The Law of Inertia as Expelled Experience in Anthroposophy

Glossary✦ Anthroposophy✦ 4 min read
The Law of Inertia as Expelled Experience n.

Steiner's reading of Galileo's law of inertia as an inner experience of uniform persistence, externalised by physics and divorced from man.

The Law of Inertia as Expelled Experience in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's reading of Galileo's law of inertia (German Trägheit, literally laziness) as a concept first drawn from an inner human experience of uniform persistence, then externalised and divorced from man. In The Origins of Natural Science (GA 326, lectures of January 1923), Steiner argues that before the fifteenth century a person understood a falling stone by comparing its motion with the speed he would need to run alongside it. Galileo broke this link: he measured the distance a body falls each second without any inward reference, so the physical was wholly removed from man. The law of inertia is therefore the model case of how modern physics emptied nature of inwardness, projecting a once-felt inner constancy outward as an abstract mechanical principle, a self-experience named and then forgotten.

The Law of Inertia as Expelled Experience names the way Galileo's principle of uniform motion began, in Steiner's account, as a feeling of staying inwardly the same, and was then ejected into outer space as a measurable law. The German word for inertia, Trägheit, means laziness, a state a person can sense from within. Physics kept the name and lost the inner origin.

In Steiner's Own Words

Another example is the law of inertia, it is generally called. The very name reveals its origin within man. (There is a play on words here. The German term for inertia, Trägheit, really means laziness.) Inertia is something that can be inwardly felt but what has become of the law of inertia in physics under the influence of "Galileoism?" the physicist says: A body, or rather a point, on which no external influence is exercises, which is left to itself, moves through space with uniform velocity. This means that throughout all time-spans it travels the same distance in each second.

Rudolf Steiner, The Origins of Natural Science (GA 326, 2 January 1923)

What it Means Today

Steiner's claim that physics ejected a felt inner constancy into outer space found its most rigorous twentieth-century development in Owen Barfield, a member of the Anthroposophical Society and a close friend of C. S. Lewis. In Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (Faber, 1957), Barfield traces a long shift in human consciousness from what he calls "original participation," in which a person experienced natural phenomena as continuous with inner life, to a non-participated relation in which the world appears as ready-made, mind-independent objects. Barfield names the modern habit of treating these objects as self-standing things "idolatry." The law of inertia is a textbook case of his thesis: a uniform persistence once sensed from within, then read off a falling stone as a property out there.

The same correction is practised at the Goetheanum's School of Spiritual Science, where Goethean phenomenology asks the observer to dwell in the movement of a phenomenon rather than only measure it, recovering the inward reference Galileo set aside. Thalira synthesis: what Steiner called the expulsion of experience, Barfield called idolatry, and both ask the same question of any physical law, namely which forgotten human sensation it was first abstracted from.

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