Steiner's name for the epoch, roughly 1440 to 1543, when humanity expelled inner qualitative experience from its picture of nature and the quantitative scientific mind was born.
The Birth of Natural Science in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's term for the epoch, traced in his 1922 to 1923 Christmas lecture cycle The Origins of Natural Science (GA 326), when the modern scientific mode of thinking entered human development. Steiner dates the turning point to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and reads it through named figures: Nicholas of Cusa, whose Docta Ignorantia of 1440 still approached the spirit with timid mathematical symbols, and Nicholas Copernicus, whose De Revolutionibus of 1543 boldly forced the sense world into mathematical form. In the century between these books, Steiner says, Western science was born. Inner qualitative experience was expelled from the picture of nature, leaving a world of quantity, number, and measure. Steiner treats this not as error but as a necessary passage, one that carries within it the seed of a renewed spiritual knowledge for those who understand what was given up.
The Birth of Natural Science is Rudolf Steiner's account of the precise historical turning point when modern quantitative science came into being. He fixes it in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, around Nicholas of Cusa, Copernicus, Galileo, and Giordano Bruno, when the older qualitative reading of the world was set aside and humanity began to grasp nature through number, measure, and weight alone.
In Steiner's Own Words
One century lies between the two. During this century Western science was born. Earlier, it had been in an embryonic state. Whoever wants to understand what led to the birth of Western science, must understand this century that lies between the Docta Ignorantia and the De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium. Even today, if we are to understand the true meaning of science, we must study the fructifications that occurred at that time in human soul life and the renunciations it had to experience.
What it Means Today
Steiner's reading of this turning point finds its closest twentieth century parallel in Edmund Husserl's last work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, written in 1936. Husserl traced the same event Steiner described, naming it the Galilean mathematization of nature: the moment when Galileo and his successors began to treat the measurable structure of the world as the real world, and the lived field of colour, warmth, tone, and felt quality as a mere subjective garment laid over it. Husserl called that lived field the Lebenswelt, the lifeworld, and argued that European science had forgotten the very ground it grew from. Where Steiner placed the birth between Cusanus in 1440 and Copernicus in 1543, Husserl placed its decisive act with Galileo a generation later, but both men were describing one passage: the expulsion of inner quality from the account of nature. Both also refused to treat that expulsion as simple progress to be celebrated or a fall to be mourned. Thalira synthesis: where Husserl asked science to remember the lifeworld it had bracketed, Steiner asked it to redeem that lifeworld, to find in the very rigor of measurement the seed of a renewed perception of the qualitative spirit it once set aside. The phenomenological recovery of lived experience and the anthroposophical path of knowledge begin from the same diagnosis and part ways only on the cure.
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