Explain Steiner’s teachings about human psychology. What are the differences between threefold, fourfold, and sevenfold human nature? How does the evolutionary dimension enter in?
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EvolutionofConsciousness.pptThe Unconscious of Nature
- Most of us are familiar with Freud’s idea of a personal unconscious.
- I’d like to introduce an analogous but radical idea: that of a supra-personal unconscious.
- One might call this “the unconscious of nature.”
Statue of the Goddess Artemis, from Ephesus.
In our modern, Western, ‘disenchanted’ consciousness, this world remains hidden from us, but other historical epochs and cultures can teach us how to recover it.
The Evidence of Etymology
- “Language is fossil poetry.” – Emerson
- What did he mean?
- Some etymologies: ceiling, window, floor, easel, umbrella, somber, urchin, dandelion, salary, hippopotamus, trophy
- Even scientific terms: comet, satellite, planet, galaxy, algebra, muscle, tissue
idea, theory, emotion, desire
Idea
Theory,
object subject
Emotion
Desire
- Where do we draw the line between s & o?
- Where was it drawn originally???
The Unconscious of Nature
- What are the consequences?
- Macrocomic thinking, feeling and willing.
- This is not our personal T, F, and W.
- And it is not conscious – at least not a part of normal consciousness.
- Thus I choose to call it the unconscious of nature.
Julian Jaynes
See the extraordinary quote on the handout from
The Evolution of Consciousness
and the Breakdown of
the Bicameral Mind!
Just as Freud can be our guide through the underworld of the personal unconscious, the late and equally great thinker Owen Barfield (1898-1998) will be our Virgil here.
We will follow Barfield’s magisterial study Saving the Appearances,
in which he explicates
Rudolf Steiner’s profound and complex
theory of an
“evolution of consciousness.”
The evolution of consciousness
- Barfield argues (following Steiner), that humanity has undergone a fundamental, long-term evolution of consciousness.
- This evolution transcends any mere history of ideas.
- Their profound insight: it is not just the ideas inhabiting consciousness that change throughout history, but rather the very structure of consciousness itself!
The locus of the represented
Barfield argues that, as humanity evolved, the felt location of the represented – the seat of meaning – has shifted.
Today, we experience the represented as abstract ideas and images inside our heads. . .
But in earlier periods, the represented was experienced behind the phenomena, shining towards one. The represented felt alive, like a human inwardness, but macrocosmic in scale.
Original Participation
- Barfield calls this primordial consciousness “original participation.”
- Original participation is numinous and ‘enchanted’: phenomena are felt to be transparent to their own meanings.
“Numinous” recalls the visible ‘nod’ (Lat. nuo) whereby Zeus reveals his will. The back of the dollar bill claims that God “nodded assent to the beginnings” (“Annuit coeptis”) of our country.
- In the West, it largely dies out during the Renaissance; nature becomes ‘opaque’ – a material world to be subdued and exploited.
- Remnants of original participa-tion still survive elsewhere, e.g. in aboriginal cultures.
In The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin offers a breathtaking example of original participation. For the Australian aborigines, the represented is a vast, mythic opera of “dream songs” that sing the landscape into existence as they wander along its “dream tracks.”
Original Participation as
Enchantment
Enchantment
- The great German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) argued famously that modernity was the result of a “disenchantment of the world” [Entzauberung der Welt – lit. ‘removing of the world’s magic’].
- So how did ‘enchantment’ look and feel?
Enchantment
- The word ‘enchantment’ implies an experience of sympathies, deep connections, hidden meanings, divine order.
- We tend to think of ‘magic’ as illicit, selfish, corrupt. But ‘enchantment’ is a ‘white magic’ that feels like an immediate expression of divine wisdom.
- The enchanted world is under a magic spell, but that is its normal state. Indeed, to this older consciousness, ‘enchantment’ feels like natural law, a great intelligence pervading everything..
- This is an immense topic. We can only cast a cursory glance at two of its innumerable manifestations:
- Totemism
- Microcosm and Macrocosm
Enchantment
Totemism
The great theorists of totemism are the classic early anthropologists, Sir James Frazer (1854-1941), Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857-1939), and Émile Durkheim (1858-1917).
Totemism
- Frazer is most famous for his 13-volume study on ancient religious rituals and mythologies, The Golden Bough (1890ff.)
- (An abridged edition is available!)
- Like other Victorians, Frazer saw ‘totemism’ as a form of ‘animism’: primitive peoples’ projection of subjective hopes and fears onto objective phenomena.
- Lévy-Bruhl had a subtler theory of totemism.
- In his major work, How Natives Think (1910), he argued that so-called ‘primitive’ people had a fundamentally different kind of consciousness.
- Although capable of elementary logical thinking, ‘totemic’ consciousness is holistic; it feels united with the world.
- Lévy-Bruhl called their pervasive experience of union ‘mystic participation.’
- But the greatest study of all is Émile Durkheim’s, Elementary Forms of Religious Life: The Totemic System in Australia (1912). It is grand theory.
- Many view this work as the foundation of the whole field of cultural anthropology. And also in Sociology.
(Aside on Totemism)
- The concept of totemism is surprisingly close to home. The word comes from the Ojibwa Indians, who lived around the Upper Great Lakes.
- The term ‘totemic system’ was coined by Henry Schoolcraft, who wrote a classic history of the American Indians.
- He spent much of his life as the government’s Indian agent in Sault Ste. Marie; later, he became one of the first Regents of the U of M. Various streets and institutions throughout Michigan have been named after him.
His studies inspired Longfellow to write “Hiawatha.”
Totemism
- Totemism classifies objects, and describes affinities, in ways that seem very strange to us.
- Durkheim describes e.g. an Australian aborigine who was shown a photo of himself, and responded: “That [photo] is the same as me. And so is a kangaroo.”
Totemism
- Durkheim saw aboriginal peoples as feeling a bond of “mystic sympathy” with such varied objects as landscapes, animals, seasons, and the planets.
- E.g., he describes two Australian clans, one of which identified with the black cockatoo, smoke, honeysuckle, the moon (and much more), while the other identified with, e.g., the tea tree, the white crestless cockatoo, the kangaroo, and the sun.
- The ‘totem’ is the object that embodies most fully an all-pervading ‘totemic principle,’ variously named ‘mana’ (Melanesia) or ‘waken’ (Sioux) or ‘manitou’ (Algonquin).
“Totemic Principle” (mana, waken, etc.)
“The Totem” (e.g. ‘kangaroo’)
F.A.
summer
etc.
the Sun
Totemism
Durkheim argues that these felt affinities cannot have been ‘projected,’ because there never was any felt sense of separate individuality: “…the anthropomorphic instinct, with which the animists have endowed primitive men, cannot explain their mental condition….They have not conceived the world in their own image any more than they have conceived themselves in the world’s image: they have done both at the same time.” [235]
Microcosm and Macrocosm
- An outstanding and very graphic example of ‘enchantment’ is the notion of ‘microcosm and macrocosm,’ in which ‘the little world’ is seen as reflecting ‘the great world.”
- Each is truly a ‘cosmos’: ordered, filled with meaning, hence beautiful (cf. ‘cosmetic,’ from the same Greek word meaning ‘ornament’)
- It is also the basis of astrology (as opposed to astronomy): the heavenly bodies possess qualities that exert specific influences on related earthly phenomena.
Microcosm and Macrocosm
Perhaps the most famous ‘sign of the macrocosm,’ from Robert Fludd’s Utriusque Cosmi Historia [History of Both Universes], 1617.
A detail from the same engraving:
This emblem of 1617 shows angelic intelli-gences streaming into the world from God.
Microcosm and Macrocosm: Astrology
“Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry” [“The Very Rich Book of Hours of the Duke of Berry”]
Musée Condé, Chantilly (1416)
- A detail from the same plate.
- From top to bottom, these are the astrological signs for Cancer, Gemini, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, and Sagittarius.
- Each constellation corresponds to a specific part of the human anatomy.
- E.g., one ‘capers’ [dances] with one’s legs, which correspond to Capricorn!
Microcosm and Macrocosm
- In his spectacular study of ‘the evolution of consciousness,’ Saving the Appearances (1957), Owen Barfield captures succinctly how the world felt to someone living e.g. in the Middle Ages.
Barfield on medieval ‘participation’
- A weakened sort of totemic ‘participation’ survived: “For medieval man, then, the universe was a kind of theophany, in which he participated at different levels, in being, in thinking, in speaking or naming, and in knowing.” [92]
- Space itself felt completely different, like a coat of qualities that fit perfectly: “Before the scientific revolution the world was more like a garment men wore about them than a stage on which they moved.” [94]
- Another good place to learn about this lost world is C. S. Lewis’ late study, The Discarded Image (1964).
- (Lewis is most famous as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, but he was also a great scholar of medieval literature – perhaps the greatest ever.)
Mythology
- Profound consequences follow if one takes this argument seriously.
- The most important for us is that mythology stops looking like a fiction devised for lack of scientific concepts.
- Instead, mythology can be read as a direct, empirical experience of enchantment.
Athena wearing a cape hemmed with weaving snakes, in the Acropolis Museum, Athens.
‘Ideas’ and ‘phenomena’
- The Greeks still experienced original participation strongly.
- This is clear even in the Greek etymologies of the words ‘idea’ (‘I have seen’) and ‘phenomena’ (‘that which is illuminated’). For Plato, thoughts were spiritual entities perceived by the mind.
- In his School of Athens, Raphael depicts Plato as an old man representing a holdover from an earlier consciousness:
Plato points upward and back, towards the blue vault of the heavens. Ideas are still macrocosmic for Plato. He sees all human knowledge as “anamnesis,” a remembering of pre-natal experiences. Sensation feels opaque and unreal to him.
Fossils of an Older Consciousness
- The etymologies of many common English words provide evidence for an earlier, ‘macrocosmic’ experience of thinking. E.g., to ‘consider’ means ‘to join stars.’
- Other astrological terms that have lost this original sense for us: ‘aspect,’ ‘influence,’ ‘temper-ament,’ ‘disposition,’ ‘lunatic.’
Hieratic perspective
- As late as 1455, original participation still organizes space ‘hieratically’: size reflects the spiritual significance of the figure.
- We participate in the construction of space.
- Note how the angels in the foreground, who are closer and should look larger, have been ‘demoted’ in size relative to Mary and Christ.
Giovanni di Paolo, Coronation of the Virgin, (ca. 1455)
But space is already abstract and strictly mathematical in Piero della Francesca’s early Renaissance Flagellation, where a shrunken Christ has receded far into the background.
Single-point perspective is not ‘natural’ in any sense. Learning it was hard work, and it
became the reigning spatial ‘paradigm’
only after centuries of practice.
Alpha-thinking
Original participation was gradually eradicated by an increasingly abstract consciousness that Barfield calls “alpha-thinking.” Logic – pure, self-referential abstraction – is its ultimate expression.
- Logical thought is self-consistent and autonomous because it is turned inward entirely upon itself. Logic tells us nothing about the external world.
- Instead, Barfield argues, its ultimate mission has been to engender human self-consciousness.
- Let there be no mistake: Steiner and Barfield treasure the clarity and autonomy that logic bring.
- Rationality is crucial to our striving for the ultimate ideals of knowledge and freedom.
- But they also understand that rationality has been purchased at a high price: alienation from any immediate experience of meaning. Following Steiner, Barfield calls this phase “onlooker consciousness”
Rationality is in a real sense ‘fallen,’ a cold, deadened, ‘winter’ consciousness. How different from the ‘midsummer night’s dream’ of original participation!
Final
(as opposed to original)
participation
- Barfield terms this new ‘enchantment’ that we must call forth actively ourselves “final participation” – final in the sense of a goal.
- Examples are philosophical Romanticism and Idealism, Goethe’s scientific work, Expressionist painting, the psychology of perception, and depth psychology – among many other phenomena.
- In each case, we actively and consciously participate in the construction of phenomena.
