Steiner's name for the lifeless image of nature that exact science produces after cognition has drawn the life out of what it observes.
The Spectre of Nature in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's verdict on the picture of nature produced by exact science, a ghost rather than a world. He set it out in the seventh lecture of Anthroposophy has Something to Add to Modern Sciences (GA 73), given in Zurich on 15 October 1918, where the German word is Naturgespenst, the nature-ghost. The argument runs in two steps. In living observation we stand inside nature with eyes, ears, and thinking at once. The moment research begins we cannot carry that life across with us, so we keep only what our sense-bound bodily organization can digest, and nature grows poorer in our hands. The old nature spirits imagined by the ancients and the modern concept of nature are therefore equally spectral, one thought up, the other drained out. The laboratory, where natural law and experiment replace living observation, is where the draining becomes deliberate method. Steiner's repair is Goethe's practice of archetypal phenomena.
The spectre of nature names the moment when knowing turns its object into a corpse. Steiner grants natural science its rigour and its triumphs, then asks what price the method exacts. Because we can carry only the sense-digestible remainder into our concepts, the nature we explain is never the nature we met. What we hold afterwards is an image with the life drawn out.
In Steiner's Own Words
If we meet the world of nature with eyes and ears, as whole human beings, which also includes the thinking mind, and do not only think in natural laws or do experiments in laboratories; if we observe nature as it presents, and think through the observations we make, then we live with nature. And when we begin to investigate nature, we cannot take the life from nature with us. Being unable to take the life from nature with us because as living beings at one with nature we are only in immediate living experience in our observation, we really make nature poorer when we try to grasp it with natural science, sucking it in, as it were. And when we want to gain real natural scientific insight, we make nature into a spectre in doing so.
What it Means Today
Sixty-two years after that Zurich evening, the historian Carolyn Merchant published The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (Harper and Row, 1980), written from the University of California, Berkeley. Merchant traced how the organic cosmos of the sixteenth century, nature as a living and nurturing mother, was replaced across the seventeenth by a machine assembled from inert parts, and she read Francis Bacon's language of constraint, of nature bound into service and put to the question, as the working charter of the experimental method. Her case is historical rather than mystical: the mechanistic picture had a date and an author list, and it licensed a way of handling whatever it pictured.
Steiner reached the same building by a different stair. Merchant asks who gained from a dead cosmos; Steiner asks what happens inside the act of knowing that leaves the cosmos dead on arrival. Thalira synthesis: these are one diagnosis read from opposite ends, Merchant from the social history of method and Steiner from the phenomenology of cognition, and both point at the same repair, which is to bring the whole human being, senses and thinking together, back to the phenomenon before abstraction starts. Anyone who has watched a river swell in April and then met that same river written as discharge in cubic metres per second knows the gap without argument. The number is accurate. It is also a ghost.
Where to Read More
- Anthroposophy has Something to Add to Modern Sciences, GA 73
- Find GA 73 at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]