiner used to correct what he saw as the one-sidedness of Darwinian ascent. Development does not only climb; it also withdraws. The human eye is simpler than the eye of many lower vertebrates, and the human body refuses the finished specialization of the animal form. For Steiner this retreat is no defect: what steps back from organic perfection becomes free for spirit.
In Steiner's Own Words
The animal is seized by everything connected with conception and subsequent production. This evolution, this development, is the highest unfolding of organic life. It is just as in the case of an increase in organic life, for example in feverish states, that the normal state of consciousness appropriate to its nature is suppressed. Thus, the arousal of organic life is associated with a suppression of consciousness, a dulling of consciousness, and everything connected with devolution and regressive development is associated with a brightening of consciousness, with the moment of most intense consciousness.
What it Means Today
Eight years after this Berlin lecture, the Dutch anatomist Louis Bolk gave Steiner's counter-stream an anatomical dossier. In a 1926 address to the Anatomical Society in Freiburg, published as Das Problem der Menschwerdung, Bolk argued that the human being is best understood as a primate fetus that has attained sexual maturity: our flat face, sparse body hair, late-closing skull sutures, and outsized brain are juvenile ape characters that never complete their development. He named the principle retardation. Steiner, in 1918, had named it devolution, and had already drawn the conclusion Bolk stopped short of: the held-back body is what permits thinking, feeling, and willing to inhabit it.
The Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould re-examined Bolk in Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Harvard University Press, 1977) and retained the core of the thesis under the name neoteny, the carrying of juvenile traits into adulthood, arguing that human evolution proceeds by slowing down rather than by adding finish. The Belgian scientist Jos Verhulst later carried the comparison organ by organ in Developmental Dynamics in Humans and Other Primates (Adonis Press, 2003), reading Bolk's retardation and Steiner's regressive development as one gesture seen from two sides. Thalira synthesis: devolution is the price of interiority, the organism pays in vitality for what it gains in consciousness, and the human form is the receipt.
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