The world-outlook that takes invisible force, not solid matter, as the ultimately real, explaining every event by the powers it supposes working behind appearances.
Dynamism is the eleventh of the twelve world-outlooks in Steiner's 1914 Berlin lectures, the standpoint of anyone who cannot rest content with bare matter yet does not climb to spirit-beings. For the dynamist the falling stone proves gravitation and the magnet proves a magnetic force; what is genuinely real is the power, not the thing it moves. Reality is woven of forces that the senses never reach.
In Steiner's Own Words
But there can be persons who do not rise to the level of the Monads; they cannot concede that existence is made up of beings with the most varied conceptual powers, but at the same time they are not content to allow reality only to external phenomena; they hold that “forces” are dominant everywhere. If, for example, a stone falls to the ground, they say, “That is gravitation!” When a magnet attracts bits of iron, they say: “That is magnetic force!” They are not content with saying simply, “There is the magnet,” but they say, “The magnet presupposes that supersensibly, invisibly, a magnetic force is present, extending in all directions.”
What it Means Today
Read as a chapter in the history of physics, Dynamism names a real and durable temptation: to locate the real in force and let the visible body dwindle to its carrier. Steiner traces the lineage to Leibniz, who already preferred active power to inert extension, and it reaches its sharpest form in the Jesuit natural philosopher Roger Boscovich, whose 1758 Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis dissolved every atom into a dimensionless point surrounded by alternating laws of attraction and repulsion. Matter vanished; only the force-law remained. The nineteenth-century field physics of Faraday and the potential-theory of the continental mathematicians inherited that instinct, and a working scientist who says the magnet merely localises a field that stretches everywhere is speaking pure Dynamism. Steiner's point is not that this picture is false but that it is one-sided, a single shade caught between two neighbours. Step down from it and you reach Realism, which takes the spread-out world as simply given and calls belief in hidden forces a superstition, as Fritz Mauthner did. Step up and you reach Monadism, where the powers behind appearances are no longer abstract forces but Leibniz's perceiving monads, spiritual beings of graded consciousness. Spiritual science asks the dynamist only to notice that force is itself a thought, and to follow that thought toward the beings who think it.
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