The Spirit of Science in Anthroposophy

What it Means Today

Steiner's two wings are still flying, and modern philosophy of science has named the strain in each one separately, without noticing they belong to a single bird. In February 1960 the Hungarian-American physicist Eugene Wigner, who would take the Nobel Prize in Physics three years later, published “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” in Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics. His puzzle is Steiner's first wing exactly: mathematics is spun out of the mathematician with no help from the senses, and yet it fits the outer world with an accuracy Wigner called a gift we neither understand nor deserve. Thirty-five years later David Chalmers named the trouble in the second wing. His 1995 paper “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness” in the Journal of Consciousness Studies separated the easy problems of behaviour and report from the hard problem: why outer description should ever yield inner experience. Observation, pressed to its limit, halts before the observer.

Thalira synthesis: these are not two puzzles but one puzzle read off the left wing and the right, and Steiner located the joint in 1920. Mathematics is unreasonably effective because it is the last surviving fragment of a cognition that once read the world from inside; consciousness is hard because the observing wing was never built to land on the being who observes.