Steiner accepted Haeckel's biogenetic law for the embryo and rejected its use for the soul: the growing child does not replay humanity's cultural history.
The Biogenetic Law and the Soul in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's correction of a borrowing his own readers had already made, the transfer of Ernst Haeckel's law, that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, from embryology onto the inner life of the growing child. Speaking at Basel on 23 April 1920, in the fourth lecture of the cycle published as The Renewal of Education (GA 301), Steiner granted the law full standing in its own field, where the human embryo does pass through the fish form and the other animal forms. He denied that the small child correspondingly replays the primordial and cultural epochs of humanity. Observation of the first years shows no such repetition, he said, and the culture-epoch schemes built on it are poetry rather than fact. Steiner then moved the true soul parallel to the far end of life, where rudiments of ancient humanity's experience surface after roughly thirty-five, not in the nursery.
The biogenetic law and the soul names the boundary Steiner drew in April 1920 between a sound embryological principle and an unsound spiritual analogy. Haeckel's law describes the body before birth. Applied to the child's soul, it yields a charming picture of small barbarians ripening into Persians and Greeks, and, Steiner argued, an education founded on something that never happens.
In Steiner's Own Words
Can we find a parallel between human spiritual and soul development and this biogenetic law? We can do so only if we can say that at the beginning of his or her earthly life, a small child goes through the various stages of humanity and moves through later periods of human development as he or she grows. Thus the development of a child repeats the development of humanity as a whole. We could certainly create such a fantasy, but it would not correspond to reality. In this area we can approach reality only through spiritual science. When we follow the development of the human embryo from the second or third week until it matures, we can see hints of a continuously more perfect form in the developmental stages, the form of a fish, and so on.
What it Means Today
The scholarly reckoning Steiner anticipated arrived fifty-seven years later. In Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Harvard University Press, 1977), Stephen Jay Gould traced how Haeckel's law escaped biology and colonised the human sciences, and he gave close attention to G. Stanley Hall, the American psychologist whose two-volume Adolescence (1904) made recapitulation the organising principle of child study. Hall read children's play at dens and hunting as a surviving savage phase. Gould showed that the underlying biology had already failed: Karl Ernst von Baer's account of embryonic divergence, published in 1828, described the same specimens better, and Haeckel's law went on living in pedagogy long after embryologists let it go. Steiner's objection of April 1920 was not made on those technical grounds. He objected as an observer of children, saying he could find no such repetition in the early years and declining to supply one by inference.
Thalira synthesis: the durability of Steiner's position comes from what he kept, since he conceded Haeckel's law and refused only the analogy, so his argument survives the collapse of the biology that took Hall's psychology down with it.
For a teacher the consequence is narrow and usable: culture-epoch material can be taught because it suits a nine-year-old, not because the nine-year-old is secretly Egyptian.
Where to Read More
- The Renewal of Education, GA 301
- Find The Renewal of Education at SteinerBooks
- Recapitulation theory, Wikidata Q32384
- The Chaldean Oracles: Ancient Theurgy and the Fire of the Gods
- Theseus: The Athenian Hero, the Labyrinth, and the Civilising of Chaos
- The Divine Aura: Unlocking the Science of the Halo