Steiner's way of forming concepts by approaching a phenomenon from several sides, letting a concept culminate, then carrying it back through the facts to be modified.
The Characterizing Method in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's procedure for forming concepts in fields where neither deduction nor induction can reach: you approach a phenomenon from several different starting points, hold those approaches together, let them culminate in a concept, then carry that concept back through the phenomena to verify it, which in practice means modifying it. Steiner set the method out in the Political Economy Seminar (GA 341), the discussion sessions he held in Dornach, Switzerland, between 31 July and 6 August 1922 alongside the National Economy Course. His argument was historical as well as logical: jurisprudence works by deduction, natural science by induction, and economics, which deals with living human beings acting into an open future, can borrow neither. The faculty exercised is mobile thinking, the same capacity Goethe used on the primal plant. Modern application: any discipline whose object keeps changing while it is being studied.
The Characterizing Method is what Steiner offered in place of definition. A definition fixes a thing once; characterization circles it, approaching from several sides until a concept forms, then tests that concept against the phenomena and lets them alter it. Steiner considered this the only honest procedure in economics, where the subject matter is people who keep deciding, and the facts never stop arriving.
In Steiner's Own Words
In economics, you absolutely need a characterizing method that seeks to gain the concepts by starting from different points, holding them together, and allowing them to culminate in concepts. This gives you a specific concept. Since you can never see the full range of facts, but only have a certain amount of experience, it will probably be one-sided in a sense. Now go through the phenomena again with the concept and try to verify it. You will see that this is actually a modification. In this way, by characterizing, you arrive at a concept that you modify by verifying, and you then arrive at an economic view. You must work towards views.
What it Means Today
Steiner was speaking into a live quarrel. The Methodenstreit had broken out in 1883, when Carl Menger published his Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences and argued that economics must derive its laws deductively from exact types, and Gustav von Schmoller of the German Historical School answered that laws could only be assembled inductively out of archives, statistics, and cases. Neither side conceded. Max Weber, who inherited the wreckage, proposed a third thing in his 1904 essay on objectivity in the social sciences: the ideal type, a concept built by deliberate one-sided accentuation of a few features, never a description of any actual economy, held up against the phenomena as a measuring rod and revised whenever the phenomena refused it. Steiner, lecturing in Dornach eighteen years later, described his own procedure in almost the same shape, and then went further than Weber was willing to go.
Thalira synthesis: Weber's ideal type stays a useful fiction the researcher knows is false, while Steiner's characterization is meant to become a living concept that metamorphoses with its object the way Goethe's primal plant does, which is why Steiner asked economists for imaginations rather than models.
For anyone working today in economics, sociology, or organisational research, the practical instruction is unchanged: stop asking what the correct definition of capital or labour is, gather several approaches to the phenomenon, let a concept form, then walk that concept back through the cases and record exactly where it bends.
Where to Read More
- Political Economy Seminar, GA 341 (1922)
- National Economy Course, GA 340 (1922)
- Find Steiner on economics at SteinerBooks
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