The Third Culture

John Barnes, author and moving force behind Adonis Press, writes: 'There is no greater satisfaction for the forces of the human soul than to participate in, to discover, the creative principles at work in nature. For they are of the same origin.' This succinctly tells the story of the Goethean approach to science and explains the book's subtitle: Participatory Science as the basis for a Healing Culture. Put another way 'Nature's laws manifest in the external physical world; but they reveal themselves to us only through our own inner capacities and individual efforts.' (Original italics). [As an aside, I wonder whether the Eureka moment of 'revelation' is always conscious. Are we not often drawn to certain teachers, paradigms, philosophies or spiritual traditions because of inner 'soul' stirrings because of a sense of knowing that we may not be able to articulate?] My 'Eureka moment,' which later served as a doorway to Goethean Science and Anthroposophy, came from reading a biology text – Man and Mammals, by Wolfgang Schad. Crudely I thought 'why don't they teach biology this way?'— which I now know they do in Waldorf Schools. More subtly, on reflection, this revelatory text awakened my inner capacities to 'know' that Schad had revealed laws of nature as yet unknown (un-revealed) to most biologists. So Goethean thinking, developed by Rudolf Steiner into Anthroposophical thinking is a fine example of The Third Culture which seeks to integrate what C. P. Snow famously, in 1956, called The Two Cultures, a mindset which has artificially divided the western world into objective science and subjective art. Historically, whether we look at Plato's distinction between the ideal world of thought and the 'ephemeral word of the senses' or Francis Bacon's claim that 'religion belongs to a realm apart form the purely objective world of scientific facts' it is not hard to see how Dualism has ruled western intellectual thought. Iain McGilchrist's masterful exposition on the brain's division into holistic right (master) and objectifying left (emissary) lobes highlights the psychological underpinning of historical cultural dichotomies.

Although Barnes' little book contains much which anthroposophically-inclined readers will find familiar, he enlists valuable input from other sources including former Czech Republic president Vaclav Havel who saw communism as a product of reductionist objective thinking that ultimately 'was not defeated by military force but by life, by the human spirit, by conscience, by the resistance of Being and of man to manipulation.' Havel also noted our dilemma as we try to find 'an objective way out of the crisis of objectivism.' Barnes also devotes much attention to Michael Polanyi and his concerns about the fallacy of objectivism, which can never be 'fully independent of our human experience.' Echoing previous statements Polanyi understood that 'Reality… is not something objectively given. It is only through our imaginative and intuitive vision that we begin to grasp it.' Put another way 'personal knowledge' involves 'two levels of awareness: the lower one for the clues or parts' given though sense perception… 'and the higher one' apprehended through our own cognitive activity. These different levels of cognitive function resonate with different levels of organisation in nature. Thus the inorganic and organic worlds, the latter displaying morphogenetic fields, are fundamentally different, and 'biotic achievements cannot – logically cannot – be ever represented in terms of physics and chemistry.' With a living entity 'we integrate mentally what living beings integrate practically … by dwelling in its motions in our efforts to understand their meaning.' (Original italics). [These ideas converge various hierarchical schemes of organisation proposed by Ervin Laszlo and Ken Wilber. For example, the Physiosphere, Biosphere and Noosphere have increasing 'depth' and complexity and decreasing 'span' as well as being subject to different organising principles.] One of the best examples of the participatory process comes from the study of plant metamorphosis, pioneered by Goethe. Looking at the sequence of leaves on a plant we integrate mentally (the individual leaf morphology relationships) doing what the plant does practically, and so see the 'formative movements' (the metamorphosis of one form into another) which are not given directly to the senses. Schiller famously challenged Goethe with the abstract notion that 'This is not an observation from experience, it is an idea.' To which Goethe, frustrated at Schiller's lack of true understanding, replied 'Then I may rejoice that I have ideas without knowing it and can even see them with my own eyes.' As Arthur Zajonc says 'The light of the mind must flow into and marry with the light of nature to bring forth a world.' Steiner goes so far as to say that 'The outer world is, in the end, only a physiognomy of a spiritual world.' When Goethe's friend Jacobi said that 'Nature conceals God!' Goethe replied 'But not from everyone!' According to Barnes and many in the anthroposophical community 'in the broad context of the evolution of human consciousness Goethe takes his place as a pioneer of a scientific method that leads from the empirical observation of nature to a new grasp of the spiritual principles that work within it.' [Again this is not an abstraction]. For most of us it is probably impossible to understand Goethean Science in any depth without some help from Steiner who called Goethe 'the Galileo of the organic world.' Steiner understood that Goethe's idealism dealt not with some 'dreamed up [abstract] oneness of all things' but with the 'concrete idea-content of reality' – a 'transformed cognitive capacity capable of participating in the forces at work in organic nature.' According to Steiner these concrete capacities, include imagination (related to thinking), inspiration (related to feeling) and intuition (related to willing). As these capacities are realised through proper nurturing the human (soul) may experience a new birth or metamorphosis: but if development deviates from the natural organic formative stream these growth potentialities are not realised. Steiner agreed with Goethe that in the past art, science and religion (beauty, truth and goodness) had been united through a dreamlike perception of the divine in all things, but that their separation had become necessary for the evolution of human consciousness. But 'Humanity has now reached the age when these three streams want to come together again. Further separation would deprive the human soul of its health.' This dynamic (of expansion and contraction) is seen in Barfield's cycle of participation, separation and final participation, and again owes much to Steiner's influence. So 'just as modern materialistic science developed during the Renaissance to satisfy the inner inclinations and realise the inner potential of western humanity, thus participatory science is arising today in response to the needs awakened by a further evolution of human consciousness.' Barnes is effective in using anthroposophical language to delineate trends which often make good historical sense even without drawing on this spiritual science tradition. But we must give credit where it is due. Our struggles to overcome the 'crisis of objectivism' would be much tougher without these insights. As McGilchrist has stressed, abstraction, materialism and objectivism are still entrenched and it is only in recognising the true potential of our participatory consciousness that we can effect a healing and bring about third culture appropriate to the third millennium.