Steiner's rule that evolution climbs to a complicated middle stage and then simplifies, so the perfected form is the simple one holding the complicated within.
Simplification at the Summit of Evolution in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's morphological correction to the common picture of development as a march from simple to ever more complicated. Steiner set it out in the lecture of 28 December 1921 at Dornach, printed in The Ideas Behind the Building of the Goetheanum (GA 289), where he contrasted his reading of natural form with Herbert Spencer's formula of differentiation followed by integration. Living evolution, Steiner said, rises to a complicated middle stage and then simplifies again, so that the most perfect form is the simple one into which the complicated has been drawn inward. His instance is the eye: undifferentiated in lower animals, elaborately equipped in middle animals with the falciform process and the pecten, then simplified again in the human eye, which carries those functions inwardly rather than as visible apparatus. The seven column capitals of the first Goetheanum were carved on that same law.
Simplification at the Summit of Evolution names the shape Steiner found when he followed a form through its whole career. Complexity is a middle condition, not a destination. What stands at the top of a developmental series looks plainer than what stands below it, because the elaboration has been taken inside and now works invisibly.
In Steiner's Own Words
But you are confronted with an idiosyncrasy. If you look at the successive capitals, it contradicts the abstract idea of development that is often expressed. For example, you find the idea of development expressed in Herbert Spencer's work in such a way that the first simply differentiates, then integrates again. But it is not like that. It contradicts the natural course of evolution. If you study natural evolution, you will find that evolution increases up to certain complicated forms, then becomes simple again, and that perfection is not what is most complicated, but what is simple, into which the complicated has transformed itself.
What it Means Today
Evolutionary biology reached a version of the same correction from a different direction. Walter Garstang coined paedomorphosis in 1922 to describe lineages that reach maturity while keeping juvenile, less specialised form; Gavin de Beer developed the argument in Embryos and Ancestors (1940); the Dutch anatomist Louis Bolk had already claimed in Das Problem der Menschwerdung (1926) that the human body is a fetalised primate body, holding on to simple traits that apes elaborate and lose. Stephen Jay Gould gathered the whole line in Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977) and made the case that human evolution ran by retention rather than by addition. The specialised adult ape is the more complicated animal; the human is the plainer one, and the plainness is where the openness sits.
Steiner's example holds up under that reading. Many fish carry a falciform process and birds a pecten oculi, vascular structures that project into the chamber of the eye; the human eye has neither, leaving the chamber clear and feeding the retina from vessels laid flat against its own layers. Less apparatus, and more seeing.
Thalira synthesis: the practical test of this law is to look for what a mature form has stopped doing outwardly, because in Steiner's morphology the dropped apparatus has not been lost but interiorised, and it is now doing its work as capacity rather than as structure.
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