KNOWLEDGE OF THE SPIRIT

            Since the beginning of the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century in the West, three main assumptions about what we can know and how we know have dominated modern thinking and consciousness.  These assumptions have had momentous consequences for all of modern life.  The first assumption is what can be called the quantitative-mechanistic assumption about the ultimate nature of reality.  It received its modern stamp very early in the scientific revolution in the distinction that was made at that time between what were designated as “primary qualities” and “secondary qualities.”  The primary qualities included such phenomena as extension in space, mass, weight, motion, number, and so forth.  In other words, the realm of the primary qualities was essentially that of the quantitative.  The primary qualities, it was thought, could be known with clarity and certainty through empirical description and mathematics.  The secondary qualities at first included such phenomena as color, taste, and sound, but eventually were extended to include also other such qualitative domains as value, meaning, and purpose.   In this view, knowledge as such was thought to apply only to the primary qualities, the quantitative.  While the secondary qualities might well be realities of experience, they could not, strictly speaking, be known because they depended on the observer.  In short, the perception of secondary qualities was considered to be tainted by subjective feelings, habits, predispositions, and so forth, and, consequently, could provide no proper material for precise, objective knowledge as such.

           
Accompanying this quantitative-mechanistic assumption were two further assumptions about what and how we can know.  The first of these has been described as the “objectivistic assumption,” which posits a fundamental separation between the knower and the object to be known.  This assumption holds that if we want to know something properly, we must detach ourselves from it as completely as possible and describe it from the perspective of a mere, uninvolved onlooker.  Appropriately, this assumption is also sometimes referred to as the assumption of the “onlooker consciousness.”   It was thought important not to intrude personal qualities involving feelings and values into the knowing relationship; to do so would distort and skew the pure knowledge of reality as objective and independent of the knower.  The other assumption that accompanied this one has been called the “sensationist” or “sense-bound” assumption about knowable reality.  This assumption, most forcefully expressed by the eighteenth century philosopher John Locke, holds that we can only know that which is given through our ordinary physical sense experience, and through abstractions from sense experience.  This assumption about knowing further ensured the limitation of knowledge to the purely quantitative and mechanical.

           
At first the assumptions of this mechanistic view were applied mainly to nature.  Nature, according to Descartes and Newton, was regarded as ultimately quantitative—without qualities and without consciousness.   It was to be understood entirely in terms of physical cause and effect, that is, mechanistically.  Nature was regarded as essentially “a law-bound system of matter in motion.”  Gradually, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this view was extended by many to the human realm and to the whole of society and culture.  From this point of view, human beings themselves came also to be understood as essentially matter in motion.  In this light, all human culture having to do with qualities and the non-material, such as meaning, values, purposes, ideals, and selves, came increasingly to be regarded as merely the surface manifestations—epiphenomena—of matter in motion.

           
The assumptions of the mechanical worldview have proved dramatically effective in dealing with the quantitative and mechanistic dimensions of the world.   The power and achievements of modern technology in every area—in communication, travel, medicine, construction, computation, and so on—would have been impossible without the development over the past four centuries of ever-enhanced ways of knowing and dealing with the quantitative and mechanical dimensions of the world.  Mechanistic assumptions are useful abstractions from the whole that are extremely effective precisely for understanding and working with the quantitative and the mechanical.  When, however, these assumptions are extended to explain everything beyond the purely quantitative and mechanical, they become exceedingly destructive.  Our experience of the life, the beauty, and the meaning in nature comes to be regarded as merely the complicated combinations of dead, passive, and valueless matter in motion. By definition—or really by fiat—the whole realm of the spirit is eliminated.

           
A fundamental transformation of our knowing would mean developing capacities for knowledge of the spirit, as well as of the material.  In the most general sense, spirit refers to everything that is not matter, to all that is immaterial, to all that is non-sensory.   What are these non-sensory realities, these realities of spirit?  We have already mentioned them.  They include meaning of every kind, including our ordinary ideas; values and ideals—the guiding ideas for achieving meaning; ultimate purposes and goals—formal and final ends; and qualities.  Qualities include color, sound, and scent that are entwined with sense experience but whose full reality transcends the sensibly given— ask any artist if this isn’t true.  But qualities also include all that we experience as meaning, value, purpose, truth, beauty, goodness, freedom, love, and selves.  Knowledge of the spirit can, therefore, also be described as knowledge of qualities in their fullest.

To develop capacities for non-sensory, qualitative knowledge—knowledge of spirit—would have far-reaching consequences for the whole of life, both individually and socially.  The articles in this issue explore some of the important implications of such a transformation of knowledge.  A fundamental transformation of our knowing capacities must perforce involve a fundamental transformation of ourselves:  of our feelings, our conceptual abilities, our powers of attention and concentration, our attitudes, and values.  Knowing in its fullness involves the whole human being.  A transformation of our dominant modern ways of knowing such as to include knowledge of both the material and the spiritual, and their intimate interconnection, would also be a transformation of ourselves and of our world.

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We began by considering three central assumptions of modern consciousness, the first being the quantitative, mechanistic nature of all reality; the second is the sense-bound nature of all that we can know, namely, that we can only know that which is given through physical sense perception or abstractions from sense perception; the third is the objectivistic assumption that in knowing we must stand back as onlookers completely detached from the object of our observation and knowledge.  It is important to bear in mind that these assumptions have become deeply ingrained in modern consciousness.  To the extent that we embody modern consciousness, we all share in these assumptions to a greater or lesser degree.  It is important to be aware that they often reassert themselves in our thinking even when we least expect it, even when we are engaged in trying to overcome them.

In what follows, we will ask, first, what have been the main criticisms historically of these assumptions of modern consciousness; second, in light of these criticisms, do these assumptions still hold, and to what effect; and third, what have been the main consequences of these assumptions for the human being and for the world.

Before looking at the criticisms as such, it may be worthwhile, first, to consider briefly the main attempt to accept and come to terms with the mechanical worldview, an attempt which has sought, at the same time, to maintain a firm place for human values.  This response can be described as the “two-realm theory of truth.”  It is most clearly represented in the long familiar distinction made between the truths of natural science and the truths of the humanities.  This twofold approach to truth has a long history in western civilization.  It was given its peculiarly modern cast very early in the scientific revolution by the distinction that, as we have seen, was made between the primary and the secondary qualities.  During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this two-realm theory of truth was further refined. It became institutionalized in the modern university, and remains so today, where it exerts its influence throughout the whole of modern education and culture. Science deals with nature, which, of course, is taken to include the human body. The humanities, as the name suggests, have as their purview, the strictly human realm of meaning, values, purpose, and qualities.  In this division, only the “truths of science,” dealing, through empirical observation and mathematics, with nature conceived as matter in motion, are viewed as objective knowledge.  The “truths of the humanities,” dealing as they do with the realm of secondary qualities, are limited to the subjective realms of faith, tradition, feeling (aesthetic, religious, and cultural), social custom, social action, and so forth.

This division between science and the humanities (in the German university: the Naturwissenschaften—the natural sciences and the Geisteswissenschaften—in English the humanities; in German, literally the spiritual sciences) has had a tremendous influence in shaping the society and culture of the West.  In the face of a thoroughgoing mechanistic science, this affirmation of the humanities alongside the natural sciences has helped keep alive essential human qualities and concerns.  Though merely subjective, and in that respect generally regarded by the dominant paradigm as inferior to scientific knowledge, the humanities have been a major source for the creative pursuit of human meaning and values.  At their best, the humanities have helped cultivate a humanely critical spirit that has often stood as a bulwark against doctrinaire, and even political, infringements upon human freedom and human rights.  The affirmation of the two-realm theory of truth has been the main response of modern religious thinkers who have been eager to reconcile their faith commitments with the materialism of modern science. It seems also to have been the main response of those scientists who are serious about both their scientific profession and their personal faith and ethical concerns.  It would be difficult to overestimate the influence for good this two-realm theory of truth has had for modern, western society and culture.  Nevertheless, the theory has some extremely serious problems, including several that have become increasingly acute. 

A major problem, often not recognized, is that the science/humanities division expresses, and institutionalizes, from the start, a deep alienation of the human being from nature.  Nature, handed over to science, is seen as dead matter in motion.  Completely separated from this nature, and standing over against it, are the humanities—the strictly human concerns of meaning, purpose, value, and qualities.  This division at the heart of our education system has helped produce a profoundly split consciousness in western civilization.

A second problem is that, while in theory the relationship between the two sides is supposed to be symmetrical and balanced, in practice it turns out to be quite unequal.  In this division, as in racial segregation, separate has not been equal. The quantitative side is nearly always regarded as the more important. This becomes especially clear in education, for instance, when in times of financial exigency the first subjects to be eliminated in budget cutting are the arts and literature, not chemistry, physics, or computer science.  In the university, the subjects dealing with the qualitative—literature, philosophy, education, religion, the arts—are constantly on the defensive, often tempted to show themselves more quantifiable and empiricist to prove that they stand on an equal footing in the curriculum with the natural sciences.

Finally, the most serious problem is the tendency for the mechanistic side to constantly encroach upon the humanities, such that all semblance of a symmetrical, equal relationship disappears.  The claim is increasingly made that human beings and all that makes them uniquely human—meaning, values, ideals, love, their selfhood—can be understood like everything else in terms of matter in motion.  The mechanistic view not only attempts to explain nature, but also to explain away the human.  This tendency has become especially strong in contemporary western culture, with profoundly negative consequences, as explored below.

A growing recognition that the science/humanities two-truth dichotomy has serious problems, at least the three just mentioned, has led to challenges to the mechanistic worldview. Each of the three central assumptions of modern consciousness that we have looked at has been subjected, especially during the past century, to a number of penetrating critiques.  We must ask to what extent, if any, these criticisms have dislodged the dominance of the mechanistic view and its claim to be the only source of genuine knowledge.

The assumption of the objectivistic, onlooker view of knowing has been, perhaps, the most thoroughly criticized of the three.  The most important criticism has come from quantum physics, a central principle of which states that in the process of knowing the observer actively participates in and actually alters the state of what is being observed.  This almost total abandonment of the old, detached onlooker stance in knowing by modern physics is especially telling since it was within physics that the ideal of the detached onlooker was originally, and quite dogmatically, advanced.  The assumption of the detached onlooker has also been challenged by participatory conceptions of knowing coming from several other directions.  Ecological studies and women’s studies, for example, both stress that the deepest knowledge, whether of nature or of human beings, requires an interactive, participatory relationship between the knower and the known. 

The mechanistic assumption itself has been challenged, again, by modern physics.  The renowned theoretical physicist, David Bohm, is often quoted as having said, “It is now clear that no mechanical explanation [of the physical universe] is now available.”  Process philosophers have also challenged the mechanistic view by arguing that the most adequate metaphor for understanding nature is not the machine, but the living organism.

Finally, the assumption that all genuine knowledge is sense-bound has been called into question from several sides.  Perhaps the most important challenge to the sense-bound (or sensationist) assumption has come from philosophers who point out that we must presuppose a certain intuitive apprehension of non-sensory realities even for the possibility of ordinary sense-bound knowing.  The Whiteheadean philosopher and theologian David Ray Griffin has argued, for example, that the assumption that we can have no intuition and perception of nonsensory realities (such as ideas, moral norms, meaning, cognitive rules of logic) “makes impossible any empirical grounding for many ideas that are inevitably presupposed in all our practice, including our practice of science.”[i]  Every creative insight, whether in science or in other areas, involves, in the act of knowing, a grasp of new, nonsensory, qualitative realities.  From this perspective, a major task confronting us today is to strengthen and further develop our capacities for new insight such that we can come to know the realm of qualities with the rigor, constancy, and penetration necessary for the full transformation of knowing that our times require.

These challenges to the assumptions of the modern mindset are important.  They point to new possibilities.  Anthroposophists need to be aware of such criticisms and be willing to cooperate with those, mostly non-anthroposophists, who are in the forefront of developing them. At the same time, however, we must ask, “How effective have the criticisms been up to this point?  What is needed to bring the positive potential for knowledge of the spiritual, the qualitative, to full fruition?”  In spite of the criticisms leveled at the mechanical philosophy from a number of quarters, it remains the dominant view not only of modern science but also of practitioners of other disciplines who have not established an objective, or spiritual-empirical, epistemology for their disciplines.  In spite of the fact, for example, that modern physics, as we have seen, contains certain fundamental challenges to non-participatory ways of knowing and to an exclusively mechanistic interpretation of reality, modern physics still remains purely quantitative.  The quantities involved are essentially number, force, and motion, and, though these are dealt with in highly rarified, formal ways, they are, nevertheless, thoroughly quantitative.  The physicists themselves are under no illusions that theirs is other than a quantitative enterprise, and as a matter of course they still often describe their field not as quantum physics, but as quantum mechanics.  Moreover, most physicists have limited themselves to a purely instrumentalist approach that does not even ask about the larger implications of their subject.  Instead, they still see it as their task to develop mathematical formulae that enable them to predict the outcome of further experiments and observations.  These aspects of modern physics have yet to be taken into account by those who are quick to draw conclusions about a presumptive new spirituality contained in quantum physics. 

Another major field of scientific research today, that of cognitive science (brain research), is exceedingly mechanistic and reductionistic.  Mind is identified entirely with brain, and the whole of the human being is reduced to the functioning of the neurons in the brain and nervous system.  All of this is interpreted strictly mechanistically.  The late Francis Crick, the biologist who turned to cognitive science after his work on DNA, has described the fundamental view of modern cognitive science this way:

You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules—you’re nothing but a pack of neurons.[ii]

Lest one suppose that this is the view of only one individual, consider this statement in which Crick was joined by the biologists Richard Dawkins and E.O. Wilson and the humanists Isaiah Berlin, W.V. Quine, and Kurt Vonnegut.  In this statement, which they issued as a justification for unfettered scientific leeway to proceed with the cloning of higher mammals and human beings, they say:

Humanity’s rich repertoire of thoughts, feelings, aspirations, and hopes seems to arise from electrochemical brain processes, not from an immaterial soul that operates in ways no instrument can discover.[iii] 

The mechanistic reduction of the human being here is complete (and, of course, it goes completely unchallenged by the simplistic conception of soul that is proposed as an alternative). When scientists write in this way, it would seem necessary to conclude that they are making exceptions for themselves.  If not, why would they expect us to pay any more attention to their electrochemical brain processes rather than our own? The fact that this apparently has not occurred to them, or that it has not led them to modify their worldview, indicates how deeply ingrained the mechanistic view is in the modern scientific mind.

Finally, in Neo-Darwinism, the dominant contemporary theory of evolution, the mechanistic assumptions reign supreme.  In fact, neo-Darwinism as the sole and exclusive explanation of all evolution means the extension of the materialistic, mechanistic assumptions to the whole of life. The fundamental principle of neo-Darwinian theory holds that all of life must be regarded as a law-bound system of matter in motion (in which the “laws of chance” are central).   In the past decade neo-Darwinism has received new impetus and standing within the university as the ideological rationale for unrestrained genetic engineering.  As the distinguished geneticist and biochemist Mae Wan Ho has pointed out in her critique of genetic engineering, neo-Darwinism (as its champions themselves never tire of intoning) regards the whole of creation as a random product, a vast accident.  It is what it is by chance; it could just as easily have been something else. 

Since all is random, no reason exists why genes cannot be transferred from species to species—indeed, from kingdom to kingdom—at will, with patents taken out on the results, payable to the universities and their associated pharmaceutical and agribusiness partners.  Materialist assumptions about knowable reality, financial profit, institutional structures, greed, and a furious assault on nature all coalesce as a unity.  One of the tragedies of the current battle between neo-Darwinists and biblical creationists (both fundamentalist in their own ways) is that the reputable biologists who accept evolution, but not an exclusively Darwinian interpretation of it, are attacked by both sides and eliminated from the discussion. 

Despite cogent criticisms brought against it, the mechanistic worldview remains strong and well-entrenched. When it has been applied to the undeniable mechanical aspects of the world, the results have been impressive and often very important.  Nothing in what is written here should be taken to suggest that the quantitative and mechanical are unimportant or, in themselves, harmful, and should be rejected.  They are abstractions useful for specific purposes.  For their full and beneficent effect the mechanical and quantitative require a purposive and qualitative context that they cannot provide for themselves.  Without such a context for guidance, the mechanistic view tends to provide its own mistaken context and the dominant explanatory principle for all existence, with disastrous consequences.

The harmful consequences of mechanistic assumptions have been building in scope and intensity for the past three centuries.  Now they threaten the future not only of human society and culture, but also of life itself on earth.  It is crucial that human beings become aware of these consequences and of what is at stake.  In doing so, we are confronted by a very bleak situation.  It is easy to look away; it is tempting, and almost irresistible, to fall into a kind of unconscious (albeit uneasy and niggling) complacency, as though the “okay world” will continue.

It is a temptation, however, which must be resisted.  The philosopher and spiritual scientist, Rudolf Steiner, has said: “We need to be awake and alive for the sake of humanity.”[iv]  He said this at the height of World War I, warning at the time that unless people did wake up and strive to understand the nature of what was happening, further catastrophes would follow.  In light of the disasters that have befallen humanity since, his warning remains as significant as when he issued it.  Now we stand at a point where the demand to awaken is more urgent than ever.  It would be a daunting task to have to demonstrate that our situation today is any less perilous than in Rudolf Steiner’s time.

3i. Fundamentalism for All

            During the past half-century, religious fundamentalism, once largely underground in sectarian withdrawal, has emerged with a vengeance, and has been spreading worldwide.  It would be a mistake, however, to see fundamentalism as only a religious phenomenon.  To be sure, no religion has been immune.  Every religion currently has its fundamentalist wings—Judaism, Christianity, Islam, but also Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and others, much to the surprise of many Westerners who have supposed Asian religions to be more gentle and tolerant than the admittedly aggressive Abrahamic religions.  Beyond the religious fundamentalism, political, economic, and scientific fundamentalisms are also rampant.  It appears that no group, association, or movement is immune to the fundamentalist temptation.  How are we to understand this?  What is the essence of fundamentalism as a social-cultural phenomenon?  In what way is it connected with the dominant, mechanistic assumptions of the modern mindset?

Modern ways of knowing, limited as they are to the mechanistic and sense world, cannot deal with the nonsensory dimensions of human experience—meaning, values, and qualities—except to explain them away as surface epiphenomena of an underlying quantitative substratum.  These non-sensory-spiritual realities, however, are the essence of human life, and they do not go away.  They keep coming back, reasserting themselves. In the dominant modern view of knowledge, however, they cannot be known in any proper sense of the word; they can only be asserted arbitrarily and dogmatically, that is, fundamentalistically. The dominant modern, mechanistic assumptions make impossible a knowing of nonsensory realities that transcends social and cultural boundaries.  Such a knowing could, in principle, be shared by all persons and so serve as a common foundation for cooperation and resolution of conflict.  Without such a knowledge basis, however, religious, ethical, and aesthetic judgments are all rendered dogmatic and irrational.  This holds equally for political, economic, and scientific, as well as for religious, assertions of ultimate ends and values.  In short, fundamentalism is pervasive as a characteristic tendency of modern consciousness.

From this point of view, we can better understand one of the glaring ironies of religious fundamentalism, namely that it is largely a reaction against the corrosive acids of modernity and at the same time a prime expression of modernity.  On the one hand, some fundamentalists have seen clearly that a mechanistic worldview is destructive of crucial human values and experience, and have felt keenly the loss entailed: the dissolution and scattering of community, the undermining of identity, the loss of meaning. All this fundamentalism strives to combat.  On the other hand, fundamentalism can only wage this battle of resistance dogmatically and negatively because it has accepted the modern view that ultimate aims and values cannot be known.  They can only be accepted and asserted dogmatically as given variously by religious scripture, tradition, cultural custom, group feeling, and so forth.  The implementation of ultimate values, once given, can then be pursued by means of modern technology and technical reason.   Many commentators have remarked on the embrace by almost all forms of religious fundamentalism of modern technology and their near-genius use of it: from hardware, such as cell phones, computers, and military technology, to the latest business and organizational management techniques.  Thus we have the interesting picture of fundamentalists fighting the inroads of modernity and in the process often out-modernizing the modernists on their own ground. In that the reaction against modernity becomes a major carrier of it, fundamentalism is subtly preempted, and in fact corrupted, from within.

Non-religious fundamentalisms—political, scientific, economic—are, of course, not combating the modern, mechanistic mindset for they have embraced and are frequently major promoters of it.  In their own way, however, they are as fundamentalist as the religious fundamentalists whom they see as their archenemies. Unwittingly, their value assertions are just as arbitrary and irrational as those of the religious.  All in the modern world who would affirm and advance value commitments that have no grounding in qualitative, imaginative, spiritual knowing have to do so dogmatically, drawing upon the givens of tradition, ideological commitments, emotions, convention, or power interests. In this light, modern liberals and conservatives, each advancing against the other their contrasting value claims, often have more in common with one another than either would like to admit.

Because of its dominant sense-bound and mechanistic assumptions regarding the acceptable method and content of knowledge, the modern world in general has a quintessentially fundamentalist character.  The tragedy is that when values clash, as they inevitably do, the arbitrary assertion of ultimate values can only end in conflict. There is no underlying knowledge base in which a deeper unity can be sought.  Religious and value conflicts, now virtually universal in scope, have also become quintessentially modern.

The great twentieth-century mathematician and philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, once gave a description of the picture of nature presented by the mechanistic view of the universe: “Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly.”[vi]  Subscribing to this view of the universe, many prominent scientists today affirm that their own scientific research reveals to us an ultimately meaningless, pointless world.  The Harvard physicist, Steven Weinberg, has famously stated: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”[vii] The biologist William Provine has written: “Our modern understanding of evolution implies that ultimate meaning in life is nonexistent.”[viii]   The astronomer Sandra Faber has said, “the universe is completely pointless from a human perspective.”  And echoing the same thought, the Harvard astronomer Margaret Geller asks, “Why should the universe have a point?  What point?  It’s just a physical system, what point is there?”[ix]  Many more similar statements from the highest ranks of the scientific community could be added.  As one encounters these commanding nihilistic declarations, it is worth recalling Whitehead’s wry comment: “Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study.”[x]  But the irony here does not seem to shake the view of many leaders of the scientific community that ours is a meaningless world.  Perhaps it is to their credit that at least they do not shrink from drawing the nihilistic consequences of their materialistic, mechanistic view. 

These scientists are among the most influential of public figures.  Science is the dominant modern faith and these scientists are its high priests, cultural icons for the whole of modern society.  Their view of a totally meaningless, mechanistic world seeps into all aspects of modern society with profoundly negative effects.  This nihilism offers no resistance to all those forces that work to corrupt and coarsen everyday life.  It provides no support for affirming the realities of beauty, ethical ideals, and the responsible self.  Nor does it offer any resources for recognizing and struggling with the depths of human existence—the human potential for good and evil, the mysteries of biography, the creativity of human imagination, the value of shared community and sacrifice for the other.  About the only values—ideals, if they may be called that—supported by this nihilism are survival and self-aggrandizement in the struggle for survival. 

In this view, the machine is regarded as clearly superior to the fallible, slow and limited, mortal human being.   Increasingly we are inundated by proposals to “improve” the human being through genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and the creation of human-cybernetic machine hybrids.  “Improve” in this context means to radically modify human nature.  The hope is that the human being will no longer be subject to disease, death, and stupidity.   There has even been the founding of a “World Transhumanist Association.” Some scientists are eager to create a “transhuman,” “posthuman,” and “metahuman” state.  While it remains doubtful whether this technological transcendence of the human being as envisaged can be achieved, this kind of thinking undercuts and trivializes all recognition of the depths of human life in all its misery, grandeur, and potential.  And it offers no resistance at all to what Owen Barfield has called the possible creation of a “fantastically hideous world.”[xi]

Probably the most pressing consequence today of the mechanistic philosophy and its accompanying nihilism is that it offers no support for the protection and care of the earth.  The emphasis on the machine parts and the absence of any sense of living wholeness simply provide permission for the relentless dismantling of nature. Erwin Chargaff, a noted biochemist and one of the few leading scientific critics of the modern scientistic faith, has written:

The over-fragmentation of the vision of nature . . . has created a Humpty-Dumpty world that must become increasingly unmanageable as more and more pieces are broken off. The wonderful, inconceivably intricate tapestry is being pulled out, torn up, and analyzed; and at the end even the memory of the design is lost and can no longer be recalled.[xii] 

As several observers of the earth situation have commented, “Nature doesn’t exist anymore”—only bits and pieces, fragments, remain. 

In addition to having direct, disastrous consequences, the view of nature as nothing but matter in motion also supports the exploitation and misuse of the earth through an unrestrained economism—the constant drive for unlimited economic growth and consumerism.  The costs to the earth are now painfully apparent: The destruction of forests; the degrading of arable land; the pollution of lakes, rivers, and oceans; the depletion of fresh water sources; the mass extinction of living species; the world-wide collapse of fishing stocks—the list of destruction goes on alarmingly.   The “Living Planet Report” by the World Wildlife Fund has recently concluded: “People are plundering the world’s resources at a pace that outstrips the planet’s capacity to sustain life.”[xiii] 

A special responsibility for this state of affairs rests with the people of the United States, who make up only six percent of the world’s population and consume 30 to 40 percent of the world’s resources.   It is little comfort that India and China will soon share with America more and more of the responsibility for the pollution and destruction of the earth as the rate of their industrialization accelerates. The situation promises to worsen, and to do so very quickly.  “Resource wars” over diminishing agricultural land, energy resources, and especially over fresh water are already being fought (as witnessed in the Middle East and Africa), and planning for more such wars worldwide has long been in process.

To add to all of this, if global warming and climate change come to pass as predicted by most of the world’s experts, then all bets on the future are off. 

We might think that this plundering of the earth is mainly due to thoughtlessness, greed, and general human cupidity.  Certainly greed and thoughtlessness have always been with us, and in all ages have played major roles in the depredation of the earth.   But the problem in our time goes much deeper than that, so long as nature is regarded as basically a dead, meaningless machine, as only matter in motion.  Greed and thoughtlessness—and comfortable indifference—are all given a free hand as never before, within the doubly disastrous context of overpopulation and destructive technology.  As long as nature is regarded as having no qualities—no inner life, no meaning, no living wholeness—taking it apart for our own immediate pleasure and economic advantage is obviously that much easier to justify.

A vivid example, much overlooked, of how a mechanistic view of life, social and cultural attitudes and greed, habit and complacency, powerful technology, and hardness of heart all come together and intertwine, is the treatment of animals by modern, industrial agriculture.  Apart from the well-documented environmental degradation, communal decline, and spread of disease associated with the factory farming of animals—particularly pigs, cows, and poultry—the suffering of the animals themselves is almost never faced.  Yet, daily our culture inflicts cruelty and suffering on millions of animals of an intensity hitherto unknown.  The animals are defined as “units of production” and are treated accordingly as useful pieces of machinery without feelings.  A pall of suffering of living, feeling creatures hangs over our modern culture, and most of us are complicit in it, if only through willful ignorance of what is taking place.  The suffering of these animals is one of the moral disasters of our time—obviously a startling claim amid all the many other horrendous, daily cruelties, but a true one nonetheless.   The withholding of mercy to these fellow creatures bespeaks an appalling failure of imagination in thinking, a lack of empathy in feeling, and a weakness in moral willing.  If it be said that the suffering of animals pales in importance in comparison to the horrid suffering of millions of human beings today, then it may be well to remember the words of Mahatma Gandhi: “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”  This same lack of imagination, empathy, and moral determination stands as a barrier to the development of any powers of qualitative knowing.

A quantitative, mechanistic way of knowing can handle quantities and the machine aspects of the world with great efficacy, and, in its place, is very important.  But the qualities of nature in and around us are disappearing—the qualities of life, meaning, beauty, and wholeness, the very qualities that have no place in our dominant conception of how and what we can know.  What cannot be known was first thought to be secondary, then, unimportant, and, finally, non-existent.

In 1971, John Cobb, a leading American philosopher and theologian, wrote a book, acknowledged by many at the time to be a small classic on the state of the environment.  It was entitled, Is It Too Late?  Almost twenty years later, Cobb and a former World Bank economist collaborated on a book on global economics.  By that time, near the conclusion of their book they had to write:

Each passing year we see foreclosed happier possibilities for the future.  The recognition of possibilities gone forever inspires us with a sense of urgency.  Delay is costly to us and ever more to our descendants and to the other species with which we share the planet.  It is already very late.  It is hard to avoid bitterness about what might have been done and about the additional missed opportunities each day.  It is hard to avoid resentment toward those who continue so successfully to block the needed changes.

Yet there is hope.  On a hotter planet, with lost deltas and shrunken coastlines, under a more dangerous sun, with less arable land, fewer species of living things, a legacy of poisonous wastes, and much beauty irrevocably lost, there will still be the possibility that our children’s children will learn at last to live as a community among communities.  Perhaps they will learn also to forgive this generation its blind commitment to ever greater consumption.  Perhaps they will even appreciate its belated efforts to leave them a planet still capable of supporting life in community.[xiv]

But now, still nearly another fifteen years later, Cobb has recently written again:

Viewing nature as a machine has led human beings to treat it that way.  We are moving toward a crisis of global proportions, and our mechanistic vision deters us from taking the drastic steps needed to change direction.[xv]

We don’t know if there will be a global catastrophe; predicting the future is risky.  Most of the experts failed to foresee the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union or the end of apartheid in South Africa.  As one wag has commented, however: “Miracles are possible, but that’s not where you puts your money.”  It would be blind and irresponsible to ignore the many warnings of impending global disaster—the latest and thus far most compelling being Al Gore’s book and film, “An Inconvenient Truth.” If we do avoid the catastrophe (or, more likely, catastrophes), it will only be because human beings learned in time to know and attend to the qualities of the world.  If the catastrophes do come, and it may be sooner than later, it will be all the more important to have individuals and communities working together to develop and sustain through it all a living, knowledge-grasp of the qualities of life, meaning, beauty, and spirit—in ourselves and in the world.  The whole of Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual science, for one leading example, is devoted to that end, and in a way that aims to have fundamental and specific implications for science, society, and culture. As far as the future of the earth is concerned, any meditative practice or path of spiritual development that does not have as a main goal the transformation of knowledge in science, society, and culture can only be irrelevant.

Steiner spoke of a “justifiable pessimism” at one level if it helps us to wake up and be alert.  At a deeper level, however, as I noted earlier, he said we should be neither optimists nor pessimists, but do our work.  In a lecture at the end of World War I, he said:

You will preeminently keep the following before your souls: “I am, in any case, called to look at everything without illusion; I must be neither pessimistic nor optimistic, so that forces may awaken in my soul which give me the power to aid the free development of the human being, to contribute to human progress in the place and situation where I am.”  Even if the faults and tragedies of the age are very visible to spiritual science, this should not be an incitement to pessimism or optimism, but rather as a call to an inner awakening so that independent work and the cultivation of right thinking will result.  For above all things, adequate understanding is necessary.  If only a sufficient number of people today were motivated to say, “We absolutely must have a better understanding of things,” then everything else would follow.[xvi]

This is the beginning foundation for a healthy society and culture, and for the healing of an ailing earth.