The independent life of concepts is Steiner's name for the moment absorbed concepts begin moving on their own, a self-life the trained researcher masters like mathematics.
The Independent Life of Concepts in Anthroposophy is the threshold experience in which the concepts a thinker has absorbed stop behaving as passive mental pictures and begin to move, combine, and unfold through their own inner activity. Rudolf Steiner named it in his Dornach philosophy lecture of 4 April 1921, published in The Stimulating Effect of Anthroposophy on the Individual Sciences (GA 76). His case study was the jurist Ludwig Haller, whose 1888 book All in All records concepts coming alive in his mind, and whose critic Eduard von Hartmann grew queasy at the thought of concepts dancing like goblins within him. For Steiner the self-life appears because thinking, once perceived within things by the Greeks, has emptied itself into pure image for the sake of human freedom. The spiritual researcher masters this awakened life through inner practice, with the sureness a mathematician brings to the transition between concepts, a discipline continued in the meditative training of the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum.
At a certain threshold of inner training, thinking stops behaving like a picture book. The independent life of concepts is Rudolf Steiner's name for what happens next: the concepts absorbed through study begin to stir, connect, and unfold on their own, the way food carries on its own life in digestion. One philosopher, Ludwig Haller, described it; another, Eduard von Hartmann, refused it; the spiritual researcher learns to steer it.
In Steiner's Own Words
If we want to explore this interesting phenomenon from a psychological perspective, we cannot do other than say the following: Ludwig Haller puts all his energy into the particular nature of contemporary philosophical thinking. But his inner human experience actually wants something different; he cannot come to this other because in the 1880s there was not even a trace of a truly modern spiritual science. What could fill this human inner life with real spiritual science is lacking. But I would like to say that he lives in it in a strangely instinctive, unconscious way. He is unaware of this, but he notices from this strange phenomenon that the world of concepts comes to life for him and leads an independent life.
What it Means Today
In 1976 the biologist Richard Dawkins closed The Selfish Gene with a chapter that gave secular culture its own version of Haller's goblins. He named the meme: a unit of culture, a tune, an idea, a catch-phrase, that propagates from mind to mind and evolves in its own interest rather than ours. Daniel Dennett built the case out in Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995), and Susan Blackmore pressed it to its limit in The Meme Machine (1999), arguing that the self who seems to choose its thoughts is itself a structure the memes have built. Memetics, in other words, arrived by natural-scientific reasoning at the observation Steiner set before his Dornach audience in 1921: concepts are not inert property, they have a life of their own.
The two schools part company at the decisive point. For memetics the independent life of ideas is masterless; the human being is host, not rider. For Steiner the self-life of concepts is the beginning of a training: the researcher learns to move within it as deliberately as a mathematician moves from one concept to the next, and what the concepts then carry is reality, not infection. Thalira synthesis: memetics discovered that concepts live and then abolished the thinker who could ride them, while Steiner's path keeps both, treating the goblin-dance as the untrained first form of a faculty that inner discipline turns into exact spiritual research.
Where to Read More
- The Stimulating Effect of Anthroposophy on the Individual Sciences, GA 76
- The Philosophy of Freedom, GA 4
- Find The Riddles of Philosophy at SteinerBooks
- Life Path Number 1: The Leader, the Pioneer, the Independent Spirit
- Magenta Aura Meaning: Creativity, Independence, and Nonconformity
- The Chaldean Oracles: Ancient Theurgy and the Fire of the Gods