Steiner's view that Einstein's relativity is true for abstract motion but becomes thinking out of touch with reality once it denies the living human standpoint.
The Critique of Relativity in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's response to Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, delivered to the Goetheanum workmen on the 11th of February 1924 and printed in GA 352, A Spiritual Scientific View of Nature and Man. Steiner grants that relativity is clever and holds for the bare observation of motion: a train, the Earth around the Sun, a matchbox and a match. His objection is that Einstein extends a geometric truth into a metaphysics where nothing is absolute. For Steiner the living organism refutes this, because a person walking to Basel grows tired, an inner change that external observation cannot produce. Relativity, pressed past its limit, becomes thinking out of touch with reality, a disembodied intellect that loses the real, inwardly experienced standpoint of the human being in the cosmos, and points back toward spiritual science.
The Critique of Relativity is Rudolf Steiner's assessment, given to the Goetheanum workmen in 1924, that Einstein's relativity is correct for the abstract observation of motion yet becomes, when stretched over the whole of life, a thinking that has lost touch with reality. Steiner accepted the physics of relative motion. What he refused was the claim that nothing absolute remains, because the living human being, who tires on the road to Basel, carries an inward standpoint no measurement can dissolve.
In Steiner's words
Einstein's theory of relativity is clever and it also applies to a certain part of the world, but you can't do anything with it when you look at reality. For from the theory of relativity one never comes to understand why a person tires so terribly when he goes to Basel, since he cannot say whether he is going into Basel or whether Basel is coming to meet him. The fatigue could not be explained if Basel were to come to him, and why I fiddle with my feet when I walk. You see, all these things show nothing other than that it is not enough to think correctly and intelligently, but that something else is needed: one must be immersed in life and must judge things according to life.
What it means today
Steiner's distinction between what is logically thinkable and what is real found an unexpected echo in modern physics itself. In September 2011 the OPERA collaboration, running a neutrino beam from CERN in Geneva to the Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy, announced that its particles appeared to travel faster than light, a result that, if true, would have unseated relativity. The mathematics was internally consistent and the measurement carefully logged. Yet in 2012 the anomaly was traced to a loose fibre optic cable and a faulty clock, and the claim was withdrawn. The episode shows the same gap Steiner pressed in 1924: a conclusion can be flawlessly reasoned and still fail to correspond to the world. Logic alone does not deliver reality, a second test is always needed.
Thalira synthesis: What Steiner called thinking out of touch with reality is the habit of trusting a calculation that no longer asks whether a living being could inhabit its conclusion. His remedy was not to reject relativity but to read it as a doorway: the very uncertainty of outer motion drives the honest thinker inward, toward the standpoint of the experiencing self that anthroposophy takes as its starting point.
Where to read more
- A Spiritual Scientific View of Nature and Man (GA 352)
- Find this volume at SteinerBooks
- Critique of Pure Reason by Kant: A Complete Guide to the Copernican Revolution in Philosophy
- The Minotaur and the Labyrinth: Theseus, the Beast, and the Path to the Centre
- The Sirens: The Deadly Song and the Lure of the Unconscious