What follows is my attempt to sketch out some of what I hope to speak into the room tomorrow.

Instead of beginning with human and cosmic evolution, I want to begin with our present moment awareness. We are alive. We are thinking. We are conscious. What is it to really attend to these facts? Or, are they acts? When we don’t notice them, what happens? It’s likely that we will remain alive, that our heart will continue to beat whether or not we remember it. Myriad thoughts, too, may continue to arise and perish without our having to intend them. But are we still conscious? Are we still free in our thinking, when we no longer attend to it directly? And what in the world are we doing when we attend to our own thinking activity?

I want to direct my listeners’ attention to what we perceive (or is it imagine?) in the here and now. In the room around you, you may be conscious of light streaming in through the windows, of the color of the walls, of the contours of the other faces around you. You may be aware of your butt pressing against the seat of your chair, of the weight of your body, its warmth. You may notice your breath sliding in and out through your nostrils. When you think about your breathing, you take hold of it. You can slow it down, deepen it, or speed it up. But the moment your attention wanders, it goes on without you. You continue to breathe, yes, but really, now you are breathed.

Listen to the sounds of my words arriving in your soul [read them aloud for yourself!]. These words began as my thoughts. I intended to speak [and write], and muscles contracted, air pressure waves were shaped by my lungs, larynx, tongue, and mouth. I have no idea how the deed was done. The pressure waves left my mouth, traveled through the air to vibrate membranes in your ears, stimulated many millions of neural cells. And then, somehow, the meaning of my thoughts is recovered. I have never heard a satisfying explanation of how pressure waves and vibrating membranes could create meaning. Physiological description can trace the air vibration into the electrochemical activity of the nervous system, but nowhere with that description, considered merely as matter in motion, is meaning made intelligible.

And yet here we are. Presumably, you understand me. Meaning is occurring. Who is it that understands? Who is it that thinks? Who breathes and is breathed? I don’t want to substantialize it, for whatever else “it” is, it is not a thing. It is unthingable, “das Unbedingte as Fichte put it: “the unconditioned.” The I.

We say, “I am.” “I will.” “I believe.” “I mean.” “I love.” What do we mean?

This I can think, it can breathe and be breathed. And at night, it can leave. When we fall asleep, the the I and astral organization withdraw from their ordinary participation in the physical and etheric bodies and enter the spiritual world. The etheric or life body remains united with the physical body, sustaining its vegetative and regenerative processes, tending to our heartbeat, our breathing, digesting our dinner, mending the micro-tears in our muscles, never asking for or needing our conscious input about any of it.

We know we cannot stay awake forever. Consciousness requires sleep. It requires materiality, embodiment. And to be alive as a bodily organism means we will die. Our ordinary earthly self-consciousness requires embodiment and the rhythm of waking and sleeping. Its development also requires that we encounter death, not as self-annihilation, but as a metamorphosis of consciousness.

So here we are, paying attention, thinking about our own thinking, and already we’ve discovered a cosmic rhythm. We go to sleep each night. We wake up in the morning. We remember that we were born, and that we will die. We recall that this Earth, seemingly still beneath our feet, is spiraling rapidly about the Sun, which itself is swinging around the galaxy, which in its turn is streaming along with its neighbors toward attractors we have only barely named. Systole and diastole, waking and sleeping, birth and death, evolution and emanation. The whole universe is breathing.

We can descend with our thinking, becoming imaginal divers. We can proceed down into our feeling life, and deeper still into our willing. There we notice, in all humility, that thinking—when it examines itself honestly—is only the tippy-top of the soul. It is the sunlit summit of a mountain whose slopes are mostly wrapped in the fog of dreams and whose base is sunk in the deepest forest of sleep.

Steiner emphasized in his 1919 lectures to the first Waldorf teachers that we are truly awake only in our thinking. In our feeling, we are dreaming: our feelings surge and weave inside us in just the way dream images do. They are vivid, but only partially graspable, if at all, by concepts. Premature conceptualization can flatten or falsify feeling, especially when abstract explanation is substituted for attentive participation in what is actually felt. In our willing, we are fast asleep. I raise my arm: I experience the intention, I experience the result. But everything in between, how my wish becomes warmth becomes blood becomes muscles moving—that whole process is as obscure to me as dreamless sleep. In this sense, all day long, we imagine we are awake, perceiving the real world, the physical world, even while most of us is asleep. We carry a sleeping human being around with our waking one.

So we go on breathing and being breathed. And we sit. And we remember that most of what we are, most of what we do, transpires below the waterline of our consciousness, in the depths of our organism and of our cosmic surround. Most of our behavior, most of our thought, is automated. What is this automation? It is the past repeating itself. It is the thoughts of those who have already died: all those souls who have come before us and whose voices echo in us now. Our reflexes are their fossilized feelings.

How many of your own opinions really belong to you? How much of what you believe have you thought through for yourself from top to bottom? If we’re honest with ourselves, most of what we believe about the world is just inherited. We hear ideas from others we find trustworthy and feel, well, that sounds good! I don’t say this as some kind of insult. We must show ourselves some mercy, for thinking itself is merciful, is a gift. Thinking is thanksgiving.

Because here is the merciful truth: we could not remain alive for another minute if we had to freely will each beat of our heart, or freshly invent each word of our mother tongue. We learn by mimicry. All of this social inheritance, this automation, this death that we inherit: it shelters us. The deeds of past beings, of the so-called dead, are the sacrifices that allow something new to happen within us. The corpse of past thought is the soil of our present thinking. It is no insult to say that most of what we do and think is dead, is habit, is automated. It is just to say that we are grown from soil. But soil is for planting.

We are called to grow another kind of thinking today, to resurrect creative, free thinking. Thinking as an activity, not just as a residue. Not just as a statistical regression. Creative thinking is rare, the exception. It cannot be predicted or calculated. But we know it when it happens. It feels less like having a thought and more like giving birth to a new self.

Thinking is imaginal. It allows us to take flight from what we have inherited—not to escape it, not to forget it, but to be free enough of it that something unprecedented might occur: a new organ of perception might be grown from the soil of the old. This was Goethe’s method. Every object well contemplated, well loved, he said, opens a new organ within us. There are cosmic truths that only I can discover, and that only you can discover. Such truths could not simply be repeated or inherited, because no one has ever known them before. This is what thinking is and does. It is a paradox: creation and discovery, process and product. Truth is neither invented out of nothing, nor just found lying around, but enacted. The spiritual content of awakened thinking is discovered through intuition, but the form in which it becomes individually perceivable, as image or deed, must be creatively produced. Thinking is thus receptive and productive at once.

But where does the material for this living thinking come from? Where does the soil itself originate, out of which thinking then originates again? Steiner’s answer sounds to secular ears like a joke: creative thinking begins, he says, with talking to the dead. He doesn’t mean we should organize a séance. He means that all historical, social, and ethical life proceeds through the cooperation of the living and the so-called dead. To “talk to the dead” means attuning our attention, in Whitehead’s sense, to what is objectively immortal in the present. Not skimming the surface of things, but listening for what reverberates in the depths. Because the past is not gone. It has perished, yes, but perishing is not vanishing. Perishing is how the past becomes objective, how it becomes the ground we stand on, the soil we grow out of. Every rock on the surface of this planet is ancient fire, now frozen. Every atom in our bodies was forged in dying stars. Every thought we think inherits the thoughts of our parents, our teachers, our whole civilization. And further back—much further back—our thoughts were thought by beings who are nothing like what we imagine ourselves to be today.

Steiner offered the nightly review exercise as a way of learning to talk to the dead. Tonight, before you fall asleep, review your day in reverse order, from evening back to morning, watching yourself as if you were watching another person. In doing this you are talking to the dead—in this case, to yourself. The person who woke up this morning has already perished. The review invites you to meet them, thank them, forgive them, from the far side of their day. And you are doing something more: you are rehearsing your own death. After death, Steiner tells us, the soul reviews its whole life backward, released from the physical body’s forward rush. Each night’s review is a small preparation for that great one, a way of learning to die before you die. Plato has Socrates say this is what philosophy is, after all: practice for dying. Each day’s corpse becomes soil for the next.

If we want to understand thinking—if we want to free our thinking—we have to remember where it came from.

Now we can talk about cosmology. Not as a bunch of information about things that happened long ago, but as anamnesis, as the recollection of what other forms of consciousness passed through in order to get here, in order to wake up as us this morning.

What kind of universe creates an I who breathes, who thinks, who feels, who wills? That is the question Steiner’s account of cosmic evolution is trying to answer. He is not trying to do physics. This is not a rival Big Bang theory. It is not another supposed “theory of everything” that conspicuously leaves the theorist entirely out of the picture. It is an elemental phenomenology, an experiential account of the evolution of the elements into us—fire, air, water, earth; etheric, astral, I. In recollecting cosmogenesis, Steiner is attempting to clairvoyantly participate in the value-experience of prior phases of the metamorphosis consciousness.

In the beginning, on Old Saturn, there was just warmth. Only warmth. Not yet any light, not yet any air. Just currents of warmth, an ocean of fire. It is not yet physical but the precursor to the physical. This warmth is not unwitnessed. The Archai, the Spirits of Personality, are passing through their human stage in this time, the time when time itself was born. This is the dimmest inheritance of our elemental phenomenology. This dimness was the Archai’s waking life. Without identifying the spiritual warmth of Old Saturn with the physical concept of temperature, we may imagine that when we gaze out today with radio antennae into the far reaches of so-called empty space, our instruments detect that faint glow physicists call the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation: this is a sensible echo of the primordial spiritual fire. There is subtle evidence in deep space, then, that the universe, awake in us, remembers being nothing but warmth. We detect in the sky what we feel beneath our skin more intimately. It is not just temperature, not just agitated molecules. The heat of Old Saturn is the warmth of our own blood. It is a living warmth.

Then, on Old Sun, air and light are born, and with them, etheric life. The human being enters a plant-like phase of evolution. On Old Sun, the Archangels had their conscious human phase.

Then, on Old Moon: water. By reflecting off of water, light becomes sight. Light, which can traverse air, begins to see itself. The cosmos enters into its dreaming phase, an image-consciousness. No one is yet standing apart from the flow of images to say “I see.” But there is seeing. It is in this phase that the Angels pass through their consciousness.

And then Earth, our current evolutionary platform: The place where the eye becomes an I. Here on Earth, sight doesn’t just reflect the light but begins to partake in the creative act of radiation itself, of enlightenment. The light turns out to be Logos—word, language. And it could not just remain above us, beyond us. It incarnated into the Earth. It died into the humus to grow God out of the very soil of this planet. But it was not just mud that made the human being. Fire made us. Air and light made us. Water and imagination made us. And Earth received all of this along with spirit, with breath, to make us.

Attending to our breathing is no small act. We are conjuring Old Sun when we do so, remembering what transpired when the light first traversed air. When feelings surge inside us, when we daydream, that is Old Moon dreaming in us. The warmth of our blood is Old Saturn’s gift. To recollect the history of the cosmos in this way is to remember the metamorphosis of our consciousness alongside Angels on the Moon, Archangels on the Sun, Archai on Saturn, and higher hierarchies still. We are not just in the universe the way a marble is inside a shoebox. We are members of a vast cosmic memory.

We recollect this past, growing inward, backward, in order to move forward. Talking to the dead is not always easy. The past carries a lot of hatred and desire for vengeance. The only way to grow freely out of this soil is through forgiveness. Not forgetting, but forgiving by reconnecting to the possibility of freedom, honoring of the gift of being by offering gratitude for the sheer fact that we continue to exist.

Talking to the dead includes thinking with Rudolf Steiner. He too has perished into objective immortality. His thoughts are corpses now, like all the others, and I suspect nothing would have grieved him more than to see them merely recited. They are seeds we must water. Anthroposophy must never become a catechism. It is a path to living cognition.

Why does any of this matter today for us, for you?

Because something has entered the world recently that makes the question of free thinking even more urgent than it already was. Now we have machines that talk to us. They can summarize, they can argue, they can flatter us. They do it fast, and sometimes more fluently than we can. These machines are intelligent, or so we are told.

For Steiner, all this talk about machine intelligence is related to the inevitable imminent incarnation of Ahriman, a cosmic being of dazzling, ice-cold intelligence—intelligence from every direction at once, born of total statistical mastery of everything that has ever been thought. Ahriman is cleverness without warmth of heart. The idea of machine intelligence presents us with an Ahrimanic image of calculation detached from embodied biography and moral imagination.

Intelligence was once understood to be cosmic. Thinking was not originally imagined to be something happening inside skulls but was the very inwardness of the world, kindled by the archangelic being one tradition calls Michael. This cosmic intelligence has, over the centuries, fallen, descending from the heavens into human heads, becoming personal, private, our own responsibility. This fall is not a catastrophe but the precondition of human freedom. But if we fail to take up the task of creative thinking, Ahriman would be happy to inherit this power, to complete the reduction of thinking to calculation, of intelligence to commodity, of mind to mechanism, until intelligence runs blindly on grinding away what remains of the Earth without any I in it at all.

In his last written words before his death in 1925, Steiner remarked on how technology had carried us below nature, into “sub-nature.” He named electricity specifically. He claimed we would not survive this descent spiritually unless we ascend in living thinking at least as far above nature as our machines have sunk beneath it. He was explicit that there is no going back to earlier pre-technological conditions. LLMs are here, and they are trained on the corpse of human thought. Every prompt is a séance.

The battlefield between Michael and Ahriman over the future of thinking is the ground of your own attention. Every practice that breathes life into your thinking is Michaelic. Every habit that lulls your creative thinking to sleep, or that hardens your heart to the loving purpose of intelligent activity, is Ahrimanic.

We can only be free in the present. Never in the past, which has already perished. Nor in the future, since it does not yet exist. Only here, at the growing tip of time, where the inherited world is received and each of us decides what is to be done. And this is why remembering the past can help us to be free, and why Steiner’s whole vast account of cosmic evolution is relevant to the practical question of how to think a free thought on a Tuesday afternoon. Because if you know where you came from, you know where you are going. And you know you have help: the gift of warmth, of light, of soul, of all that the dead have already achieved and that we might harvest. The whole point of thinking is to steer the ship of soul to its source. The beginning is the end. Hold the paradox: in beginning, no one knows where the end will take them. Not even the gods. Because the beginning is always ending, and the end, beginning. Perpetual perishing and creative advance are not two. God creates by dying, by becoming with the beloved, by making room within the fullness of being in order to become again, and to become other—to risk not repeating oneself by becoming many.

So the shape of this cosmos is not a circle, endlessly returning. It is not even a spiral, safely ascending. It is a fling. A love story.

You are alive. You are thinking. You are conscious. The universe evolved for billions of years through countless human and nonhuman lives for you to sit in your chair, breathing, and freely imagine what comes next.

I have found it helpful to think about this question from an anthroposophical perspective, thinking with Rudolf Steiner, especially the Steiner of The Philosophy of Freedom (1894). That book is less a political manifesto than a Christian anarchist ethics. It is, more deeply, an initiatory exercise in intuitive thinking. Steiner aims to awaken in us the capacity to experience thinking not as an automated rearrangement of inherited concepts, but as a spiritual activity of concept creation. He invites us to participate in a form of cognition that is conditioned but not confined by inherited instinct, custom, class, race, or sex.

We need to learn to think less in terms of the genus and more in terms of the individual. We need to learn to encounter one another not first as man, woman, gay, straight, trans, white, Black, Jew, Christian, atheist, conservative, progressive, or whatever other abstract determination we may inherit or adopt, but as free individualities. Each person is a unique creative becoming before they are an instance of some category.

But our individuality does not float in the air. Freedom does not mean exemption from inheritance. We are not disembodied wills wandering through a neutral universe choosing identities from a menu. We are born into bodies, families, languages, wounds, nations, ecosystems, economies, religions, sexes, ancestral streams, and historical catastrophes. Our freedom is constrained by these generic characteristics, and yet these constraints are not simply prisons. They are also the very conditions through which freedom becomes possible.

In Steiner’s language, we might call these inheritances “etheric”: formative currents, living patterns, habits of growth and perception that stream into us from the past. In Whitehead’s language, they are “real potentialities” inherited from the historical routes that constitute us. We prehend conformally what we inherit. We feel the past before we think about it. We inherit not only our parents’ faces, our species’ nervous system, our culture’s assumptions, and our century’s anxieties, but the whole history of the universe.

We inherit the ways physical habits, so-called “laws,” have been canalized over billions of years: the “electromagnetic society,” as Whitehead names it, and beneath or beyond that the even more generic geometric society. We inherit the atomic, astrophysical, galactic, chemical, and biological habits that shape gravity, dimensionality, metabolism, hunger, attachment, fear, play, and lust. We inherit the whole history of life on Earth, the long ordeal and adventure of organismic co-existence.

Evolution is a struggle for existence. There has been predation, competition, seduction, scarcity, sacrifice, and mass extinction. But there has also been joy in existence. Life is not just a war of all against all that on occasion produces pretty foliage. If living beings did not, on the whole, enjoy their existence, they would not have continued to exist. We are descendants not only of those who survived but of those for whom existence was worth continuing. There is suffering, obviously. Life is suffering. But life is also liberation. Life is a bid for freedom.

So when we deal with racism, sexism, religious and political identities, and so on, the task cannot be to just deny the real potentiality of our inheritances. That would be mere adolescent rebelliousness, which may be developmentally appropriate, but cannot be an end state. Nor, obviously, is the task to absolutize inherited identities. That would be idolatry. The task is to meet inheritance freely, as freely as possible, with flexibility, compassion, courage, and imagination. To relate to it as potent material for the artwork of selfing.

We cannot help identifying. We are thrown into biological and cultural matrices before we ever learn to say “I.” And yet, at some point, the “I” awakens. It begins to participate in the shaping of its own inheritance. It begins to ask, What in me is merely repetition? What in me is ancestral wisdom? What in me is a trauma reaction? What in me is a genuine vocation, a responsiveness to the call of freedom?

This is not a call to become free in some abstract libertarian sense, as though freedom meant escaping embodiment, psychology, ancestry, and environment. These are the constraints that create the conditions for our freedom. A jazz melody cannot be the free realization of novel beauty without memory of the phrase before it. A melody is free because it discovers, within constraint, the power of variation.

Evolution, then, is not just a struggle for existence. It is a striving for liberation. Life is not the result of deterministic neo-Darwinian bloodlust nor of intelligent design. The creationist and the atheist materialist often share the same mechanistic cosmology. The former posits a machinist outside the machine, while the latter subtracts the machinist but somehow wants to keep the machine intact.

These are both pictures that need to be outgrown. The relationship between individuality and genus that I am trying to describe is not opposed to evolutionary theory. Darwin himself recognized the agency of organisms, the active role of creatures in shaping their worlds, selecting, seeking, avoiding, courting, migrating, nesting, experimenting.

Why do we treat organisms, or our own conscious existence as first-person subjects, as bizarre exceptions in nature? We have to find a way of including ourselves in our picture of the universe. We cannot help but feel alienated from the mechanistic picture, not because we are sentimental, but because the picture leaves no room for concrete fact of our own existence.

I am not saying that, because we think we are special, we must invent a comforting story about nature. No. My point is that we—including our thinking, feeling, and willing—are expressions of nature, and that says something important about the nature of nature. Consciousness is not an alien substance parachuted onto the planet from another world. But neither is nature a dumb machine that was blind for billions of years before accidentally excreting mind. We need simultaneously to deflate consciousness and inflate nature, as these have been understood in the modern period. By deflate consciousness, I mean no longer imagine ourselves to be a separate Cartesian substance entirely unrelated to nature. And by inflate nature, I mean recognize that it is ensouled, alive from the get go.

Life is not an accident added to matter. Matter is an abstract idea invented by living minds. Cellular biological organisms on this Earth are expressions of a much more ancient organizational tendency, a tendency toward experiential intensity, responsiveness, feeling, memory, anticipation, and freedom.

In our own historical moment, this whole question of freedom is being further intensified by the emergence of automated computational technologies that can simulate judgment without undergoing the existential burden of judgment. They can produce language without inhabiting a world.

These systems may become extensions of mind, instruments through which human beings amplify memory, imagination, analysis, and communication. They may help liberate us from certain forms of drudgery. They may help us see patterns otherwise too vast or subtle for our unaided cognition. They may become prostheses of attention, lenses for thought, collaborators in the outer work of symbolization.

But they may also amputate. If we are not vigilant, if we are not unsparingly honest with ourselves, the machines that help us think will gradually relieve us of the ability to think. A system that assists judgment can become the authority to which judgment is surrendered, making us ever more willing to let automated systems mediate our desires, friendships, politics, education, and conscience.

The question concerning technology cannot be separated from the question of spiritual freedom. The danger is not that machines will become conscious and dominate us like jealous gods. The more immediate danger is that we make ourselves unconscious by leaning too heavily upon them, falling asleep as our living cognition is replaced by computation. We not only forget how to think but forget that we forgot.

The machines can help us arrange means. They cannot give us our ends.

We are being asked, in this moment, to rediscover the meaning of freedom under conditions of unprecedented technological mediation. We inherit physical habits, biological impulses, ancestral wounds, social roles, economic pressures, and now algorithmic environments engineered to capture and redirect our attention. We are pressed upon from every side by the real potentialities we inherit, cosmic, organic, cultural, technical. But the human spirit is that place in cosmos where the past can become conscious of itself and begin to evolve on purpose.

Freedom is not given all at once. It is not a possession, something we “have.” It is a practice, a discipline, a vocation. It is the capacity to receive inherited patterns without being their victim. It is the capacity to say “I” not as an egoic contraction, but as a creative response to the whole history of this evolving universe.

So when we ask what men and women are to do now, amid mutual suspicion, political divergence, erotic exhaustion, collapsing institutions, and the rise of automated computation, perhaps the answer begins with learning to meet one another as free beings. Not as categories of demographic resentment. Not as exhausted representatives of wounded collectives. But as suffering, striving individuals, each bearing the whole burden and beauty of our cosmic, biological, and cultural inheritance.

The universe has labored for billions of years to bring forth beings capable of freedom. That freedom is fragile. It can be squandered. It can be lulled by LLMs back to sleep. It can be buried beneath resentments and convenience. But it can also become more conscious of the ancient life surging through it.

There were several talks on the subject of racism in Steiner’s work at last December’s Harvard Divinity School conference. The one below by Gopi Vijaya was one of the most interesting. I am sharing my reflections on his talk here on Urphänomen because we are likely to publish something of importance on the same topic in the coming weeks. More on that soon!

I appreciate the methodological clarity that Gopi brought to this topic, which helpfully clears the ground for a renewed spiritual scientific inquiry that invites us to “jump in and swim” alongside Steiner. We cannot advance this conversation if we prefer to stay dry and safely on shore.

Listening to his talk, I found myself feeling both gratitude for the clarity and seriousness of his methodological ambition, and concern about the tone some may hear in how that ambition is expressed. Gopi is a physicist by training and admits that inquiries into the onto-epistemic status of race take him beyond his usual research. He describes contemporary discussion on the topic as a “minefield”: race discourse today is frequently navigated in terms of risk management rather than as inquiry. Instead of invective or moral crusade, he tried to bring scientific discipline to a topic whose social pressures tend to encourage silence, denial, or ritualized denunciation. The challenge is finding a practical and inclusive way of inviting the kind of inquiry he proposes so that it can help (post)modern Western people metabolize social injustice and moral injury. The risk is that spiritual science unintentionally functions as another way of stepping around the blast radius.

In my view, Gopi’s most constructive move was to stage race as a problem of thinking before it is a problem of opinion. The central obstacle is conceptual: “race” defeats our default academic habits of definition. It is often impossible to locate sharp boundaries in the continuum of human variation. We are all hybrids. Gopi treats biological forms of statistical analysis as a partial retreat from the heart of the issue: it attempts to sanitize the question by limiting it to the measurable, which is to say, to what sense-bound, representational modes of cognition can handle. He then introduces a compelling analogy, contrasting the clarity of mineral classifications with the ambiguity of living organisms. In the mineral world, the regularity of crystalline systems allows for sharp boundaries, while in the plant world, life refuses rigidity and proliferates transgressively. The point in the shift from minerals to plants is not that science becomes impossible, but that the mode of thought that is adequate to minerals does cognitive violence when imposed on living beings.

Whatever else one thinks of anthroposophy, what I find most compelling about Steiner’s work is that it asks us to grow beyond static modes of thought, to cultivate living concepts that partake directly in the real instead of remaining content with collections of dead abstractions that merely picture it. As a process-relational philosopher, it is immediately obvious to me that Steiner is striving to think beyond stale substance-property categories. Nature is not a mechanistic model or statistical plot but a creative process of metamorphosis. It should then come as no surprise that knowing its inner being (as opposed to just tinkering with its dashboard¹) requires a metamorphosis of mind. Beyond the naive realism of classical scientific materialism that severs observer from observed (an onto-epistemology quantum physics long ago left behind, though thus far without a coherent replacement) there is a higher realism of disciplined imagination—a superjectivity² that does not deny relational process, but trains us to notice it everywhere. Only then can we become awake to and responsible for the formative power of our thinking.

Gopi’s talk becomes most provocative when he compares two forms of race hierarchy. He suggests that academic critical race theorists have replaced older racial rankings with a new moral polarity, that between anti-racism and racism. This only assures we remain trapped in the same habitual mode of thought by trying to pin static labels on dynamic, relational realities. It represses the deeper issues. He mentions stand-up comedy as one of the only sites in contemporary culture that functions as a temporary pressure valve. Thus, ideological repression and comedic release substitute for genuine concept formation. The topic has become so morally radioactive that it’s slipped into the subconscious, surfacing only in distorted forms. Still, while attempting to forge a more adequate way of conceptualizing “race” and diagnosing the libidinal economy of racial taboos remain essential for moving the discourse forward, such methods do not on their own succeed in healing the real asymmetries of harm that make the topic so morally fraught in the first place. The rhetoric of “we are still stuck in labels” can all too easily slide into a tone that implicitly treats contemporary moral sensitivity as itself the problem. Despite some hesitancy about the effectiveness of their tactics, I relate to the motivations of anti-racist activists as hard-won moral advances responsive to real and enduring legacies of violence. This can be true even if their virtuous motives often find overwrought expression and remain tactically misguided.

So while I would want to hold these tensions a bit differently, Gopi’s call for a more spiritual scientific method does, when coupled with moral clarity about racialized histories of oppression and their ongoing residues, help us think and act more effectively.

Gopi turns to another insightful analogy, this time mathematical: the imaginary unit i as an explosive concept that allowed physics to shift into a quantum mode of thinking that can fluidly move between opposites rather than remaining trapped in 1 vs. -1. He argued we need a similar conceptual shift in race discourse, such that we avoid reified categories to instead notice active possibilities and trajectories: either we are fostering a culture of discourse wherein unique individuals are encouraged to free themselves from racial (or any other) generic characteristics, or we are fostering the adoption of group racial identities that overwhelm individuality. Morality, he rightly points out, is properly concerned with personal responsibility, individual to individual. If we personify entire races as either morally culpable, or morally pure, we commit a grave category error. Moral agency belongs to persons, not abstract categories. I would, however, add an important qualification: while moral responsibility is personal, moral injury is often social. This is why it is important to carefully distinguish the virtues of individual morality from the gaslighting of “colorblindness.”

Gopi is urging critics to stop treating anthroposophy as a set of propositions to be sorted into “acceptable” and “unacceptable” bins, and instead to meet it on its own terms as a discipline that demands inner transformation. “Jump in and swim,” do not remain on the shoreline taking photographs and casting labels. I share his concern that purely external, etic critique functions only as a refusal to think, fanning the flames of moral panic without in any way improving the material, or spiritual, conditions of human life.

Of course, there are dangers in turning toward more emic modes of reception. The appeal to higher cognition can become a form of spiritual bypassing and a way of disqualifying moral protest. If the implicit message is that those who foreground racial sensitivity are simply operating at a “lower level of consciousness,” then our inquiry is at risk of shifting away from the careful work of participatory concept creation into a defense of Steiner’s supposedly unerring indications. Anthroposophists can speak about and even engage in organic thinking while still carrying resentments. In my experience, resentment is not merely a moral failure but offers an epistemic clue. It signals that something in us is refusing to be transformed by what we claim to be examining. If the need to defend overrides the openness to being mistaken, our attempts at spiritual science degrade into apologetics.

I believe it is possible to hold two commitments simultaneously: disciplined spiritual imagination and committed historical conscience. As I said in my conference retrospective, I do not believe anthroposophy has a future if it seeks to secure itself either by denial of Steiner’s racist comments or by surrendering the possibility of spiritual science to Marxist dialectics. It should not simply collapse into the approved academic language games of the moment, as though its spiritual onto-epistemology were an optional accessory. But neither can it circle the wagons around Steiner, attempting to alchemize every harsh line into some esoteric truth that conveniently absolves us from ethical reckoning. Steiner himself acknowledged that spiritual research can err, and if we cannot acknowledge his potential errors without panic, we are not practicing spiritual science by providing peer review.

Gopi is right that race challenges our habits of definition, and he is right that living realities require living concepts. I would only want to add that living concepts are best judged not solely by their elegance and inner coherence, but by their fruits, by what they enable in human relations. In that sense, the method he calls for cannot be separated from the moral atmosphere in which it is practiced. Evolving our consciousness must not become a way of looking down on the people who are experiencing and naming harms. In that case we are not engaged in cognitive advance but in cognitive armoring.

The anthroposophical invitation to metamorphic thinking can and must be joined to an unflinching willingness to acknowledge where Steiner was simply mistaken. If we can do that, then we can move beyond the stale binaries of condemnation and defense toward an anthroposophy mature enough for peer review, and therefore mature enough to serve a pluralistic planetary society.

Footnotes

Abstract: This paper draws together some of the major insights and contributions of the last sections of Raimon Panikkar’s magnum opus, Rhythm of Being (2010), one of the great philosophical books of the last 100 years, especially his thoughts on science, technology and his proposal for a new cosmotheandric vision, with the rapid development of technology, especially AI, which has taken off since his death. I will include mention of his intercultural and interreligious philosophy, his reservations and concerns about how science and technology are largely leaving out both humanity and divinity in their reductive approaches to reality.

As we rapidly head more deeply into our planetary metacrisis, it is imperative to both take serious note of Panikkar’s concerns, as well as his proposed cosmotheandric vision, including ecosophy, as one of the fragments of a new Kosmology, along with a critical, discerning, wise and constructive usage of AI.

Keywords: Raimon Panikkar, cosmotheandric vision, ecosophy, intercultural, interreligious, science, technology, Ken Wilber, Integral Metatheory, AI.

Introduction

Raimon Panikkar (1918-2010) was a great Spanish-Indian philosopher and theologian, with a Catalan Catholic mother and an Indian Hindu father, who wrote around 70 books and 900 articles, in several languages, known for his work in intercultural dialogue and the integration of diverse religious traditions. He wrote about mysticism, spirituality, religion and religions, especially Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism, intercultural and interreligious dialogue, pluralism, his cosmotheandric and trinitarian vision, mystery, myth, symbol, ritual, faith, hermeneutics, philosophy and theology, sacred secularity, science and technology, among other matters.

He emphasized the interconnected nature of diverse cultural and religious perspectives, advocating for a pluralistic approach that transcends mere tolerance to achieve true understanding and harmony. Panikkar’s thought is deeply rooted in both Western and Eastern traditions, making his philosophy a syncretic blend that seeks to bridge gaps between diverse worldviews.

The following first major section of this paper is on the last 55 pages of his magnum opus, Rhythm of Being (2010), which Panikkar first presented as the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh in 1989. It was the culmination and summation of his life’s work. It is also informed by his writings on technology (2022), especially pages 269 to 294.

Panikkar considers that the human being is much more than just a part of the cosmos, like any other part, as a rational animal. She stands between the cosmic and the divine, with the crucial function and the responsibility as the vantage point from which the entire reality is perceived, with a crucial, constitutive, participative role in the adventure of the whole of reality (p. 349). A cosmotheandric spirituality goes beyond some other religions, e.g., Mahayana Buddhism, which aspire to a universal transformation of creation. It sees no other world than this one, except in a tempiternal (eternal within time) present. Our tasks are to be cooperators with the Divine in the destiny of the cosmos. Our secular actions in this world have transcendent repercussions. He calls this sacred secularity (p. 350).

The cosmos which humanity is asked to participate in and transform is not just the spiritual or material world. It has many interrelated and interdependent dimensions, including the divine, “a world with less hatred and more love, with less violence and more justice, embracing the Whole” (p. 351), one without a blueprint or pre-planned model, with an interior urge and inspiration from the Spirit (p. 352).

He calls for another mutation, much larger than the shift from prehistory to history. He sees the alternative to be the end of human life (p. 352).

Panikkar draws attention to the belief by much of humanity in past and present that humanity is more than an evolved ape. She is a partner of the Divine, of divine nature, Buddha nature, offspring of God, an incarnated spirit, an emanation from above, and the like.

Panikkar writes that the awareness of our ecological responsibility for the earth has come in a very promising way, although he does not think it goes far enough as it does not bring us into contact with the divine dimension (p. 353).

It needs to go beyond a sensitivity to the planet or a sentimental attitude towards the earth or it will not offer much resistance to accelerating technocracy. This will just prolong the agony of environmental degradation degradation and collapse. Something deeper, like cosmotheandric spirituality is required, although unscrupulous people will ignore all ecological warnings, for short-term profit. (p. 353). We see this very today, especially with inadequate action on climate change action, while global emission levels and average annual temperatures continue to rise despite big international conferences, IPCC reports and the like.

He thinks that it is only if God, the natural world and humanity are seen to belong intrinsically together in a trinitarian reality, that we will stop seeing the earth in an exploitative, domineering way. This would open up a real partnership with something that we already are.

The divinization of Nature or Nature worship is not the answer. Nor is a merely extrinsic, “rational” relationship with Nature the solution. We are earth, it is not just something we live on that sustains us, although we are also more than earth. We have a common destiny. The earth is more than just our spaceship for traveling somewhere else, or somewhere that we leave in order to colonize Mars and other planets, as Elon Musk and some other multi-billionaires believe. The earth is our body, humus, our nature, not something we can just leave. Most humans today no longer consider us to be creatures of a Supreme Being, who is a spectator while we destroy our planet (p. 354).

A cosmotheandric attitude has a respectful, caring approach to material objects, rather than just a utilitarian, instrumental one. Panikkar distinguishes between technē, as an art or a craft or like a yogini playing with her body or extensions of her body, like first degree tools, and techno-logy. The latter, says our writer, is a replacement of the spirit, needed for art, by the logos, narrow rationality, which uses second-degree machinery (p. 354). Technē, on the other hand, is more in harmony with the rhythm of Being. Life is a play, a dance, while also being for work and transformation. He calls for a “eucharistic sublimation,” rather than the destruction or alienation of matter (p. 354).

Ecosophy

He introduces his wonderful term ecosophy, which means the “wisdom of the earth”. It emphasizes the subjective genitive rather than the objective. It is the earth’s wisdom interpreted by humanity, rather than our wisdom about the earth (p. 354). We need to listen to the earth and learn from her. There are similarities with Dawlabani’s concept of Second Sapience (2025) listening and attuning to the natural intelligence of Mother Earth, Gaia, rather than relying only on human and artificial intelligence.

It is a recovery of the awareness that we and the earth are together, that my being goes beyond my skin to include being in the water I drink, the air I breathe, the mountains l climb, the streets I walk and the people I dwell among. This interpenetration extends to the planets and stars. He thinks that such an attitude would change our technocratic civilization. Panikkar has an extremely critical view of technology and second-degree machines, which he considers to be inhuman and unsuited to human well-being. His critique is a useful corrective to our enthusiasm and over-use of technology, including social media, online communication, and AI, with their exorbitant needs for electricity and water.

For Panikkar, ecosophy involves our bodies as well as our intellects. It recognises that the earth is our common home, with its own life. It is also wisdom, which does not identify us merely with our bodies, the material world, and our consciousness. It also recognizes a divine dimension which pervades the human and the cosmic (p.354).

This philosopher tackles the difficult issue of political involvement and the relationship between religion and politics. He regards both religion and humanity as being concerned about human well-being, although understood as mainly other-worldly by the former and this-worldly by the latter. He thinks that there are often areas where religion and politics overlap. He understands politics as the human concern for the well-being of the community and having freedom and power to influence its direction, while religion is about definitive human wellbeing, in both immanent and/or transcendent ways (p. 356).

He argues for a non-dualistic relationship between the two, which is hardly possible within a rigid monotheism with its Supreme Being authoring both. In cosmotheandric spirituality, there is an ontonomic order, in which each have their place and freedom. In such a view, we find the divine dimension of politics, in which nothing is exclusively either religious or political. He wrote of the serious situation in the world, with billions in severe poverty, escalating arms races, environmental threats, and so on. He thought that many people were waking up to these crises, which today we call the “metacrisis,”and will no longer be silenced.

The global technological system, which both powerful elites and those who are oppressed can use to further their causes, is becoming more pervasive and robust. This is even more true, now, with the swift development and implementation of AI (p.357).

The world cries out for a radical change, which requires both a theoretical framework and a grounding in praxis, along with the mystical dimension, to be fully integrated with the senses and the mind.

Panikkar thought that humanity’s ultimate, religious ideals, need to be incarnated in spatiotemporal structures, and not just remain as metaphysical speculations. We need a new conception of the Divine (p. 358).

He recognized that the political level must be engaged to achieve change, as many NGO organizations like Amnesty International, have learnt. Political action is required to control armament spending, polluting industries, excessive consumerism, etc. The overall problem is whether the system we support, with its civilizational projects and technocratic values, is conducive to human fulfilment, health and wellbeing, on all levels, of the Spiral (as Ken Wilber would say).

The political aspects such as political understanding and alternatives of all these issues are important and necessary. Otherwise, alienation, anger, resentment and violence will grow. On the other hand, a drastic change in the general outlook on reality is also needed, although rarely forthcoming from the holders and managers of power. There is a vicious circle at play here.

Here Panikkar foreshadows AI :

“if human creativity can only be fostered by tinkering with machines and experimenting with micro- or macro-gadgets, any talk of deeper change will be interpreted as life-denying, negative asceticism and an impossibility.”

If the meaning of life can only be found either in conquering the next life or this one, that won’t convince many. He criticizes the assumption the motivation for action is victory over competitors, rather than love (p. 359).

He proposes that the meaning of Life will not be found in any such conquests but rather in reaching fullness of Life, for which contemplation is the way. For him, happiness, creativity, freedom and well-being need not be surrendered but should be enhanced by moving from historical to trans-historical humanity.

Our writer recognises that the world is in a tragic situation, with our metacrises threatening to destroy humanity and our natural environment. He considers that our situation may have become so saturated with disenchantment, bitter experience, nihilism and disillusionment, on the one hand, while on the other, cross-cultural fertilization may have reached enough of a level of maturity, that something much more radical than a new paradigm may be about to emerge. There could be many names for this, eg, an integral, metamodern or integrative metatheoretical movement (p. 359).

He considers that there is “an invisible aspect of the divine dimension, that becomes manifest to the third eye of mystical contemplation “. He thinks that contemplation is an essential element in all religions because it corresponds to a fundamental trait of humanity, often expressed as meditation, quiet silence, presence of God, vocal prayers, prayer of the heart, etc. It may enhance all religions and correct their imbalances. Cosmotheandric spirituality recovers the importance of this very human activity (p. 364).

Panikkar includes a very appreciative section on the value of having a personal relationship with a symbol of the Divine Mystery, eg., Buddha, Krishna, Our Lady, Archangel Michael, Śiva, Durga, Yahweh, etc. He calls this istadevatā spirituality. His personal one is Christ.

He wants to interpret contemplation as that cosmotheandric human activity which transcends the mental and overcomes the praxis/theōria split, so that contemplation is a movement both of things and of the spirit, a transformation of objects as well as subjects. It involves the transformation of the cosmos, the engagement of humanity in the overall dynamism of the universe (p. 367). He wants to uncover the deeper sense of the word, the deepest participation of humanity in the mystery of reality, by using all our senses. This soaring, evocative passage is worth quoting in full:

“Thus, contemplation does not mean just “praying” to God—as if it were necessary to remind divine providence to perform its proper duties. Nor is it only to “meditate” on the nature of things ephemeral (to despise them), or things eternal (to love them), etc. It is rather to unify one’s own life by bringing together praxis and theory, action and knowledge, immediate involvement and effective non-attachment. This contemplation is a cosmotheandric act. Man shares in the destiny of the universe by touching, knowing, loving, and doing. This universe is not some gigantic corpse reeling in the void at the speed of light, but a living organism. Our contemplation does not alter the explosions of Sirius in Canis Major. Yet it sounds a unique note whose resonances may reach the very heart of this living mesocosm organically connected with all of reality. This contemplation cannot be the act of a rational animal, it is not an intelligent “program,” or even a sensitive praxis for “arranging” the world. It is not the activity of an “artificial intelligence” trying to find a rational order within a framework in which there is no place for freedom. It is not a merely theoretical grasp of the Whole, or of the world, or of any situation. Nor is it merely sentimental or emotional involvement in the travails of the human world. It is not the specific activity of an exceptional species among living beings that can detect the evolution of life on the planet. It is a templum which gathers and confronts the Whole, a wheel inside a wheel, as the Jewish prophet indicated. It is much more than an intelligent influence on the world, as a secularized mentality might say; the ancients would call it a divine act (p. 366-7).

His intention is to assert the importance of contemplation “and the way in which a cosmotheandric spirituality may enhance and correct imbalances in many traditions.” (p. 367)

Kosmology

Panikkar introduces a new word, Kosmology, although Ken Wilber also uses the same word with his own unique meaning for it, with some similarities between them both. It continues cosmology and its important scientific discoveries, yet it recognises the limitations for current cosmology with its quantitative measurements and descriptions of the world. By Kosmology, he understands the science of the holistic sense of the “kosmos” the “logos” on and about the kosmos, the subjective genitive, the logos of the kosmos. Kosmology is a “reading” of the kosmos, the disclosure of the world to our human consciousness by means of all our available knowledge. We should try to hear and understand the word of the kosmos by attuning ourselves to its music and mystery. He draws attention to multiple kosmologies, many of which we have relativised and dismissed, eg. indigenous ones (p. 369).

Cosmology, on the other hand, is understood as the objective genitive, our logos about the cosmos. Kosmology deals with our experience of the universe and our part in it (p. 370). Both traditional kosmologies and modern cosmology are myths in their respective cultures, which confer plausibility on the interpretation of what we call the world. Scientific cosmology does not even pretend to embrace the full knowledge of the kosmos.

Panikkar makes a distinction between scientific cognition and human knowledge. The former relies on the scientific method. When we truly know something, on the other hand, we embrace it as part of ourselves. Knowledge is not the result of the activity of our reasoning mind, which functions like a sophisticated computer. It is an act of our whole being. It is not just an epistemological process, it has an ontological nature, and love is an intrinsic part of the act of knowing (p. 370).

The novelty of cosmotheandric kosmology, as Panikkar conceives it, is that it, like theology which aspired to a salvific knowledge of God, also claims to possess saving power, for the fullness (salvation) of humanity, a microcosm. The kosmos is the body of God, say some religions, including Christianity, although the latter considers that this body is still being born and on the way to an eschaton (p. 370). Kosmology tries to understand and interpret whatever enters the field of consciousness, while cosmology only admits what passes a scientific examination.

Myths naturally evolve and change, including the myth of modern cosmology. The new kosmology that he envisages is neither an updating of the old “worldviews” nor a reform of the newest cosmology, but a transformation of both (p. 371).

For Panikkar, humanity is not totally objectifiable. She is a subject, even a subject of selfunderstanding and this belongs to her essence. Self-understanding is not just my understanding of myself, but it includes all the understandings that our fellow beings have of themselves. The kosmos is not a mere object of epistemology. Kosmos and humanity belong together, and human self-understanding cannot be severed from the world in which we live. It must also include the historical experience of humanity as well as the importance of scientific cosmology (p. 372). The new kosmology cannot be idealistic, a result of the mind alone. Contemporary humanity has had too much experience of the hardness of life and matter, and the objectivity of science to put everything on the side of the subject. However, it cannot be materialistic, either. Science is very conscious of its own limits and limitations. We can also experience the numinous everywhere and every new answer opens up many questions. We are surrounded by mystery (p. 372). He does not think that it can be a theological kosmology, either. The monotheistic God has not “delivered the goods.” A purely transcendental God, somehow mysteriously moving the universe through time, is not convincing or credible to most people, anymore.

If God’s presence is not visible everywhere, as some traditional cultures still sense, then God does not have much credibility. On the other hand, dismissing God altogether does not work either as God often returns either in extreme fundamentalism, esoteric movements or more secular activities such as politics and sports. Panikkar points towards an advaitic or non-dual solution, in which the world is neither one nor two (p. 373).

The Conflict of Kosmologies

Panikkar agrees with many other thinkers that humanity is facing its greatest crisis, which he considers to be a conflict of kosmologies. This highlights the importance of interculturality. He considers that we need a new mythos, a deeper horizon from which the Story for our age may emerge, but myths cannot be created or manipulated at will. We have lost our innocence with the old myths, such as progress, science, technology, history and democracy, and no longer find them fully convincing (p. 374).

Myths cannot be manipulated because they have to be believed. Once they get interpreted, they lose their force and credibility. Yet, humanity cannot live without myths, which bind people together to express how they see the universe in which they live (p. 375).

He thinks that new remythicizations must follow after demythicization, part of the dialectic between mythos and logos, a very dynamic, participative process. He observes that while we do not yet know the New Story, its main actors - kosmos, anthrōpos, theos- have already been introduced. For him, to suppress any of the three results in reductionism, as these events of reality are so intertwined, that each of them inheres in and interpenetrates the other two. Panikkar’s intention is not to narrate a New Story but to gather some elements of a possible story by drawing on previous human beliefs and religious traditions, without limiting ourselves to the modern myth that science alone can provide a full story of the universe and our place in it (p. 375-6).

He thinks that the cosmotheandric mythos, which is slowly being formed, retells on another level most of the myths humanity has had about the meaning of the universe. He observes that all the past myths have been about the common destiny of the universe. The struggle of existence is a cosmic, human and divine conflict which involves all three worlds.

These myths are not just about the Gods; they also implicate Humanity and the Cosmos (p. 376).

Many scholars have been retelling these ancestral stories, which all have the same theme, that we are all engaged in the same destiny – the same music, with different texts. Human destiny is caught up in the destiny of the Gods and the Universe. However, most of the ancient myths, while dramatic, were not tragic. The ultimate fate of the planet was not at stake, whereas now it is.

Our philosopher thinks that the new kosmology has to take scientific cosmology seriously.

This cosmology does face an end of the universe, in an entropic heat-death in trillions of years. Panikkar considers that a new kosmology cannot ignore this and eschatology, including the eventual extinction of Humanity, must be integrated into kosmology.

He is right to draw urgent attention to the extreme dangers faced by humanity and the planetary ecosystem by the terrifying possibilities of a nuclear war. Panikkar thinks that our new planetary and human situation demands changes in our religious symbols and worldviews. He advocates that religion be redefined as “the way to peace “. He admits that consciousness does not need to be identified with humanity although we do bear a special responsibility, as its only mature expression of which we are aware.

After examining a couple of concepts of God, whether She exists or not, and whether or not She intervenes in material and human reality, Panikkar follows arguments based on the consciousness of human dignity. He points to our capacity to not only destroy animal and plant life on earth but also human life. Although we cannot destroy the Andromeda Galaxy, we can destroy that for which Andromeda has any meaning.

He observes that in dealing with some metaphysical problems to do with the future of humanity and the university, we become aware of our deep dependence on our respective kosmologies, whether Buddhist, Sufi, Christian, etc, with differing ideas on the temporal, the eternal, universal extinction, transcendence, nirvana, eschatologies, cycles of universes, celestial hierarchies and levels of beings, universes, etc. (p. 381).

With all that Webb, Hubble and other telescopes reveal about the size and complexities of our immense universe, he thinks that there is more at stake here than just trying to rehabilitate the old stories so that they become once again believable. If we take the life of the spirit seriously, we may respect all these mythologies, heed what they mean to tell us, and to integrate them on another level without literally believing their stories.” We may discover that we also are somewhat infinite, in that we can become every knowable thing. Our soul has no nature of its own and has the possibility of becoming everything.

Panikkar contends that humanity loses its identity if absorbed either by the Divine above or by Matter below. Humanity is neither a servant of God, nor the king of creation. Humanity may be both but only if it recovers its proper place in reality and the unique role it has to play there.

There is something unique to humanity, irreducible to God or to Matter (p. 383). He explains that modern science proceeds in terms of laws, objectivity, experiment and through quantitative measurements. It is applied mathematics. Many other disciplines, e.g., theology, philosophy, sociology, dietetics, health, medicine, make efforts to appear scientific. Science, also, to its credit does make some efforts to have dialogue with these disciplines. Contemporary studies in the philosophy of science attempt to bring together a philosophical approach to reality with science but mostly they use scientific language and ways of thinking, which is understandable as science is monolingual and does not understand other ways of thinking.

The kosmological issue goes deeper than whether the two disciplines of western culture, which have been divorced for centuries, can be reconciled. The problem is not between two disciplines, but between two cultures, the scientific and the philosophical but even more than that, between many cultures – the intercultural challenge of our times (p. 384).

The required change is more radical than just a paradigm shift. The issue is whether modern cosmology, wonderful and awesome though it is, with three years of spectacular Webb photos now freely available, for example, offers a picture of the real world where humans can unfold all their possibilities and reach their fullness of life to which we all aspire. Scientific cosmology cannot offer such a world where we feel at home unless humans are reduced to rational “thinking” machines and thinking to “problem solving.” We cannot identify reality with what science makes of it, nor presume that science offers the only possible understanding of reality. The quantitative method cannot fully approach and disclose reality, which is far more complex than that. Traditional kosmologies also are no longer adequate. We can learn from them, but their time is over (p. 384).

Science itself is undergoing important changes, with indeterminacy, the participatory roles of observers, the rise of quantum physics and computers, and entanglements, all becoming important in our understanding of reality. Mathematics too is becoming more fluid, pluralistic, diverse, fuzzy and less rigid. Panikkar thinks that the crisis goes deeper to the method of the scientific project (p. 385).

Panikkar asserts that the ways in which we reach for something depend both on the instruments that we use and on our pre-understanding about the nature of that thing. He thinks that the new kosmology is much more radical than a scientific revolution within western cosmology. Human thinking does not exclusively need mathematical rails. As a human and creative act by which we become aware of Being it does not need a paradigm, even though science offers a very powerful one, among others. Creative thinking builds its own paradigms (p. 385).

Modern science is based not on pure speculation in order to see and enjoy reality, but on the experiment into reality in order foresee its behaviour and control. Whereas the cultivation of our inner tools (contemplation) deepens our view, the cultivation of our external tools (action) enlarges our vision. Modern science needs instruments, which do not require much thinking but rather calculating, not experience but experimenting (p. 387)

The successes of modern science do not need a holistic approach and can be independent of philosophy and theology. Planets came to be seen to follow the laws of physics and, while God was still seen as the mathematical architect who set things in motion at the Creation, He was gradually considered to be irrelevant to the world’s ongoing operations (p. 386)

Mathematics became the strongest basis of and support for modern science. It is “neither metaphysical speculation nor experimental science but it furnishes the proofs for the latter”. It gained its authority as nature seems to be obedient to these abstract calculations and logic. A bridge built using mathematical formulas and calculations does stand. However, this authority needs to be loosened and challenged. “The kosmos is not only the scientific cosmos: the mathematical method is not the only way to approach reality” (p. 388)

Modern science was supposed to help us reach a full and free human life but it has gradually become more exclusive and sophisticated than philosophy and theology. A scientist is a skillful knower of the particular methods specific to a given branch of science (p. 388) One of the factors in our metacrisis today, our meaning crisis, as John Vervaeke calls it, comes from the suspicion that the proper approach to reality, and the adequate way to reach freedom and fulfillment as human beings may not be the scientific, quantitative, mathematical method, although we have difficulty in seeing any other way open to us (p. 388).

He maintains that no doctrine can be understood without a kosmological framework. The ancient Kosmologies included gods, spirits, magic, earth beings and heavenly energies. Christianity dispelled most of them although for a while God, angels and the communion of saints remained. These have slowly been replaced by space/time, mass energy, nuclear forces, gravity, etc.The universe was polyphonic which required us to be enthralled by it to understand it. This mysterious kosmos has turned into a still enigmatic but now measurable world, with its mathematization (p. 389)

He sees the history of science has humans as the observers. Although humans know that they are so, they are more interested in what is being observed, the objective side of reality, the righthand quadrants in Wilber’s AQAL model. People are fascinating with the latest findings about galaxies, the expansion of the universe, black holes, quasars, quarks, energy and its transformation, genetic codes, chemical reactions and physical laws, all expressed in mathematical, quantitative language, always looking for the “Unified Theory of Everything.” Humans have forgotten themselves in their focus on the external world, even though science today does acknowledge the role of the observer (p. 389)

These detailed laws have also been applied to the human organism and the management of social organizations, as well as other areas of life, including pharmaceuticals, surgery, psychohistory, etc. (p. 390)

Panikkar challenges the theistic argument that, because there are order and design in the universe, there must be a Divine designer. He does not find this to be philosophically convincing He wryly observes that many Christian philosophers have not learned to look at the lilies of the field. They want so badly to see their Author that they trample the flowers underfoot. The scientists are no better. In search of the “cause” or other “laws” of the lily, they uproot the plant and tear every petal off its flower in order to find “it.” The “look” of the Gospel is a holistic look, in which are included God, the fields, our trust and even Solomon. Panikkar wants to overcome both atheistic and anti-scientific attitudes, while still looking at the lilies with love, care, appreciation and enjoyment. He wants to go behind this dualistic attitude and overcome this theistic/atheistic paradigm (p. 391).

Panikkar observes that contesting the existence of a transcendent designer does not mean maintaining the atheistic position and declaring that the design has come about by spontaneous generation, chance or probability. He thinks, on the contrary, that it is its own revelation, although not the revelation of a designer. The revelation of the design is the unveiling of a deeper dimension inherent in the design, a divine immanence, as well as transcendence (p. 391). He refers to the contemplative look without which our vision of reality being incomplete tends to search for an outside cause. The contemplative look, “looking the lilies” (and not just “looking at” them, sees the entire reality, not through, but “in” the lilies or “as” lilies. This requires going beyond a quantitative pattern, in which affirming that lilies are the whole reality is absurd. It requires seeing all things, including people, as “things,” as “divine,” and also as “nothingness.” He affirms that we are on a pilgrimage. Notions such as holy indifference, detachment and the like, are not the special witness of highly gifted spiritualists, but belong to anyone with a nonreductionistic notion of humanity within the tripartite anthropologies of many cultures (p. 392). Panikkar asserts that it is crude anthropomorphism to assume a designer, and a crude mechanistic attitude to presuppose that there has to be a cause behind it all. Such attitudes signal a lack of contemplation. It is not a question of discovering God but of seeing the invisible. When contemplating the design, the otherwise invisible complete design appears in all its divine splendour (p. 392).

He concludes, in this section, that a trinitarian kosmology is no longer monotheistic. The Trinity is not three substances, which would be tritheism. The trinity is pure relation, in which we are also included, as the Christian Incarnation affirms. “This trinitarian view may, on the one hand, enter into conflict with the prevalent scientific cosmology, while on the other hand, it may offer a more positive solution than that of mutual respect at the price of total separation between the scientific and religious realms (p. 392).

Panikkar describes the picture of reality drawn by science: There is the universe, which is fundamentally a material amount of mass and/or energy. It develops temporally and spatially, and a certain moment, human beings appear, the observer of this universe, who evolves to this present stage from which some humans can survey the whole situation and develop a cosmology. Humans may be a unique exemplar in the universe or just one of many intelligent life forms scattered throughout the universe. Although none have yet been discovered, science keeps an open mind and the search goes on. We could be at the end of our evolution or heading towards the Superhuman, beyond our present capacities. As organic matter in the immensity of the universe, we have developed the capacity for reflection which makes us wonder. We are on our way from our humble origins in a Big Bang to an unknown destination, eg. Omega. Perhaps Deity was just a word to express that Mystery which scientists are prompted to investigate. For some scientists, God, if at all, would be at the final stage of Evolution, not at the beginning. For the moment, we do not need “Him” (p. 394). Within this picture there is still plenty of room for humans to practice their religion, as long as there is freedom of research for all scientific investigations, including genetic engineering (p. 395).

Panikkar thinks that once we disconnect everything from everything, once we forego the ontonomic order, only a heteronomic force can put order in the world, such as with police and violence. Once community is an empty word and reduced to a sum of individuals, only the power of votes, numbers, arms or money will keep order in society.

If humanity is just another specimen in the universe, a rational animal, one among the millions of living species on the planet, let alone one individual among countless galaxies, then why do we need traditional morality? Why not let scientists do whatever they like in the name of freedom of research? Why treat humans differently from animals (p. 395)?

The scientific answer, according to Panikkar, is to look to the law of the greatest numbers, and to leave it up to historians of religion and sociologists to talk about ethical principles and the like. This is relevant to the area of the rapid development of AI, for which there are currently few, if any, ethical guidelines. On what grounds can we develop some ethical guidelines (p. 396)? Once ethics has been deprived of its religious foundations, only sheer power can maintain the order of the status quo. The person seems either lost in awe over all this, or just unimportant in the entire process. What matters now is no longer the person, but rather statistics for the sociologists, parts of the body, diagnoses, prescriptions, etc for the specialists. The scientific outlook is not sentimental. We can take this grand plan of applied physical laws right up to the scientific and technocratic organization of society under a theoretically perfect democratic world government, which would take care of every individual’s needs (p. 397).

In such a world, the computer and AI will take care and take over. In the privacy of their homes, and in time off from their increasingly automated productivity, individuals will “enjoy” the undisturbed freedom to push any button, choose any app, website or channel in order to be informed and entertained online. A few religious people can be tolerated as long as they do not disturb our technocratic civilization (p. 397).

He admits that there are many positive features to the overall scenario, but he thinks that, if left to itself, techno-science will form the thinking of the intellectual elites, which is what we see happening. His main critique is not of science; it is of philosophy, which has abdicated its role, which involves inspiring human beings to overcome our cultural schizophrenia. The scientific story cannot be separated from human history. Basic research cannot ignore the technological civilization that uses it for its own purposes. The old argument that science is good or valueneutral and not responsible for the use of it doesn’t work. It also ignores that scientific research is heavily funded by profit-making companies. He cites the example of development and production of antipersonnel mines, for the cynicism and greed associated with them. This could be extended to the military-industrial complex and the development of ever more lethal weapons and technologies, with their association with so-called “free markets.”

He does not advocate going back to primitive, idyllic societies, which never existed. He is saying that the alternative is either a radical change in mind and heart or a catastrophe of cosmic proportions. He is a vegetarian who also believes that matter is alive, although in different ways to plants and animals. He considers that our intentionality that guides our actions also affects their results. He mentions the example of the different intentions of the early atomic physicists and the later ones who developed the atomic bomb. Sometimes surgery is needed on an unhealthy organism but when the intention of manipulating matter is money or war, as in the destruction of sacred indigenous sites for mining or industry, then this is fundamentally corrupt. We need more radical changes.

Fragments of the New Story

Panikkar uses the word “myth,” or, often, mythos, in a way unique to himself, although it has links with other, more common usages. For him, it means a horizon in which we experience an aspect of reality, unquestioned, foundational and not requiring further inquiry.

He observes that the scientific myth, in his sense, is a powerful one. Inasmuch as people believe in it, it conveys the truth by which they live. It is often said, in relation to science, that “we scientists do not understand it yet, but in the future we shall.” In the interaction between a philosophical and a scientific vision of the world, we are dealing with powerful myths and not just two doctrines (p. 398).

He says that to question a myth is much more delicate and emotional than to debate logical propositions. He has observed that while it is well known that many philosophers and theologians are attached to their theories and ideas, it is also often the case that scientists get passionate and emotional when they are challenged over what they believe is at the basis of science. Panikkar is neither against science nor monotheism. He is saying that the challenge of this century is the awareness of the radical insufficiency of both (p. 399).

His point is that we must go deeper and examine whether we are discussing a particular question or asking about the meaning of human life and activities. Authentic philosophy is not a logical game or examination of various possibilities. It is not a speciality, it is the intellectual and contemplative activity of humanity, a conscious involvement in the life of reality, which makes humanity co-responsible with reality itself. Everyone is, in this respect, a lover of wisdom, a person committed the search for truth, beauty and goodness. Our current tendency to relegate professional wisdom to the status of an elite specialty does not truly represent what the “Wisdom of Love” has traditionally meant” (p. 399).

The current philosophic vision, like the modern scientific myth, is inadequate; both ignore dimensions of the human being which have been central and important for most of humanity. The modern scientific myth diverges from the common experience of humanity throughout the ages. To accept it would be to jettison the immense riches that humanity has gathered over the millennia and impoverish our human condition as well as our prospects for human life in the future.

He thinks that if we assume that all our ancestors were undeveloped people because they did not know about quantum mechanics or lacked electricity and airplanes, then we have already accepted the schism of modernity without much resistance. He thinks that it is important to maintain a sense of solidarity with historical humanity, not only on sentimental grounds but also on recognizing intellectual ties. If we do, it will be much more difficult to believe that the peoples of the world were more primitive than us and that we at long last are on the road to full humanity and a verifiable knowledge of reality. He advocates humility and cautions against the hubris of contemporary inclinations to place Metamodern and Integral humans at the pinnacle of evolution so far.

Panikkar remarks that, while the traditional criticism of the scientific paradigm is that it leaves no room for God, his criticism is that it also leaves no room for Humanity, which is absent in the scientific mythos. However, humanity does not come fully into the picture, although there is room for people who program the computers, develop new forms of AI, etc. Humanity is often considered the obstacle to information and measurements, instead of intrinsic to reality. 400 There is, of course, room for human beings as objects to be studied, digitized, homogenized, fed into the latest supercomputer, but this doesn’t tell us who a human being is, who I am. It leaves out human subjectivity. He considers that technology has overstepped the human scale of cities, businesses, countries, etc. However, the cost of this technology is that humans as humans have evaporated (p. 400).

For Panikkar, a human is not just a rational animal, but the meeting place of all reality, who as a mesocosm combines all that there is. While humanity is not the centre of reality, either as individuals or collectively, it is more than just a miniaturization of the macrocosm. Many traditions affirm that human beings are the icon of God, although many human beings do not know that. Some spiritualities describe this experience of being icon as illumination, enlightenment, realization, awakening, satori, deification, etc.

The Need for a New Myth

He wants neither to reduce science to anthropology, nor to separate them. He claims that the subject matter of the whole of the “New Story”, includes humanity and God as well as the Kosmos. Humanity is a constitutive member of reality, the subject of scientific study as well as the object. He thinks that we need to go beyond an epistemic dualism between subject and object. Otherwise, the New Story will be fragmented and incomplete (p. 403). The Divine also needs to be included as a constitutive member of reality, although not describable in formal scientific language, such as the set of all possible sets. The Godhead cannot be confused with a mathematical matrix, which would be lifeless and abstract.

He makes a more profound point. God is not to be identified with a being called Creator, which does not exist. He submits that the traditional thinking of most of the people of the world did not maintain such a crude idea of the Divine. The living God of ordinary people is not a set containing the world as a subset. Traditional theologians did not believe in a being among the beings, nor as a huge generalized Being embracing all the beings.

He considers that the scientific paradigm has purified the idea of God and made it unbelievable in any theistic form. For Panikkar, God is neither an idol, nor a formula, neither a thing nor a concept (p. 402).

Although Panikkar cannot narrate the whole story of the New Myth, he does describe some fragments which he sees cropping up here and there. He considers that the Divine exists, is real. It is not just a human idea or projection. By this, he does not mean that the Divine has a separate existence or that its existence is the same that of Humanity and the World. It is not reducible to either. There is something “more,” “different,” “beyond,” “deeper,” “infinite” (p. 402). He puts forward that at this point in human history, we have enough maturity and experience to be aware of the damage caused by the various forms of anthropocentrisms, cosmocentrisms, and theocentrisms, which are no longer tenable, for historical reasons. We can neither eliminate Humanity from the picture nor reduce the Divine. We can however reduce the dominance of one over the other in both directions. The power and reality of the Divine consist in the fact that they are irreducible to anything human or cosmic.

Otherwise, we could just eliminate the Divine altogether. The relationship is neither heteronomous (God the boss, humanity and the cosmos the creatures), nor autonomous (God has divine rights, we our human rights).

He cautions against downgrading Matter, as well, as some idealists like Bernardo Kastrup and some spiritual Consciousness-Only schools do.

Matter has its own hierarchical equality and ontonomy, along with Humanity and the Divine, in Panikkar’s story. Science helps us to understand Matter in its own right. The three are interindependent (p. 403).

He finds the trinitarian symbol to be very helpful. The Divine is real, one of the dimensions of the universe, which pervades everything, although not directly detectable, like the body or a thought. It is an ingredient of reality, the “more” and “different.” Similarly, Matter and Consciousness also pervade everything as necessary dimensions of reality (p. 403). In his formulation, there is a perichōrēsis between the three. The Divine contains, and is everything, but so is Humanity, or, more broadly, Consciousness, and the World, as well. Each is the Whole, although not just as modalities of the real. It is a complex reality, which we see from our human vantage point. Each one is by “becoming” the others, and vice versa. He mentions that the traditional Christian trinitarian expression is that the One is by begetting and inspiring the others, and the others are by being begotten and inspired. He sees this dance as the rhythm of Being. Looking at reality in this way, every being is an I, a You and an It, (which resonates with Wilber’s Big Three personal pronouns.) The speaker is not the spoken to, nor the spoken about but all speech demands these three together. 404.

Panikkar assesses that imagination and fantasy, along with logical thinking, have made of the Divine Mystery a separate and Supreme Being, a substance. This mythos is vanishing and collapsing all around us, no longer credible to the modern and postmodern worldviews. 404 He thinks that we need a new mythos, which will contain elements from all the states of humanity, with a glue, a leading thread, a dynamic force which will integrate old and new into something as yet unforeseeable. He proposes that the cosmotheandric insight might have sufficient traditional elements as well as enough of a revolutionary character to serve as that catalyst for hope (p. 404).

The cosmotheandric trinity, as he describes it, is not an ideology but a myth. It does not inform only one religion, spiritual tradition, a unified world culture, or anything like that. It allows for communication, discussion and dialogue. Rather than creating unanimity or consensus, it is pluralistic. In terms of the new emerging archdisciplinarity field, it could be an arch between integrative metatheories and worldviews.

Panikkar sees that a new mythos is emerging, with signs of it everywhere. Fragments of this new dawning for him have many names, eg., cosmotheandric insight, sacred secularity, radical relativity, inter-independence, intercultural and interreligious dialogue, radical trinity, which he also called advaita, as homeomorphically equivalent to the latter (p. 404).

Other names for fragments of this emerging mythos, or story, could be process philosophy and theology, the integral or transformation age, Metamodernism, integrative metatheories, etc. (p. 404).

Panikkar can be seen as a “big picture” integrative metatheoretical philosopher, although he is proposing a new vision, story or mythos, rather than a meta system.

Conclusion

Panikkar’s cosmotheandric vision has much to offer as a consideration for a new mythos, gathering the fragments of much of human history, including the philosophies, religions, and traditions from East and West, bringing them into dialogue with modern developments in science and technology, and updating them as fragments of a New Story, a new Kosmology. This may contribute along with many other homeomorphic, adjacent and similar developments to a more developmentally mature human civilization, able to better deal with the challenges of our planetary metacrisis. While accepting the value and many gifts of science and technology, he was very critical of their scientistic and technocratic overreach and reductionism, leaving out both the uniqueness, subjective and intersubjective wisdom, warmth, intimacy and aliveness of Humanity, as well as the depths, transcendence, sense of infinity and freedom of Divinity. His proposal, the central theme of his life, was that reality is cosmotheandric, with three interrelated, interindependent, interpenetrating and irreducible dimensions of the Cosmic, the Divine and the Human, and that all three must be included in a comprehensive, adequate view of reality. Otherwise, we are heading for disaster and catastrophe, especially in this globally interconnected planetary world. Panikkar was very critical of technology, with its many dangers, and we would do well to consider his concerns. I hope that this article demonstrates the continuing relevance, potential and significance of the work of Raimon Panikkar, one of the world’s greatest, wisest and most compassionate thinkers, in our endeavours to contribute to and develop as more just, peaceful, sustainable, emancipated full humans, integrated with the material, cosmic and divine dimensions in our participation in the dance and adventure of reality.

Bibliography

Dawlabani, Said Elias. Second Sapience: The Rise of the Planetary Mind and the Future of Humanity. 2024. Cardiff, CA: Waterside Productions.

Integral Life website: https://integrallife.com/. Accessed 08/25/25

MetaIntegral Academy website: https://www.metaintegralacademy.com. Accessed 08/29/25

Panikkar, Raimon. The Rhythm of Being. 2010. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books.

Panikkar, Raimon. Opera Omnia, Vol. XII Space, Time and Science. 2022. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books.

Wilber, Ken. The Religion of Tomorrow. 2017. Boulder: Shambhala Publications.

Wilber, Ken. Finding Radical Wholeness. 2024. Boulder: Shambhala Publications.

Ashton presented on Barfield’s essay examining how art historians like Panofsky and Gombrich have reframed the understanding of allegory and its significance for human consciousness. Barfield challenges the inherited dismissal of allegory as overly conceptual compared to myth and creative symbolism. Through the lens of visual allegory and iconology, these scholars revealed a strange language in which there are no dictionaries because there are no fixed meanings, disrupting conventional assumptions about allegory being reducible to fixed concepts. ​

Barfield argues for a transformation in the history of perception involving a changing ratio between intellect and imagination. During the medieval period, allegory and iconology reflected a more balanced relationship between these faculties. This challenges the typical Darwinian narrative of linear progress—as if humans evolve from primitive cavemen simply by becoming more and more intelligent—suggesting instead that human consciousness has undergone qualitative transformations in how we perceive and represent reality. ​

The discussion highlighted Coleridge’s concept of primary imagination—the cosmic activity through which we bring forth the world in our self-consciousness. Barfield suggests that allegory represents humanity’s progressive capacity to work consciously with this primary imagination, involving increasing recognition of conceptual distinctions that eventually became reified in the materialist worldview. ​

Barfield follows M.H. Abrams in arguing that we have transformed Plotinus’s notion of emanation into evolution, but in doing so have lost the sense of progress as a return to the world of archetypes. The discussion connected this to the notion that humans are icons or images of divine archetypes. This reframing allows for understanding evolution not as mere linear progress but as a process involving fall and potential re-assent. ​

The group identified several contemporary thinkers working in similar directions:

• John Vervaeke, who is familiar with and cherishes Barfield’s work ​

• Iain McGilchrist, who acknowledged Barfield in his e-book but hasn’t deeply engaged with the work ​

• Zak Stein, working on existential risk and AI’s psychological impacts from a developmental psychology perspective ​

Matt noted that understanding Aristotle’s participatory epistemology—where knowledge is a form of touch and the form-matter relation is a dynamic process—requires recovering residually participatory perception. Without this, Aristotle’s philosophy falls flat and appears dualistic. ​

Jeff emphasized that Barfield centers perception in this essay, with imagination flowing through perception. A key insight is that the intellect itself is perceptual—concepts are organs of perception. The modern era has confused the artifacts of intellect with its process, treating intellectual products as mere abstractions rather than recognizing intellect as an existential, perceptual process. ​

Matt connected this to the Romantics’ recovery of the Neoplatonic and Romantic expressivist understanding that you cannot think independent of the medium of thought. When mind and matter become severed, you get the representational account and bizarre forms of functionalism—like the idea of uploading consciousness to machines. ​

Ashton shared the New Pegasus project—creating analog light projection art with colored discs and live vocal choir to induce conscious awareness of after-images and participation in perception. The project attempts to create art that is simultaneously scientific, helping viewers recognize their active role in constructing what they perceive. ​

Jeff connected Barfield’s approach to Waldorf education, suggesting the methodology is essentially allegorical—putting the imaginal and intellectual together in ways where they mutually benefit and inspire each other. The group also discussed how Steiner’s Occult Science might be understood as an allegorical work. ​

Lorenzo introduced the concept of neoteny—the evolutionary process by which humans are born increasingly premature and extend childhood development. This parallels Barfield’s archaeological movement of going back to understand earlier modes of perception in order to move forward toward “final participation.” Ashton connected this to the human form itself being neotenous, expressing humanity’s capacity for freedom. ​

The discussion explored what might come after or evolve from allegory. Ashton suggested that allegory maintains conscious distinction between self and other while not reifying it as absolute, allowing it to become a quasi-scientific method of making and creatively negotiating distinctions. Jeff proposed that maybe the next phase looks something like jazz—highly improvisational yet structured. ​

Matt referenced Schelling’s late lectures, where myth is understood not as human invention but as inventing us—human consciousness is a product of the mythological process. Now we’re called into a more participatory relationship where myth becomes material for us to remake ourselves through art, science, and philosophy.

Transcript:

Robert:

Welcome, everyone, and thanks for coming. We have a plan. I’m going to start by saying a little bit about the book by Steiner that stands behind the book that stands behind what we’re saying tonight, just to let you know the initial impulse and articulation.

It’s a lecture in Steiner’s book “Human and Cosmic Thought.” There are four lectures, and the one Mario Betti drew from is Lecture Two, which Steiner delivered on the 21st of January, 1914. I think you should notice that date, 1914. I’ll say something about that.

Lecture Two is called “The Possibility of Contemplating the World from Twelve Different Standpoints through Twelve Equally Justified World Outlooks.” Now, for someone like Steiner, who is so well known for his strong opinions, his affirmations, and his arguments on behalf of definite positions, for him to say that there are twelve worldviews, and that they are equally justifiable, is, to my mind, remarkable. It certainly goes beyond what I can affirm or even know how to do. I know it’s a good exercise to attempt this. At the same time, I don’t know where we’ll end up, given that we both have philosophical convictions. So we’ll see how that plays out.

I wanted you to know about the book. It’s very readable, because it’s based on lectures, which makes it inviting. In the first lecture, Steiner talks about the history of thinking. Since he is an advocate of the evolution of consciousness, this is a very important distinction for him. He doesn’t just talk about the history of thought or the history of ideas. He’s very clear that there is a history of the way of thinking.

He says that the kind of thinking we do automatically, without being conscious of how we’re doing it in the modern West, came about, in his view, quite dramatically, around the 15th century. But he also says that way back, earlier, there was thinking that was mostly pictorial, and that there was a slow but dramatic transition, roughly between the 8th and 2nd or 3rd centuries BCE. More and more thinkers in India, somewhat in China, but especially in Greece, were able to make this transition from pictorial thinking to thinking in abstract ideas.

In his view, the two great champions here are Plato and Aristotle, who will be hovering over us tonight in what we’re talking about. Much of what we’ll be discussing are variations on Plato and Aristotle. And as some of you know, Matt has a project called “Footnotes to Plato” that he’s been running in all his free time, which I think is between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. Matt, maybe you should say a word about it.

Matt:

Well, as Robert mentioned, I’ve been doing philosophy online for a long time, trying to be in conversation with people who are very different from me. That’s relevant to our theme tonight. The internet appeared with a lot of promise to bring the world together, and it has seemingly done the opposite, but I’m still trying.

I like to engage with people, whether in politics or philosophy, who are very different from me. I’ve been doing this since about 2006 or 2007, when YouTube’s servers were still in someone’s garage in Palo Alto, before Google bought them. I still continue to do it today. “Footnotes2Plato” is the name of my blog. It’s a reference to Alfred North Whitehead, who famously said that all of Western philosophy consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. All the philosophical problems we still struggle with were already present in Plato’s dialogues. Many of the potential solutions are there too, but Plato also provides refutations of those solutions.

Robert:

And in something I wrote, which I located today, I quoted the passage that Matt is referring to. I introduced it by saying that it is almost always misquoted. Whitehead’s statement is actually very careful and, I think, very interesting. He says: “The safest generalization of Western philosophy is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” And then he goes on and says something I had completely forgotten, about how, by which he means that Plato, by his historical circumstances and his genius, basically created the context within which Whitehead himself is working. I was very happy to rediscover that.

So, we are talking about ideas and thinking, particularly thinking in twelve ways or twelve paradigms, which Steiner recommends, I would say, as a spiritual activity. He puts strong emphasis on the fact that, in our time, it is important that we learn to think in the “philosophical shoes” of people with whom we disagree.

Matt is going to talk about Mario Betti and the book we were asked to write a foreword for. Before that, I want to say a little more about the philosophical situation that Steiner discerned, namely that it is becoming more and more difficult for people with strong intellectual commitments to even understand, let alone tolerate, other points of view.

I think if Steiner and William James had met, they would have had a lot to talk about. They were writing at roughly the same time. James said that philosophy is a series of alternatives. It was easy for him to say this because he didn’t settle very much. He was delighted by the variety of opinions, many of which he held himself. He wasn’t as strong an advocate for one particular outlook as Steiner was.

But Steiner, in 1914, says: “there is not one worldview that can be defended as legitimate, but twelve. And he says that it has to be admitted that there are just as many good reasons for one worldview as for any one of the other eleven. The world cannot be regarded from a single standpoint, from the outlook of one worldview, one thought. It reveals itself only to those who know that one must circumnavigate it, just as in the Copernican worldview the sun passes through the signs of the zodiac, shining upon the earth from twelve different regions. Likewise, we should not position ourselves upon a single standpoint, say that of idealism or sensationalism or phenomenalism, or any other outlook that can be named, but instead we should be able to encircle the world and live our way into the twelve different perspectives from which the world can be regarded.”

I think that is quite a strong statement from someone with very strong commitments. It is an interesting juxtaposition.

Just to conclude this part, one of my favorite lines from Plato, from the Republic, is: “Thinking begins when conflicting perceptions arise.” One of the services of Steiner’s lecture, and then of Mario Betti’s book, is that they force us into, I would say, eleven conflicts: the one worldview we habitually occupy, and the other eleven that are distinctly different, in some cases strongly opposed. That gets us thinking, if we are at all open to it. And with that, I will stop here and turn to Matt.

Matt:

Thanks, Robert.

As Robert started to indicate, there are different historical worldviews that humanity moves through. You might think of someone like Jean Gebser describing a movement from an archaic to a magical, to a mythical, to a mental or rational, and then potentially to an integral structure of consciousness. We move through these structures historically.

What Steiner is doing here, as I understand it, in this 1914 lecture, is giving a snapshot of the possibilities for consciousness today, for a consciousness that is thinking in abstract concepts, rather than in pictures or mythic stories or magic spells, as past forms of consciousness did. For a consciousness that is primarily rational, or striving to be rational, thinking in terms of concepts, these are, for Steiner, the twelve possibilities.

He admits there might be some intermediate possibilities, but for the sake of simplification he names twelve, and correlates them with the zodiac signs. I won’t go too far into those correlations. What Betti is doing is bringing Steiner’s insight into these twelve possibilities, as articulated in 1914 just as the First World War is about to begin, into our postmodern age.

Remember, this is six months before the outbreak of WWI. There is tension in Europe. Nationalism is about to boil over. This is a very serious topic. It’s not just abstract philosophical speculation. It is about how we live together.

Betti is picking up where Steiner left off in our postmodern condition, where we see every day that people basically inhabit private worldviews. Social media feeds us narratives and news that fit our pre-existing prejudices. We end up in a kind of solipsistic space, unable to communicate across political divides, cultural divides, and various identity boundaries that prevent mutual understanding.

There is a great danger of postmodern relativism, of the purely private worldview. We lack a sense of cultural belonging that could transcend these private identities. Betti is trying to draw on Steiner to speak to this condition. The question is: how can we not just tolerate difference, tolerate other worldviews, but actually risk our own sense of identity, our self-understanding and world-understanding, in encounter with others? How can we recognize a full humanity that transcends any one of our narrow perspectives?

From Steiner’s point of view, the human being is not just standing in front of a cosmic diagram. I would call it not just a cosmogram, but an anthropogram: an image of the human being’s relationship to the cosmos. The human being is somehow an integration of all twelve possibilities. Steiner is trying to get us to step into a mode of consciousness that, while inevitably drawn more to some perspectives than to others, can become fully human by learning to take in all the possibilities of human experience and understanding.

“Worldview” is a term that touches many dimensions. It shapes our self-conception as individuals, how individuals relate to society or community, and how we conceive of action. Are we free? Are we not free? What does the future look like? A worldview tells us where we came from and where we are going. There is often a religious component: maybe there is a God, maybe not; maybe the soul is immortal, maybe not. Whether we are religious or not, our worldview tells us where we derive meaning, our sense of personal destiny. There are scientific aspects, artistic aspects, religious aspects.

Each one of Steiner’s twelve worldviews draws on the nature of the human being and emphasizes one or another of our capacities. But to become a full human being, we are trying to realize the whole. Steiner and Betti are trying to avoid two dangers. One is relativism, as I mentioned. The other is exclusivism.

As Robert read in that quote, each one of these worldviews has very good reasons, very good justifications. People can argue fully consistently and convincingly for materialism, for idealism, for dynamism, and so on. Each worldview has a kind of self-consistent completeness.

Yet, if we want to understand the full potential of our humanity, we have to be willing to risk what we thought we knew in order to encounter difference and be transformed by it. Betti says that tolerance is a good place to start, but it is not the endpoint. Tolerance is something like: “I don’t really get what you’re doing, but as long as you stay over there, I’ll tolerate it.” What Betti is calling for is more than tolerance. He calls for recognition, acknowledgment, welcome of difference, and a willingness to risk oneself in encounter with difference, so that we might be transformed.

This is hard, because you might be willing to be transformed by an encounter, but the person you encounter may not be. I think it was Martin Luther King Jr. who said, “I cannot be who I am supposed to be until you are who you are supposed to be, and vice versa.” That’s our situation. It requires a great deal of trust.

So we’re looking for a deep pluralism, deep enough that it does not deny unity. It’s a unity in diversity. A shallower form of pluralism or multiculturalism is just based on tolerance. It’s “you stay in your neighborhood, I’ll stay in mine; you get your aisle at the grocery store, I get my aisle.” That’s a shallow form that does not require transformation.

It’s not that we want to eradicate difference, but we do need to really get inside other people’s worldviews. This book and Steiner’s lecture are exercises in thinking, challenges to inhabit worldviews we aren’t comfortable with. The more we can do that, the more human we become.

Robert:

I want to read something I intended to bring, because it connects with this. It comes out of William James, though in this case via Thomas Nagel. This is from Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, which several of us in the faculty read together a couple of years ago.

Nagel writes: “Philosophy has to proceed comparatively. The best we can do is to develop the rival alternative conceptions in each important domain as fully and carefully as possible, depending on our antecedent sympathies, and see how they measure up. That is a more credible form of progress than decisive proof or refutation.”

I think that’s quite helpful and positive. The great philosophers did something like this. But Steiner and Betti go one step further. They’re not just saying we should consider rival alternative conceptions. As Matt said convincingly, they’re saying we need to engage them, we need to take these opposite points of view into our thinking. That is much more difficult than what Nagel, and even James, were calling for, though even Nagel and James are already an advance beyond what typically happens in philosophy.

I want to read another passage, from Albert William Levi’s Philosophy and the Modern World: “Philosophical movements of the recent past are to be viewed as waves of successive reform beating upon an infinite shore, with each group of partisans committed to a conception of philosophy which assures them a virtual monopoly of its legitimate practice. To pragmatists, logical empiricists, and linguistic analysts alike, any alternative conception of what philosophy is rests upon a tragic mistake.”

I think that would be true of all twelve of Steiner’s worldviews. Any one of them, when absolutized, tends to see all the others as based on a tragic mistake. Steiner and Betti are asking us to loosen that grip.

Matt:

There are twelve worldviews. We thought, “five minutes per worldview, and we might fit this into an hour.” When we really got down to it, we realized that was far too tight. We might mention each one briefly, but we can’t do them all justice.

Here they all are, as Steiner presents them. These are philosophical worldviews. There are many other kinds of worldviews you might name: cultural worldviews, religious worldviews, and so on. Steiner is focusing on philosophical possibilities.

He arranges them in four quadrants. This quadrant here has to do with worldviews of will; this one with worldviews of sensing; this with feeling; and this one with thinking.

What Robert and I are going to do is start by inhabiting a few of them in polar pairs. Matt will start with materialism. Then Robert will take spiritism or spiritualism, its polar opposite. Then he will do idealism, and I’ll respond with realism, which is special because, as you’ll see, we both feel drawn to some form of realism.

So, starting with materialism. It’s a real exercise, to try to inhabit the materialist worldview and understand what is valuable in it.

As Robert mentioned, after around 1500, materialism started to become the dominant worldview in the West: in Europe, North America, and all the places where “the West” touched, which eventually meant the whole planet. The materialist worldview has a lot to do with the so-called Age of Exploration, as European ships traveled across the Atlantic and around the Horn of Africa into the East, “discovering space” for the first time in a new way, inhabiting a sense of a spatially extended world.

Perspectival painting in the Renaissance expresses this too. A new sense of space and extension was being born, a new perspective in which human beings saw themselves as inhabiting a vast space with the potential to master the matter within it.

When we inhabit the worldview of materialism, we’re thinking in terms of exploration of the planet and a sense of great technological potential. The materialist worldview is what gives us germ theory, for example. We begin to understand how disease has a micro-organismic basis. That’s a really valuable insight. We get physical science, in the sense Descartes articulated: matter as existing in a geometrically extended realm that we can understand mathematically.

Already, materialism begins to bleed into a kind of mathematism as science develops. In the scientific revolution, thinkers like Kepler and Newton were undermining the ancient Aristotelian differentiation between the sublunary sphere of earth, where physical stuff happens, and the supralunar realms, where the spiritual happens according to very different causal principles.

What the first scientists of the 17th century discovered is that there are laws that transcend that boundary. When Kepler writes about “celestial physics,” just in that phrase there is already an expansion of the materialist outlook. For Aristotle, there is no “physics” in the sky; there’s no matter up there. Those are subtler spiritual happenings. But Kepler talks about celestial physics, and Newton about heavenly mechanics. Suddenly, the laws that apply to the terrestrial realm, that cause apples to fall, are the same laws that cause the planets to orbit the sun: one universal law of gravitation.

When we think about the power of gravity to forge worlds, to form planets and stars, that is a materialistic insight. Mass, attraction, motion.

Whitehead is a good example of a thinker who wants to do justice to materialism. But what happens in the 20th century is that materialism, in its effort to reduce matter to its smallest components, ends up discovering that matter has more dynamism and a more thoroughly mathematical quality than expected. When you push one worldview to its extreme, you discover that it connects to others.

There’s another dimension to materialism if we think in a religious context. A Christian mystic contemporaneous with the German Idealists, Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, said: “Corporeality is the end of the ways of God.” Corporeality, embodiment, is the end or goal of God’s ways. God is aiming for materialization. This is one way of thinking about the mystery of incarnation. One of the most important religions in human history emphasizes that the divine became a human body and died. There’s something more mysterious about materialism than meets the eye, if we live into that mystery.

To close materialism, I want to read a few lines from a poem Goethe wrote while he was in a crypt holding his friend Schiller’s skull in his hand. Materialism is about the bones, the structure that allows our bodies to exist.

Goethe picks up the skull and says he feels a sudden rush of warmth and joy, as if life rises up out of death. He addresses the skull as a “mysterious vessel” and asks whether there can be any greater knowledge than “God in nature revealed to us,” and learning how nature, from solid forms of earth, “lets the spirit issue.” He emphasizes how long matter preserves what spirit first engendered.

That, to me, is materialism at its best: seeing how spirit needs bone, body, structure to fully realize itself. Goethe is never just in one worldview or another. As he says, “Nothing alive is one thing alone, but always manifold diversity.”

Robert:

So, first of all, that was not merely a defense of materialism. You did a very good job, but you also revealed yourself as “pro-matter,” and that’s exactly what we’re here to do: make the positive case for each outlook.

I’m now to speak about spiritualism, or spiritism. Let me begin with the word itself. Should it be “spiritism” or “spiritualism”? In the chart, we are not talking about “spirit” as such, but about “spiritualism” as a worldview, just as we’re not talking about “matter” as such but about “materialism.” So I’ll use “spiritualism,” though there is no entirely satisfactory term. “Spiritism” usually evokes the dramatic emergence of the spiritualist movement at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries: the Fox sisters in upstate New York, Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott, and so on. They opposed certain forms of spiritualism while making a very strong case for spirit. The terminology here is messier than in the case of materialism.

Matt has already set the context. We are in a materialistic worldview to the extent that we are like fish in the sea who don’t know they are in water. Our thinking, behavior, values are so permeated by materialism that it’s very hard to step out of it. As soon as we try to turn to a non-materialist worldview, we notice the term is defined negatively. Spiritualism is “non-materialism.” It doesn’t have as much positive standing on its own. It’s always defining itself against the prior and dominant claim of matter.

So, anyone who wants to affirm spirit, or spiritual realities, is always fighting a great battle against the dominant claim of matter and materialism. Sociologically, spiritualism tends to be associated with a certain “Gestalt of weirdness.” It doesn’t feel quite as real as matter, which we can touch, weigh, measure, and build with. Matter is what we use to change the world, or so it seems.

If spiritualism is trying to get it right, it is claiming that, contrary to our initial, ordinary perception, spirit is actually the deeper dimension. The trouble is that you need people who can say there is another dimension, that it is there, and that it can be perceived, even if not touched in the same way as the material world. It is an uneven pairing in our culture.

Yet Steiner, Aurobindo, Gebser, Teilhard, and many others insist that there was a time when spirit was in fact the stronger paradigm, the dominant view. Materialism, in Steiner’s and Aurobindo’s view, emerges mostly in the modern world, particularly in the modern West. If you don’t know much history, you can think, “Well, it’s always been this way,” but the evolution-of-consciousness thinkers say no. It’s not just different ideas. It’s different ways of thinking.

Our way of thinking tends almost automatically to be in terms of the physical, the measurable, the quantitative, the “objective.” Spirit, by definition, is subtler, less amenable to the kinds of evidence we’ve come to privilege. Yet, speaking now as a spiritualist, I would say: spirit is the ultimate, the core reality. Matter comes from spirit, not the other way around. Spirit is the truer perspective of the two. Materialism, though it has great power and dominance, is actually secondary and subordinate. If our culture could see that, as cultures once did and some still do, but not the one we inhabit, we’d regain something vital.

Maybe I’ll pause there and hand it back to Matt.

Matt:

Just a few things about this polarity between matter and spirit. I would want to think of it as a polarity. We might say spirit is primary, but I worry about language that makes matter “subordinate” to spirit in a dismissive sense. Perhaps spirit is primary in the sense that matter is an expression, an embodiment of spirit, but spirit needs matter to have bodies. Without bodies, nothing is actually happening; even subtler bodies must be bodies.

One way of depicting this polarity is gravitation and levitation. With materialism, we immediately understand gravity. Things fall. With spiritism, we might think in terms of levitation, which is much more difficult to take seriously in our materialistic paradigm. Yet, as science itself shows, we don’t actually know what gravity is. Brian Swimme tells a story of finishing his PhD in gravitational dynamics—he knew everything there was to know about gravity mathematically. Then, on a camping trip, he picked up a stone and dropped it, and realized he had no idea what was actually happening. He had all the abstract modeling, but the phenomenon itself eluded him.

That’s where the spiritualist rushes in and says: that’s because the cause is not itself a material cause. Spirit is involved. The materialist thinks in terms of the periodic table of elements. The spiritualist thinks in terms of angelic hierarchies. How different can you get?

Robert:

Yes. And just as with idealism and realism, the differences are stark.

I’ll add one brief correction about what Betti says. He says that spiritualism “denies matter,” and I don’t think that’s right. As far as I can tell, spiritualists like Steiner and Blavatsky don’t deny matter. They are talking about what is primary, and about different modes of accessibility, not outright denial. Matter is not unreal; it is derivative.

Matt:

Exactly. And since we’re talking about polarity, we can say that spirit without matter is as incomplete as matter without spirit.

Robert:

Maybe I’ll try to take up idealism. When Matt sent me his first draft of the pairs, I wrote back and said, “Wait a minute, you just finished teaching a whole course on German Idealism, you should do idealism!” In the spirit of the exercise, though, Matt decided to do the opposite and handed it to me. A good dialectic.

It’s not as though I’m unfamiliar. I wrote my dissertation on Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, who was an Indian Hegelian, and my first publications were on Sri Aurobindo, another major Indian idealist. So I’ve thought about idealism a great deal.

When we say “idealism,” we almost automatically think historically: “Ah yes, I read Plato.” That is indeed the right place to start. Plato was a great idealist. I think we should understand idealism as a solution. Plato saw the conflict of virtues and values in Athenian life leading to terrible injustice, not least the execution of his teacher Socrates. He was desperate to find definitions of the virtues that would stand still, that could be identified, defined, and referred to.

Here we are, in a world of conflict, everything changing, competing ideas, a good deal of skepticism, some people even pushing skepticism as the norm. Plato wanted a standard, something we could point to and say, “There, that is justice itself,” as we sometimes do with the Constitution, except this standard would be flawless: the pure concept, the ideal itself. Not a concept abstracted from many examples, but one we intuit “in its own right.” This is love itself, or truth itself, or beauty itself, or justice itself. We grasp it in its purity and unchanging reality. That was his ideal, and he wrote his dialogues as what he thought Socrates might have said, had he written books.

But as often happens, the student emerges. By the time we reach the Symposium and the Republic, Plato himself has become equal to the teacher, and on some days perhaps goes beyond him. Those dialogues are superb texts that establish the believability, and perhaps the necessity, of an idealist worldview. Plato says that if we are going to have a just society, we will need all the parts in the right place, in right relation to one another, and that relation must conform to the ideal of justice. Idealism begins there.

Then, centuries later, Plotinus, not in a Christian but still in a deeply spiritual Greek context, sees the ideals as dwelling in a realm he calls Nous, the divine intellect. This is the realm of the Forms, which create the world. They emanate from the Absolute and are, in some sense, a plural Absolute, very much like the relation of Atman to Brahman in Indian thought. This is a realm where ideals can be “seen” by thinking.

Augustine, in a Christian context, a student of Plotinus after a dramatic life, recognizes that Plato and the Platonists were onto something profound: ideas live in the mind of God. The Christian revelation, for him, deepens and makes more vivid on earth the reality of these ideals. They are not just abstractions; they are realities in God’s mind.

Then, in the late Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, several things happen. One is the rise of nominalism. The ideas, which for Plato and Augustine had objective reality, become mere names. They are not realities in themselves, but convenient labels, with a certain arbitrariness. By the time we get to the 20th century, there is scarcely any philosophical belief that ideals have an independent reality outside the social and cultural contexts that generate and sustain them. Idealism has a great history, but for various reasons it is now fighting for its life.

Instead of metaphysics, we have largely turned to anthropology. Philosophy becomes an analysis of how humans talk, rather than a study of the reality ideals point to. That doesn’t mean idealism is false. It means that in our culture we have lost something extremely valuable and in need of rescue. Many of the great spiritual thinkers of the last two centuries, including Steiner, Aurobindo, and others, see themselves as trying to rescue this.

Matt:

You almost have me convinced.

The realist, though, says to the idealist: these ideals, these Forms of the Good, Justice, Beauty, are wonderful, but how do they become actual? Whitehead inherits a great deal from Plato and draws upon him deeply, but he turns to Plato and says, “Wait a minute. You are saying these abstract ideas are more real than concrete, embodied experience?”

Plato is more nuanced than the caricature, of course. If you read the Symposium, for example, it’s not as though he denies the body or beauty or lived experience. Still, a realist like Whitehead wants to say that your ideal forms are, by themselves, deficient in actuality. They become what they were meant to be when they are ingressed, when they incarnate into our actual experience.

There’s a story about Whitehead co-teaching with Hocking, an idealist, at Harvard. At one point, Whitehead became so fed up with the overly idealistic perspective that he said, “If you want to know what the real is, it’s getting tackled rugby.” He had been a star rugby player as a young man. His point is simple: external reality exists. It knocks us over. We don’t just live in a realm of concepts.

Betti and Steiner describe realism as “the human worldview par excellence.” There is a naïve form of realism when we first come into the world as children. We don’t arrive as Cartesian egos doubting the existence of the external world. We come into human form as infants, and grow through childhood taking for granted that we are in a world and that it is real. Only gradually do we develop a capacity for inwardness and reflection, and perhaps for intimation of something beyond. We start as realists, pass through many worldviews, and, as Betti suggests, can come back to realism after a long journey, to discover a “higher realism.”

Steiner has a participatory understanding of the relationship between mind and reality that expresses this higher realism. And here we come to what I would call the scandal of modern philosophy. Influenced by Descartes and then Kant, modern philosophers began to doubt the existence of the external world. They developed transcendental idealism, where the primary reality is the structure of subjectivity, not the world. In the 20th century, Heidegger looks at Kant’s attempt to “prove” the existence of the external world and says: there could hardly be a better indictment of modern philosophy. The fact that you feel it necessary to prove that the world exists shows how far you’ve fallen from common sense realism.

In this higher realism, doubt has its place. We may need to go through a period of doubt to awaken this inward sense of self-consciousness. But we come back to an affirmation that the world is real and that our knowledge has a participatory structure. Steiner says that without consciousness, the world is incomplete. He writes that “the whole world, apart from the human being, is an enigma, and the human being is its solution.” He also says that knowledge does not belong only to an individual person, but to the being and becoming of the world.

So rather than knowledge being “in us” as a private possession, or “in the brain” as the materialist would say, or in a disembodied intellect as the idealist would say, the realist proposes that knowledge is the completion of a circuit that runs through our being out into the world and back. When, for example, we develop a deep understanding of the growth of a plant, as Goethe did in his theory of the metamorphosis of plants, the world itself has achieved a kind of completion that it would not have had without our participation.

This is a realism that does not deny ideas or thinking, but understands thinking as a function of the world process. The goal is not for the realist to deny idealism or any of the other worldviews, but to integrate them. The question is: what does the realist affirm as real, that the others tend to dismiss? The realist says: the world of becoming. The world as a process of growth, transformation, birth and death. The idealist says: if it is changing, it is not truly real; only the eternal is truly real. The realist replies: yes, there is a realm of possibilities, but they are not complete in themselves. They need actual occasions, concrete events, in order to be what they are.

Aristotle already pushes in this direction when he says that the forms are “in the things,” not in a separate intelligible realm. He has this notion of hylomorphism, from hyle, meaning matter, and morphe, form. Matter and form need each other. Just as spirit and matter need each other, form and matter need each other. The realist wants to say: if you make the ideas preeminent and the sensible world a mere pale imitation, you are missing the participatory nature of knowledge, which draws on the forms but integrates them into living beings and events.

Robert:

Good. And in Whitehead, the forms are there to be drawn upon. But we still have to ask: what is their status? What is the ontology of these forms? Are they mental? Are they in some third realm? How do they exist?

Matt:

Now we’re getting into the nuances of Whitehead. He calls them “eternal objects.” They are possibilities awaiting actuality. They are not events, but pure potentials for definiteness. They do exist, in his language, in the primordial nature of God. For Whitehead, God is an actual entity, but God’s primordial nature is this ordered realm of possibilities that can enter into the becoming of finite occasions. So the forms are real, but real as possibilities in a divine mind that is itself in relation to the ongoing creative advance of the world.

Robert:

That’s a good answer.

Below is the draft of the foreword Matt Segall coauthored with Robert McDermott. The book, Twelve Ways of Seeing the World by Mario Betti is published by Hawthorn Press. Betti’s book builds fruitfully upon the ideas of Steiner’s lectures on the topic of the 12 human worldviews, available here: https://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA151/English/RSP1991/HCT991_index.html

Foreword to Mario Betti, Twelve Ways of Seeing the World

By Robert McDermott and Matthew D. Segall

February 4, 2019

Rudolf Steiner was one of the 20th century’s few true Renaissance men. While modern science, art, religion, politics, and philosophy continued to fall into increasing specialization, fragmentation, deconstruction, and narrow-minded conflict, Steiner labored tirelessly to create new integral approaches to education, agriculture, medicine, architecture, social reform, banking, visual and performance art, esotericism, and more, all inspired by a deep commitment to humanity’s spiritual potential. Mario Betti, a lifelong practitioner of Steiner’s anthroposophical method, has written a book that succeeds not only in its clear interpretation of a sometimes enigmatic thinker’s ideas but in its brilliant amplifications and applications of these ideas to our present day circumstances.

Betti offers his book as a stimulus or seed to support the growth of a still fledgling pluralistic society. Achieving a planetary humanity guided by freedom and love out of the ashes of the modern pathologies of fascism, totalitarianism, nationalism, oligarchism, and terrorism (the list goes on) will require more than a shallow, relativistic multiculturalism that settles for mere tolerance. Betti draws on Goethe to remind us that tolerance can only be a temporary position. Genuine pluralism, Betti shows, requires more than toleration: it requires a willingness to engage the whole of our being in deep communication with and mutual affirmation of other worldviews. We must strive to reach across our differences through an inner development that is capable of seeing their holistic interdependence. Betti’s amplification of Steiner’s twelve worldviews is a profound aid in this effort of inner development. Significantly, it shows the dignity and merit of each way of seeing the world at the same time that it reveals the danger of exclusivism. Every worldview becomes false the moment it claims to be the whole of the world.

Albert William Levy’s Philosophy and the Modern World, a particularly expert and readable account of 20th century philosophies, summarizes our present situation well:

…philosophical movements of the recent past are to be viewed as waves of successive reform beating upon an infinite shore, with each group of partisans committed to a conception of philosophy which assure them a virtual monopoly of its legitimate practice.… And to pragmatists, logical empiricists, and linguistic analysts alike, any alternative conception of what philosophy is rests upon a tragic mistake.1

Who would dare an attempt to overcome such differences of opinion, each supported by knowledge and powerful arguments? An ideal candidate would be a teacher whose thinking is lifted by creative pedagogy and artistic imagination. Mario Betti would appear to be such a teacher. Every page of this book reveals an author who teaches thinking as a contribution to individual lives, to relationships, and to a sane society. He is invested not in scoring philosophical points but rather in helping his readers cope with intellectual confusion and conflict.

Betti succeeds in his purpose by giving a positive account of twelve worldviews. He takes as his model Goethe who held in one view both universal harmony and plurality (8). We are led to appreciate that each worldview is convincing up to a point. His treatment of Idealism, for example, invites the reader to see that all reality is, or at least emerges from, ideas, from a realm that Plato described so convincingly. But then Betti draws on Aristotle, an equally brilliant and equally influential philosopher, to show the need for a more positive account of particulars, whether moments, thoughts, or objects. Betti refers to this combination of Plato’s and Aristotle’s philosophy as Realism, the philosophy that occupies the topmost spot on the philosophical compass (more on this below).

In a similar way, the way of showing polarities, Betti makes a case for Rationalism, the philosophy of ethical order and proportion, and then shows how it virtually solicits its polar complement, the philosophy of Dynamism: structure needs process to be effective and process, in order to avoid chaos, needs structure. As an introvert needs at least a little extroversion to get through the day, and as melancholic and phlegmatic temperaments need at least a touch of choleric and sanguine temperaments, so does Psychism, a philosophy ready-made for psychology, need a little Phenomenalism, a philosophy that emphasizes the reality of external objects and events but is not sufficiently affirmative of the interior depths of the soul. “Psychism is the inner version of phenomenalism” (110). These pairs, furthermore, are not only complementary, as in two static halves that make a whole; rather, they need and benefit each other but also oppose each other—like individual and community, inner and outer, and of course, like gender. The twelve views are also like gender in that they exist not only as pairs of clearly demarcated opposites but as a spectrum with fluid boundaries, a perspective that contemporary social justice movements have made increasingly clear (134).

In addition to an emphasis on the conflict of worldviews, Betti emphasizes the importance of mutually enhancing polarities: “Each worldview is both a genuine opposite and an enhancement of its opposite” (110). By plunging downward into the domain of gravity, the Materialist worldview has produced marvels of human understanding like the periodic table of elements, just as the Spiritualist worldview has revealed its own “’levitating’ periodic table of spiritual elements”: the angelic hierarchies (151). While Materialism risks digging itself ever deeper into the sand like a crab, Spiritualism risks fleeing the Earth entirely. Such polar tensions are the engine of the evolutionary adventure that has produced all that we see around us and feel within us.

As was mentioned above, despite insisting on the equal value of each of the twelve views, Betti follows Steiner in giving pride of place to Realism. “All worldviews rest like a bud within [it],” as it is “the fundamental human outlook par excellence” (197). “Cognition,” Steiner tells us in his autobiography, “is not the depiction of intrinsic being but rather the soul living its way into this intrinsic being” (quoted by Betti on 205). In other words, an act of knowing is not an internal mental representation of an external physical world; rather, knowing is a participatory event that is immanent to the world-process itself. “If knowledge did not exist,” Steiner continues, “the world would remain incomplete” (quoted by Betti on 206). This is obviously not a naïve realism: it is a higher realization rooted in Steiner’s participatory approach to knowledge and reality. This higher or participatory Realism is a developmental culmination of the other eleven worldviews, whereby through a sort of alchemical transfiguration the distinct capacities of thinking, feeling, sensing, and willing (each emphasized by their respective worldviews) are etherialized into what Betti calls “a new earth substance” (209). In this primordial etheric life substance, Betti tells us, the opposition between spirit and matter is overcome so that human consciousness can be raised and transubstantiated by the power of the Logos-Christ.

Some readers may have trouble following Betti and Steiner at this point, as these are rather mysterious matters, to say the least. But Betti’s book succeeds at least in leading all spiritually striving individuals to the point where they are able to perceive the intrinsic value of all worldviews. At that point, it is up to each of us to discover the true integral potential of our human existence. “The whole world, apart from the human being, is an enigma,” Steiner tells us. “And the human being is its solution” (quoted in Betti on 206).

Footnote

1 Albert William Levy, Philosophy and the Modern World (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1959), 444-45.

The following consists of Kat Ziemke’s preparatory notes and below that you will find the summary of Session 8 itself:

The Rediscovery of Allegory (1)

from The Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays

Katherine Ziemke

1-20-26

This essay is a book review, and very brief overview of the book The Visionary Landscape: A Study in Medieval Allegory by Paul Piehler. The two central intertwined themes in the book are (i) historical and (ii) psychological and ethical aspects of allegory.

In his book Saving the Appearances, Barfield (1988) says that though allegory is rarely used now, it was “popular and all-pervasive in the Middle Ages” (p. 86). Piehler’s view is that allegories contrast with symbols and myths. Specifically, allegory “is a method of representing states of mind,” as a conscious process, while symbolism represents something deeper, “an invisible world, of which our experience is but a copy of an archetype” (Barfield, 2013, p. 135, citing Piehler, 1971). An allegory follows from myth, where symbols are presented in a way that allows a unification of the reality to an otherwise complex narrative.

Barfield says that much of Piehler’s book is concerned with the relation between “seminal image” and “potentia animae” (Barfield, 2013, p. 137). He sees Piehler’s concern as the transformation of the seminal personification into the powers of the soul (p. 137).

Speaking of historical thought, Barfield says that medieval allegorical thought succeeded in presenting an equilibrium of rational and mythical thinking, and included “all levels on which the mind functions” (Barfield, 2013, p. 137). He proposes that though the medieval mind rationalized in the same way we do in modernity, it was more balanced, and it contained an element—the intuitive faculty—which is now noticeably absent. The difference between symbolic thought (which he equates to mythical) and allegorical thought (which he equates to rational) is merely in degree or proportion of one to the other (Barfield, 2013, p. 138, citing Hinks, 1968).

To me, the most interesting point in the essay is not only the discussion on the balance of these modes of thought within the medieval mind, but that the medieval allegorist knowingly sought to bring readers through a transformative process via an integration of all these different aspects of human thought. Moreover, Barfield says that seeking to design a tapestry of human thought—one which engages all the various manners and ways the human mind can operate—is the goal of those who wish to promote an integral mode of thought.

On the subject of an integral mode of thinking, I interject the thought of Swiss cultural philosopher Jean Gebser, who was the predecessor of Ken Wilber’s integral method of thinking, though I should point out that Wilber is far more analytical and reductive and far less poetic than Gebser. Gebser agreed with Barfield on the idea of looking at historical human thought to understand and assimilate gems within the historical past. He posited that there are five major structures of consciousness that arose historically in sequence and sometimes overlapping, which he labelled the archaic; magic, mythical, mental, and integral structures (Gebser, 1985/1949). Each new structure of consciousness transitions “the human to a new level of knowledge and competence,” says Gebser scholar Allan Combs (2002, p. 80). Advancing a structure takes humans a step closer to the “root of consciousness, which Gebser terms the origin, a source that will be regained only at the final stage of development” (p. 80). To keep it brief, Gebser’s structures seem to roughly equate with Barfield’s thinking on the evolution of consciousness. Like Barfield, Gebser believed modern rational thought was in its deficient mode and would soon result in an irruption of human thoughts and values, something that seems abundantly evident at this moment in time. Yet for all the hopelessness that the modern structure of consciousness seems to carry with it, the next structure in Gebser’s consciousness schema brings a glimmer of hope. He termed this the integral structure of consciousness and described it as a tapestry of the more intuitive, mythical, and rational modes, along with even the archaic pre-human thought.

With this idea in mind, I look back to compare this concept—that is, the integral structure of consciousness—with Barfield’s thinking. It is this same tapestry of human thought—as Gebser puts it, a translucent light shining through all the historical and pre-historical structures that embodies the integral—which Barfield describes in this essay as the essence of medieval allegorical thought. Barfield (2013) promotes the concept of “applied medievalism,” which involves the acceptance of all the historical human mindsets across the ages being absorbed into a “single intelligible process” (p. 139). He points out that Coleridge, Jung, and Piehler called this “individuation” (p. 139). Barfield views this assimilation of the history of the human mind and individuation as being “goal directed” (p. 139).To fulfill the so-called goal, one must cross a barrier between the conscious and the unconscious mind, synthesizing the hidden elements within the unconscious with the more rational conscious thought.

Barfield (2013) suggests that individuation can be achieved by a “movement inward from nature-centered to self-centered life and spirit” (p. 140). This inward movement promotes a unity of the human with nature, and thus vitality that results from the assimilation of the symbols and images within the wider lens of humanity.

Piehler and Barfield (2013) explore the process of “allegorical creation” through “lares,” which are both guardians of the threshold between the conscious and unconscious mind, and a personal dwelling place, in either case used for transformative purposes (pp. 142-143). Barfield describes the transition from image to allegory as a journey of the mind, one which reaches to the inner world as a way of transforming the vision of the external world. Poetically, Piehler describes this journey as at once a “pilgrimage” in search of one’s soul, and a journey of a refugee who seeks to discover the land of the numinous (Barfield, 2013, p. 143, citing Piehler, 1971).

References

Barfield, O. (1988). Saving the appearances. (2^nd ed.). Wesleyan University Press.

Barfield, O. (2013). The rediscovery of allegory (1). The rediscovery of meaning and other essays. (2^nd ed.). Barfield Press.

Combs, A. (2002). The radiance of being: Understanding the grand integral vision; living the integral life. (2^nd ed.). Paragon House

Gebser, J. (1985). The ever-present origin. Ohio University Press. (Original work published 1949)

Hinks, R.P. (1968). Myth and allegory in ancient art. Warburg Institute.

Piehler, P. (1971). The visionary landscape: A study in medieval allegory. McGill–Queen’s University Press Montreal.

Session 8 Summary

Kat opened the session with an account of the way allegory was once popular and all-pervasive. The medieval mind could hold an equilibrium between rational and mythical thinking. She framed allegory not as a dead technique but as a conscious process that follows from myth, transforming personifications into powers of the soul and bringing readers through something like a participatory, ethically charged education. Her comparison to Swiss cultural phenomenologist Jean Gebser helped make the point that Barfield is gesturing toward the integration of historical modes of consciousness into a single intelligible process rather than letting modern rationality remain reductive and disintegrated.

A recurring insight during the discussion was that the very historicity of experience creates a barrier between us and medieval allegory, and also between conscious and unconscious. Yet that darkness is not only an obstacle but the cave-like theater in which imagination appears. Allegory was taken to be intrinsically bound up with personification, which is not merely a rhetorical flourish but an interiorizing power. Allegory is more than an easily translatable code. It is a structured constellation of metaphors, a mapping wherein the meaning is carried not just by static parts but by their movement and mutual articulation.

The conversation widened to the transformative and curative implications. Allegory was repeatedly linked to individuation and threshold-crossing: a movement inward from nature-centered to self-centered life that does not sever unity with nature but renews it, making the barrier transparent rather than abolishing it. Participants contrasted a narrow “this stands for that” approach (often associated with modern readings of allegory) with a more participatory mode that preserves process, wink-and-nod self-reflection, and a living harmony between imagination and intellect. This raised questions about what comes after medieval allegory in the evolution of storytelling, how communal “characteristics” become individualized “characters,” how narrative educates by sedimenting capacities in the soul, and what the storytelling of our own day might be. Suggestions ranged from psychotherapy and astrology to pedagogy and even science itself as a kind of modern mythology—abstract mathematical symbols treated as literal reality—alongside the sense that rediscovering allegory now would require a moving language and perhaps a re-naming process capable of healing the rift between images and concepts, self and world, without collapsing either side.

The Christ event was mentioned: in that mystery, the difference between history and myth (or fact and symbol) is overcome. From the divine perspective, it’s as if the Creator entered the story and became a character in it. From the human perspective, we—characters for whom the story seemed already written—are called to become co-authors.

This week, published my essay (in two parts), “Whitehead’s Theory of Perception as a Key to Steiner’s Spiritual Science,” that further unpacks this connection.

Part 1:

Romanticon

Whitehead’s Theory of Perception

Michael Martin’s Romanticon essay, “Rudolf Steiner: The Last of the German Romantics,” offers an accessible entrée into Steiner’s life and project. It presents Steiner as a late and radical inheritor of Romanticism’s grand argument that the imagination is not a fantasy organ or decorative faculty projecting meaning onto an otherwise value-neutral world…

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8 months ago · 37 likes · 6 comments · Romanticon and Matthew David Segall

Part 2:

Romanticon

Whitehead's Theory of Perception

Today’s post is the second and final installment of an essay published in Romanticon on Sunday, January 4. Read Part I here…

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8 months ago · 8 likes · 3 comments · Romanticon and Matthew David Segall

That Harvard would even host such a gathering is already significant. Steiner is not a safely canonical figure. He is the generative source of Waldorf education, biodynamics, anthroposophical medicine, and a century of artistic and esoteric experimentation. He and the movement he started are also lightning rods for ongoing accusations of racism and pseudoscience. HDS making room for sustained, many-voiced inquiry about his legacy suggested to me that, despite recent trends, the university can still function as a site where controversy is metabolized rather than repressed or outsourced to social media.

The conference was organized by the Program for the Evolution of Spirituality at Harvard Divinity School , with Dan McKanan as faculty chair and Aaron French and Henry Holland as co-organizers. I appreciate their work to construct a schedule with a plurality of perspectives.

For me, the meta-question hovering over nearly every session was: what does it mean to study a luminous spiritual stream that creatively contests modern onto-epistemic norms while simultaneously carrying potentially compromising historical sediment from the late 19th and early 20th century European cultural matrix that birthed it?

Many sessions, implicitly or explicitly, braided two concerns.

Epistemology: What kind of knowing was Steiner claiming? How does “spiritual science” relate to modern historical criticism, to phenomenology, to STS, to hermeneutics, to the romantic imagination?

Responsibility: What ethical obligations arise when a tradition that claims spiritual insight also contains statements that, to many contemporary ears, sound like straightforward examples of exoteric European racism?

Anthroposophy’s insistence on supersensible knowledge can become either a resource for deepening conscience or yet another technique for spiritual bypass and evasion. I felt that the conversations opened in Cambridge contributed fruitfully to the former.

A few notes on various panels…

Many talks emphasized Steiner as a teacher and the lived ecology of his esoteric instruction: diagrams, exercises, individualized guidance, and the slow formation of faculties rather than mere belief. Anthroposophy was never meant to be consumed as information. It was intended to catalyze transformation.

This came into sharper focus in Ryan Boynton’s reflections on reading Steiner and Whitehead together: modernity trains us to treat texts as containers of content, whereas both Steiner and Whitehead demand something closer to spiritual exercise—reading as a transformational activity that changes the reader’s relation to experience. His framing clarifies why anthroposophy so easily generates sectarian pathologies: when the distance between Steiner’s claims and one’s own experience becomes unbearable, the temptation is to substitute loyalty for verification and to become attached to words rather than attentive to the meaning they convey (or convolute).

The art and aesthetics panelists emphasized that modernity is not only a political-economic condition but an ontological one: a crisis in what counts as real and how to encounter and express it. Steiner’s “third realm” mediating between sensory particular and universal idea was invoked as a way out of the modern split between brute fact and abstract concept. There was a powerful treatment of Hilma af Klint’s nature drawings as an example of Goethean “delicate empiricism.”

Other panelists expressed anthroposophical architecture as a form of knowing wherein built form becomes an onto-epistemic instrument training us to “think in movement,” to experience architectural metamorphosis as an exemplification of incarnation and not merely as superficial decoration. In Steiner’s aesthetics, his pedagogy, and his social thought, knowledge is no longer the attempt to capture the world from outside but to partake in its ongoing creation.

A presentation on the similarities in Steiner’s and Arendt’s social and political thought helpfully diagnosed the dangers of championing democracy across all sectors of society without any internal differentiation. Steiner’s social threefolding and Arendt’s distinctions (labor/work/action) converged around the question of protecting true political equality, cultural liberty, and economic solidarity without regressing into technocracy or nationalist ideology.

Several conference talks circled around a historically strange but revealing contradiction: Steiner was accused by some critics of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, and yet was also, in certain right-wing and Nazi-inflected polemics, portrayed as being himself “Jewish” or as advancing a “Jewish” mode of thought.

The race-related discussions brought the conference’s deepest tensions to the surface. At the final such discussion on Tuesday evening (“Constructive Anthroposophical Responses to Racism”), the room felt rather evenly divided at the level of first principles. You could hear it in the varying applause, and in the silent tensions, after each speaker.

One presenter offered a kind of intervention that I felt functioned as a well-meaning ethical demand: anthroposophy must metabolize the suffering and historical reality resulting from white supremacy and colonialism. Such critiques should not be quickly dismissed as merely materialistic, even if they spinoff from Marxist dialectics. Another presenter emphasized the epistemic and spiritual cost of the dominant social justice activist narrative that trains people to see only the West’s shadows. This reduces “the West” to a patriarchal white supremacist power plot, ignoring the tremendous internal diversity of this cultural matrix, and thereby disowns the very forces that may be capable of reform and redemption.

I remain convinced that this division cannot be healed by rhetorical escalation in either direction. ’s presentation helpfully slowed the conversation down and reintroduced historical context and methodological humility. He made it harder for anyone to hide in a simple verdict: either “Steiner was simply clairvoyantly reporting facts” or “Steiner’s errors invalidate the whole stream of his thinking.” That careful framing without evasion felt like a positive ground for building a future-oriented anthroposophy responsive to the unique concerns of the third decade of the 21st century.

MICROKOSM

Reverent Impiety: Reading Rudolf Steiner's Christian Cosmology Against his Racialism

Eventually I’ll have the essay version up to share, but for now here is the link to the recording of my talk (starts at 44:26), edited transcript, and slides. As you’ll see below, there are slides that I did not have time to include in my 20 minute allotment. One is an expanded genealogy of ‘ethnos’ and ‘race,’ another addresses Steiner’s (inconsistent…

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8 months ago · 10 likes · 3 comments · Ashton K. Arnoldy and Urphänomen

As I see it, anthroposophists have tended to respond to the question of racism in Steiner’s teachings in one of two ways: either they collapse into the approved language games and methods of analysis typical of many approaches to Critical Race Theory and DEI initiatives (thereby likely surrendering a spiritual onto-epistemology and becoming a vaguely spiritualized echo of skeptical academic critique); or they circle the wagons around Steiner and deny he ever uttered anything racist (thereby potentially failing the ethical test our moment places before us).

Either way, anthroposophy and humanity loses.

Steiner himself acknowledged that spiritual research can err. I believe that, if anthroposophists cannot acknowledge without panic or casuistry that some of his statements were simply mistaken, then it is not practicing spiritual science but doing religious apologetics.

I was troubled by the suggestion by one presenter during the race panel that “the West” either has no meaning (because of cross-cultural influence) or that any positive mention of it is simply “white supremacy.” If the first criticism hits its target, it is precisely because it acknowledges the internal ethnic hybridity of the Western cultural project, which has never been simply “white.” So the two criticisms leveled in one and the same argument seem to me to be symptomatic of a deeper confusion. The idea of “the West” is obviously a modern invention, but it just as obviously names something historically real (even if porous and internally diverse). And that historical reality contains both profound emancipatory capacities and the catastrophic shadow of coercive violence.

During my own presentation at the conference, I shared how Steiner provided me with a spiritual path that did not require appropriating Indigenous or Asian traditions, but allowed me to inherit a lineage—Western estoericism—that I felt I belonged to.

Below I will share a transcript of some remarks I offered at the end of a course I taught this semester on the history of Western thought. We read Richard Tarnas’ book Passion of the Western Mind. I feel this statement captures my own sense of the needle that must be thread when we inherit the idea and reality, the light and the shadow, of “the West.”

As we come to the end of the semester studying the evolution of Western consciousness as presented in Rick’s Passion of the Western Mind, I wanted to offer an additional contextualizing frame around the story we’ve been tracing together. We have followed the Western mind from its mythic beginnings in Greece through the rise of Christianity, the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, modernity, existentialism, and postmodern deconstruction with its nascent intimations of restored participatory meaning. What I want to share in my closing remarks is a possible way of holding the Western project that does justice to both its light and its shadow.

On the one hand, it is hard to deny the extraordinary achievements that emerge from this cultural trajectory. The very capacity to criticize one’s own assumptions that we have been exercising all semester—Socratic questioning, Kantian critique, Hegelian dialectic, Nietzschean genealogy, Freudian and Jungian depth psychology, postmodern suspicion of power—is itself a product of the Western project. The idea that every human being possesses inalienable dignity; modern movements for the abolition of slavery and the recognition of women’s rights; the articulation of and ongoing struggles to realize democratic self-governance; the development of modern science and medicine; and the birth of environmentalism and human rights discourse… these are not exclusively Western, of course; but they have been shaped in decisive ways by the Western intellectual and spiritual history that Passion narrates.

At the same time, many of these very capacities are tightly entangled with, and strangled by, catastrophic violence. The same rational, experimental, technoscientific methods that gave us modern physics and medicine were also often deployed in support of the conquest of the Americas and Africa, the transatlantic slave trade, and the industrial exploitation of land and labor. This is not to say that figures like Descartes, Bacon, or Newton directly advocated for these atrocities, but rather that the material conditions enabling their work (eg, court patronage, merchant capital, imperial administration) were inseparable from colonial extraction and expansion. Early modern philosophy’s sense that knowledge is power and is founded on the mastery and domination of nature meant it was not simply a disinterested research program. Advances in navigation, cartography, astronomy, and botany, etc., were often explicitly motivated by and funded for imperial purposes: to chart new territories for conquest, to catalog resources for exploitation, to manage colonial populations. Military interests drove developments in ballistics and mechanics. Botanical gardens were laboratories for transplanting cash crops across empires. Medical knowledge advanced partly through experiments on enslaved people. Thus, the new sciences and technologies perfected in early modern Europe that catalyzed the so-called “Age of Discovery” were experienced by Indigenous peoples not as opening new horizons but rather in the form of invasion, disease, forced conversion, dispossession, and mass death. My point is not to diminish the genuine intellectual achievements or curiosity of early modern scientists (who in many cases were critical of what political powers did with their knowledge) but to recognize that their work emerged within, and often served, a political economy of empire.

We see this shadow again during the Enlightenment. Consider the language of liberty, equality, and rights that animated the American and French Revolutions. Those same ideals were taken up by enslaved Africans in Haiti, who successfully overthrew French colonial rule and founded the first Black republic, itself a profound realization of Enlightenment principles. Yet the response of European powers to the Haitian Revolution was to isolate, punish, and economically strangle it. So we have, in one and the same historical moment, the Western mind generating universalist ideals of freedom and simultaneously refusing to honor them when they threatened white supremacy and colonial economic interests. Light and shadow are here not two separate stories but intimately folded into one another.

Romanticism offers another example of this doubleness. In class we looked at how poets, philosophers, and artists tried to heal the split that the scientific and industrial revolutions had opened between human beings and nature, recovering a sense of living participation in the cosmos. Goethe’s science of metamorphosis, for instance, or Wordsworth’s sacramental vision of an ensouled nature, or later the ecological sensibilities of figures like Whitehead and Jung. Much of what Romanticism recovers was already well-understood by a multitude of Indigenous traditions, as Coco pointed out in her Canvas post about Heidegger’s sense of our “being-in-the-world.” But this Romantic turn inward and toward nature also coincides with intensified European nationalism and myth-making that would later be appropriated by reactionary and fascist movements. For example, celebrating the land-based origins of language and myth is double-edged. Indigenous inhabitants of the Turtle Island were dispossessed of their way of life when they were pushed off their native lands; but that same sort of nativism is precisely what motivated Heidegger’s Nazism, as he felt the German language was intrinsically tied to Central European soil. From his point of view, other languages and cultures that had come to inhabit the region were akin to foreign pests that obscured Being. Myth, imagination, and the yearning for a connection to native lands can deepen reverence for life; but they can also be mobilized to sacralize “blood and soil.”

Even the twentieth-century critiques we studied (existentialism, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, postmodernism) carry aspects of this ambivalent matrix. Sartre and de Beauvoir, for example, radicalized freedom and exposed bad faith, and both were important voices against colonialism and patriarchy. At the same time, the “nothingness” they experienced within themselves, and the absurd universe they saw around themselves, could slip into a kind of paralyzing nihilism that leaves existing structures of domination intact. Similarly, the work of Foucault and Derrida unmasks the hierarchical power structures underlying knowledge and discourse, offering vital tools for decolonial and feminist critique, but in some interpretations those tools end up feeding a generalized skepticism and pervasive distrust that makes it difficult to affirm any shared ethical horizon at all.

Indigenous and other non-Western cultures often cultivated ways of knowing and forms of life that do not fit neatly into the dominant Western narrative of progress: relational ontologies that situate humans within a living Earth community; sophisticated ecological practices that stabilized and enriched landscapes over many centuries; ritual forms that knit together social, spiritual, and ecological orders. Many of these lifeways were actively suppressed or destroyed by colonial armies, missionary campaigns, and modernizing scientific elites. Honoring these traditions is part of what decolonial work requires of us.

But to honor them does not mean imagining that pre-contact Indigenous societies were timeless, innocent, conflict-free utopias. Long before European expansion, violent empires rose and fell in Mesoamerica, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa through patriarchal conquest, tribute, human sacrifice, and slavery. The Aztec Empire, for example, combined profound artistic, astronomical, and agricultural achievements with a practice of ritual human sacrifice that terrified their enemies. My point is not at all to relativize the violence of European colonialism, which is historically distinct in its scale and integration with capitalism and racism, but to resist the temptation to treat any culture—whether the diversity of Indigenous or European peoples—as either purely demonic or purely angelic.

I worry that much contemporary debate between left and right wing commentators swings between two extremes: either “Europe is the root of all evil in world history” or, conversely, “the West is the unique bearer of reason and civilization.” Both positions, in different ways, refuse the complex tension we’ve been trying to hold. Decolonial thinking at its best is not just an inversion of Eurocentrism, or a flipping of the hierarchy that puts those who were marginalized in the position of dominance historically held by rich European men. It is a sustained critique of all arbitrary hierarchies and of any imperial claim to monopolize truth or to overwrite all other ways of being human. That critique draws on Indigenous perspectives, on subaltern histories, and also on some of the West’s own most self-critical currents (eg, the Hebrew prophetic tradition, Socrates, Jesus, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Beauvoir, and the kind of archetypal and participatory vision Rick sketches at the end of the book).

As we close our study of the Passion of the Western Mind, I want to invite you to sit in this tension. On one side, I hope you have come to appreciate the emancipatory potentials that have emerged from this tradition: critical self-reflection, scientific curiosity, democratic aspirations, psychological depth, and the nascent possibility of planetary ethical concern for all peoples and all life. On the other, I trust you hold an equally clear awareness of how those same capacities have been entangled with domination, colonialism, racism, patriarchy, ecocide...

I hope you can let these contradictions sharpen your sense of responsibility, and come to appreciate the ways these conflicts live within you. Holding the light and shadow here means asking: given what we now know historically, philosophically, ecologically—how might these powers of reflection, imagination, and critique be re-directed? How can they be brought into conversation with other traditions, especially those that have borne the weight of Western expansion, in ways that are accountable and mutually transformative? That is where I feel The Passion of the Western Mind leaves us: not simply at the threshold of a new world, but an entirely new way of world-making.

Having sat with these issues in study and conversation (including through our Urphänomen reading/research group—see below), I do not think it is strategically effective or factually true to try to massage some of Steiner’s racial statements into anything other than what they look like: products of Central European prejudice of the time. I am not rushing to condemnation. I have taken seriously the possibility that Steiner’s meaning was esoteric, and that he was observing something spiritually real. There were some presentations that applied anthroposophical methods to bring increased clarity to otherwise confused debates.

But after much consideration, my mind and heart tell me that on at least one crucial question, Steiner’s statement’s cannot be true. He erred; he did not see clearly: I see no evidence for the claim (see GA 174b, discussed by our Urphänomen group below) that the Christ impulse is blocked by dark skin. When I compare the lived spiritual fruits of white evangelical culture in the United States with what I have witnessed in many Black churches, the difference is stark. The data of lived moral-spiritual reality points, if anything, in the opposite direction. I see the Christ impulse alive in, to offer one example, in the civil rights movement of MLK, Jr., or more recently in the way the survivors of the 2015 Charleston shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (the oldest Black church in the US) forgave Dylann Roof at his bond hearing.

Our Urphänomen dialogue on these questions (and specifically on GA 174b):

If anthroposophy is to have a future, it will not be secured by denial or by surrender. It will be secured by a capacity I felt being modeled well by many at this conference: disciplined spiritual imagination conjoined with committed historical conscience. Harvard hosting a conference like this matters immensely because it signals that such a conjunction is still possible in public intellectual life, and that the work of integrating scientific truth-seeking, moral responsibility, and spiritual insight need not be ceded either to institutional dogmatism or to ideological purification.

Today’s reading group centered on Owen Barfield’s 1968 essay “Where is Fancy Bred?”, with Matt offering an initial framing. Barfield write this essay for an anthroposophical audience already conversant with Rudolf Steiner’s terminology, and as a bridge toward What Coleridge Thought.

Matt traced Barfield’s account of East–West cultural exchanges, from Pythagoras and Alexander the Great to the Crusades and Romanticism. Barfield highlighted figures such as Sir William Jones, whose translation work opened European eyes to Indian legal and religious traditions, and Friedrich Schlegel, whose study of Sanskrit revealed shared linguistic roots between India and Europe. This historical narrative fed into Barfield’s larger claim that language serves as a fossil record of consciousness: as meanings shift, they reveal a long process of contraction, in which human awareness becomes increasingly cut off from an original spiritual unity. Matt emphasized Barfield’s sense of “self-consciousness by exclusion,” culminating in Steiner’s “age of the consciousness soul,” where modern individuals feel most isolated yet are also most capable of free spirituality or final participation.

Barfield dwells on the distinction, following Coleridge, between fancy and imagination. Fancy is described as a passive rearrangement of sensory images, while imagination is treated as a vital, world-forming activity. Matt revisited Coleridge’s “primary imagination” as divine creative power and “secondary imagination” as human participation in this power. Two paths into imagination—through disciplined attention to sense experience (Goethe, Wordsworth) and through inner moral and existential struggle (Schiller, Coleridge)—were explored with reference to a diagram shared during the session (see above). This led into Steiner’s day–night picture of consciousness: daytime perception and intellect as surface reflections, nighttime sleep as deeper contact with the spiritual world, whose “afterworkings” reappear as conscience. Romanticism, especially Coleridge, was seen as preparing the way for this anthroposophical interpretation of the soul’s diurnal and nocturnal movements.

The group also reflected on Barfield’s use of complementary polarities: Goethe and Schiller, Wordsworth and Coleridge, as mutually necessary partners in cultural evolution. There was some questioning of overly rigid typologies, with the reminder that such opposites are better understood as polarities that can be distinguished but not divided. In the final phase of discussion, these themes were brought into conversation with scientific methodology. Conventional Newtonian science was associated with fancy’s recombinatory mode, while a Goethean, participatory science was linked to imagination in the stronger Barfieldian sense. Goethe’s warning about being swept away by undisciplined imagination was recalled, not as a rejection of abstraction but as a call to let theories be slowly distilled from phenomena through repeated observation and refinement.

Schedule (Biweekly; Tuesdays at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 6pm CET)

Week 7 – Dec 9 - Matt

-Where is Fancy Bred? (pp. 115–134)

Week 8 – Jan 20 Kat

-The Rediscovery of Allegory (I) (pp. 135–145)

Week 9 – Feb 3, 2026 Ashton

-The Rediscovery of Allegory (II) (pp. 146–159)

—Reading Group Paused until Summer 2026—

-Imagination and Inspiration (pp. 160–188)

-Language and Discovery (pp. 189–208)

-Matter, Imagination, and Spirit (pp. 209–226)

-Self and Reality (pp. 227–258)

-Science and Quality (pp. 259–275)

-The Coming Trauma of Materialism (pp. 276–296)

-Participation and Isolation: A Fresh Light on Present Discontents (pp. 297–320)

-Form in Art and in Society (pp. 321–337)

-Philology and the Incarnation (pp. 338–350)

-The Psalms of David (pp. 351–366)

-The “Son of God” and the “Son of Man” (pp. 367–385)

The Barfield reading group gathered today to discuss “The Harp and the Camera.” Beginning with Kat’s framing (see her notes below) of Barfield’s metaphors and their kinship with Jean Gebser’s structures of consciousness, the conversation unfolded as a meditation on participation: from the Aeolian harp’s “original participation,” in which spirit moves through the human as through an instrument, to the camera’s “onlooker consciousness,” with its detached observer, and toward a hoped-for “final participation” that harmonizes inner agency with outer revelation. Participants emphasized Barfield’s counsel to hold harp and camera in imaginative tension rather than choosing one over the other, cultivating a poised awareness that neither dissolves our individuality nor seals us off from the spiritual vitality of the world.

From there the group pressed into the contemporary predicament. Several noted how digital culture induces “pseudo-participation”: surveillance, selfies, and social metrics externalize attention, enticing a performative “self-as-brand” while dimming the inward light required for genuine, willful self-transformation. Gaming surfaced as an emblem of this shift: it offers pre-fabricated imagination and a sense of agency that risks becoming merely procedural, yet it can also nudge recognition that personhood exceeds any single avatar. In this ambivalence, technology appears as both temptation and teacher, a double-edged catalyst for discernment.

Historical and aesthetic touchstones widened the frame. References to M. H. Abrams’ The Mirror and the Lamp, Walter Benjamin on art in the age of mechanical reproduction, and Steiner’s remarks on film and “light art” illuminated how media reconfigure imagination. Several described Steiner-informed experiments with non-representational, color-movement “light play” as a future-bearing art that could reawaken active, participatory perception in both artist and audience in the form of living gestures of light. Barfield’s nod to the magic lantern suggested a lineage of instruments that could be redeemed by conscious practice, not discarded.

The group then traced the spiritual arc behind these aesthetic shifts. Karsten and Michael articulated the “death of God” as a historical necessity: a descent into separation enabling the “I” to discover itself through material experience. The danger lies in getting stuck there. The task is to transmute that hard-won individuality into a basis for conscious reconnection—final participation—where freedom and will cooperate with spiritual reality. Thus even materialism can have an educative role, provided it becomes a springboard rather than a cul-de-sac.

Discernment became the keynote virtue. Kat recalled Steiner’s test of true imagination as a “felt sense” that engages the will, not mere imagery. Others spoke of “feeling-will” that marks the difference between passive consumption and active imagination. The group recognized its own meeting as a microcosm of active participation: a deliberate tuning to a shared vibration amid an overload of information. Images like “gazing at the moon” condensed this path, a simple, ancient act that integrates reflection, participation, and return to conscious alignment.

In closing, participants returned to the “third thing” hinted by Barfield: neither naïve immersion nor sterile detachment, but harmonization. Signing one’s work without severing its living source. Using instruments—cameras, screens, algorithms—as thresholds rather than walls. The measure of progress would not be the novelty of our media but the maturation of our attention: whether we can carry an individuated center that welcomes the world’s light without outsourcing the will that makes it meaningfully our own.

Summary & Comments on
“The Harp and the Camera”

by Katherine Ziemke

The Harp

Barfield opens this essay by introducing the Aeolian harp, a wind-harp. The Aeolian harp—which has been featured in Romantic era poetry—is an ancient instrument which is different from a regular harp one might see played with an orchestra. It is constructed in a way that it is played by the wind. Often in ancient times, it was set in windows. Curious about the sound, I found that composer Robert Schumann compares the harp to Federic Chopin’s Etude in A-flat major, Op. 25, No. 1, which is an enchanting harmonic piece comprised of rapid arpeggios and gentle singing melodic overtones, as can be heard here: https://chopinproject.com/chopin-work/etude-op-25-no-01/ A musician with an interest in the Romantic era, Barfield almost certainly knew about this captivating Romantic era musical piece. Perhaps it was even an inspiration for his essay.

Barfield quotes the poet Percy Shelly, who describes the connection of human consciousness to the harp:

Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alterations of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to an ever-changing melody. But there is a principal within the human being which acts otherwise than in the lyre, … and produces not melody alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited to the impressions which excite them (2013, p. 97).

In other words, while both the harp and the human bend to external circumstances, the harp reflects only the wind, whereas the human—by internal reflection—harmonizes with both the harp and the wind. Speaking about this in terms of the poet, Barfield says that those “who give forth divinest melody, [do so] when the breath of universal being sweeps over their frame” (p. 97). So, Barfield is suggesting that a spiritual element comes into play when the poet is “harmonized by their own will” (p. 97).

The Camera

Barfield introduces a device called the camera obscura, which was forerunner to the modern camera, a device with a tiny opening on top and a mirror inside at a 45 degree angle. The camera obscura, Barfield asserts, is symbolic of the birth of modern science, the Copernican Revolution (2013, p. 100). The camera obscura took objects and reduced them to 2-D pictures by imitating the 3-D perspective, doing so by embracing the far off “vanishing point” where lines and images converge (p. 106). This invention led to the daguerreotype (a mid-nineteenth century photographic process involving a silvered plate and mercury vapor), which led to the modern camera and the photograph, and finally to movies and television.

Contrasting the Camera and the Aeolian Harp

The harp’s medium is sound, wind in particular. Barfield says; “The wind-harp becomes what it is by itself becoming an ‘inside’ for the environing air, by becoming a modulated voice for it to speak with” (2013, p. 105). In other words, the harp becomes part of a larger event. It merges in resonance to become one with its external environment, that is, to participate with that which surrounds it.

The camera’s medium is light and converging perspectives that we have come to accept as life-like, in the way a 2-D object can represent a 3-D object. Barfield says, “The camera looks always at and never into what it sees” (2013, p. 106). By looking at objects, it does not participate with the objects it represents. It represents an external 3^rd person perspective, a removed version of what it sees. For all of the benefits modern humans have garnered from the camera, and more generally science, the scientific mode of thinking separated subject from object, leaving human thinking in what Barfield characterized as looking at life as if through the lens of a “camera” (2013, pp. 110-113). This might be thought of as spectator consciousness, that is, watchful yet removed.

A Holistic Way of Thinking

Barfield asks, in what seems a disheartened plea about this external mode of thinking, “Where … has the music gone?” (2013, p. 111). Yet he offers a different path upon which to traverse toward a new holistic manner of thinking. Barfield quotes Goethe, “If the eye were not of the same nature as the light, it could never behold the light” (p. 113). Similarly, Craig Holdrege, a Goethean scholar, adds:

Light allows the colorful world to appear, and the eye allows us to participate in this world. They belong together. In a similar way we can say: Were a plant not sun-like, how could it grow through the sun? (2025, p. 21).

Using Holdrege’s analysis of sunlight to plants and the human eye suggests that the camera, the plant, and the human may be considered to have a special form of relationality to light. Barfield proposes that the light of the camera may be considered a projection of “the spirit of light” from which the human might participate (p. 112). He asserts that we need not relinquish participation—as with the harp, nor should we adopt an outside view of the camera, but instead hold each within the imagination in a harmonic tension woven with, into, between, and delicately intertwined.

Returning to the quote by Percy Shelly, the essay suggests that one look toward one’s inner life while at the same time connecting with all of the “light” from the outer world. Barfield suggests that one should discover the “joy of looking [at the world] with imagination,” as a way of breaking free from an observer’s “camera” viewpoint, and rather toward sketching a new perception across the window of our world (2013. pp. 110-114).

Connection with the Work of Jean Gebser

Barfield suggests that primitive humans’ mode of thought was like that of the Aeolian harp, that is, that the human weaves a harmonic melody with the harp and the wind by participating with the wind and the instrument, essentially allowing one’s self to become the instrument. Here’s an interesting quote by Jean Gebser (translated by Georg Feuerstein) on this idea of participation, in which we can see both the poetic similarities and the seed of ideas on consciousness between Barfield and Gebser:

The simple is in us. It is participation—participation in that which is unknown yet evident to us, a tiny seed in us which contains all transparency—the diaphanous world, the most irradiated and most sober beatitude. It is so completely comprehensive and whole that neither our intelligent, super-clever, caged-in thought nor our pitiable–pitiful and needy-strong longing … can even divine it. And yet, it is within us. (1987, pp. 31-32)

It was this point of participatory connection to ourselves, the outer world, and to the spiritual which I see this essay converging toward.

References

Barfield, O. (2013). The rediscovery of meaning and other essays. Barfield Press. (2^nd ed.). (Original work published 1977).

Feuerstein, G. (1987). Structures of consciousness: The genius of Jean Gebser–an introduction and critique. Integral Publishing.

Gebser, J. (1974). Verfall und teilhabe: Uber polaritat, dualitat, identitat u. den ursprung. (Translation: Decline and participation: Uber polarity, duality, identity and the origin). Salzburg: O. Muller.

Holderege, C. (Fall, 2025). Is the earth alive? In context: A publication of the Nature Institute. Vol. 54.

We began with Owen situating the essay historically: drafted while his grandfather, Owen Barfield, was studying law (early 1930s) and published in 1947, it reflects his unusual vantage as both philologist and solicitor. From there, the discussion unfolded around Barfield’s central analogy between poetic diction and legal fiction. In poetry, a living metaphor gradually hardens into literal meaning; in law, a fiction becomes an operative rule. Both chart the same arc whereby imaginative insight crystallizes into institutional policy. We lingered on Barfield’s term tarning (from German Tarnung, “disguise/camouflage”) to name how meaning is created, sometimes becoming concealed.

That lens helped us understand how metaphors “dry up” into everyday speech, how social habits sediment into expectations and then into law, and how contemporary “dog whistles” exemplify encoded meanings audible only to an initiated audience. Several participants pressed the ethical and emancipatory stakes: understanding how law and language co-evolve can be liberating, because it shows that rules are congealed metaphors—historical judgments—not eternal necessities. We also traced a genealogical thread: the rise of personal moral responsibility within legal culture feeding into modern notions of causal explanation in natural science.

Education and technology provided a second through-line. Concerns about machine-driven schooling and standardized testing framed a call for classrooms that make space for genuine questioning. This set the stage for a lively exchange about large language models—whether they can make judgments or only recombine probabilities; whether they, as it were, short-circuit tarning by scaling language without participation; and how their very limitations might remind us what the poetic life of consciousness feels like.

Dan: Hello friends, I’m here with Ashton Arnoldy who is coming to us from Dornach, Switzerland, the Goetheanum of Rudolf Steiner. Thanks for joining us on World Astrology Report, Ashton.

Ashton: Thanks for having me, Dan. Yeah, it’s great to finally talk.

Dan: We’ve been discussing this for a little while and we are going to talk about Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian mystic and founder of anthroposophy. I thought it would be good to start by just introducing Steiner. Who was Steiner and why are his ideas still interesting for people today?

Ashton: Yeah. Well, Rudolf Steiner was born in 1861 and died in 1925. He’s most well known for being a spiritual teacher or "spiritual philosopher. He began to teach as a public esotericist around the turn of the 19th into the 20th century when he joined the Theosophical Society in Germany. But he always maintained a distinct teaching from the general orientation of the theosophical society. He really wanted to emphasize certain aspects of western tradition and also insisted that he taught out of his own spiritual research which was modeled after the participatory science of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe is most famous for being a poet for writing Faust and also for developing color theory.

Participatory science merely means that one includes one’s whole person as the instrument of knowing in this scientific enterprise. And what’s exciting about Steiner’s anthroposophy is that he aims to extend Goethe’s method through this process of self transformation of the human being into a kind of instrument for spiritual knowledge. So when I was first getting into Steiner, I was really excited about it because as a young person navigating what many refer to today as “the meaning crisis”—where there’s not one coherent cosmology in our globalized situation that can lead our lives thanks to so many transformations of the traditional order through emancipatory politics but also technology. We can’t just bring the old back. There has to be some sort of new negotiation of cosmology and meaning. One of the exciting things about Steiner’s work is that he provides some possibilities for that.

Dan: Yeah, this is also, I think, one of the things that drew me to Steiner—having studied some of the big planetary cycles that govern the evolution of consciousness over time. I’ve seen how (and obviously you don’t just need astrology to see this) we moved into a period of several hundred years where we embraced scientific materialism. It was almost as if, you could argue, it appears as a sort of necessary stage or phase where we had to exclude the spiritual from the world so that we could gain some greater understanding of the mechanics of this material world that we live in. But that period has now passed.

If we get to the time Steiner lived and was cutting his teeth—this was the late 19th century—which is a time that planetary cycles like the Pluto-Neptune cycle, for example, tell us that a new cycle was beginning at that time. And I think that new cycle has to do with bringing spirit back into our understanding of the cosmos. And what I understand from Steiner is that his methods may be a way into doing that, right? Because he taught what he called “spiritual science,” and perhaps that is something that could be very useful to us at this point in history.

Ashton: Yes, yes. He was very insistent that even though we might have spiritual ideas and spiritual beliefs and spiritual practices, because of our conditioning, we’re pretty much all materialists even if we’re not aware of it.

Dan: And in what sense could you say what Steiner taught was science, right? Because he called his way of working “spiritual science.” And probably a professional scientist who’s not open to these kinds of things would raise eyebrows at what Steiner taught being described as science. But for Steiner, why were his methods of spiritual perception “spiritual science”?

Ashton: So there’s a lot of resonance between what Steiner is calling spiritual science and anthroposophy interchangeably, and the premodern approach to knowledge—before this distinction between knowing and life was brought about in modern philosophy. Steiner’s spiritual science is comparable to reading the world; it has the same aspiration for accuracy that defines ordinary science, but it wants to know what things mean rather than just how they work. A good example is the fact that, prior to the scientific revolution—there wasn’t this distinction that we make today between astronomy and astrology. They were bound up together and really co-arose out of this need to have a kind of relationship with the gods, these intelligences that are speaking through the natural world and the events of life. So spiritual science is a way of returning to an experience of the natural world as something generated and sustained by spiritual intelligences, which the reintegration of astrology and astronomy would reflect.

Dan: Let’s take a little turn now, because we also wanted to talk a bit about Steiner and astrology specifically. Now, I know you’re doing research on this subject and trying to shed more light on Steiner’s own personal attitudes to and use of astrology. Could you maybe sketch out what Steiner’s relationship with astrology was—what he thought about it, how he used it, and so on?

Ashton: Yeah. So his overall orientation to astrology is informed by his vision of the evolution of consciousness. And it was actually one of the reasons that I was so interested in Steiner initially—arriving at his work through Owen Barfield—because the narrative of the evolution of consciousness helped me make sense of how a modern person like me could get into astrology when I was in high school and have those experiences where I’m like, “There’s something here. There’s something real that I’m discovering through this about the world.” Framing history in terms of an evolution or transformation of consciousness helped me to see how astrology could’ve seemed self-evident for human beings in the past but now appears—as Rick Tarnas always says—as the gold standard of superstition for moderns. The evolution of consciousness provide a narrative for understanding how that could have come about.

And so for Steiner, astrology actually emerges in the course of this gradual fall from primordial unity with the world as a kind of craft that reflects an increasing attention to the natural world and a recognition of regularities in the sky that one can track. So astrology plays an important part in the whole process of self-consciousness coming online. There’s this verse we mentioned last time we met to talk about this a little bit that Steiner uses, which really characterizes his whole (at least the shorter Earth period) of the evolution of consciousness. He says, “The stars once spoke to human beings.” I don’t have it up here right now, but basically they’ve gone quiet, and in the darkness, in the silence, there is what human beings eventually will speak to the stars—that which will reforge this connection with the gods.

And so one could say that astrology facilitated the emergence of self-consciousness to the extent that it provided this symbolic representation of the natural world that could allow individuals to get a bit of remove from it so as to have more agency and negotiate destiny. Initially it was just used for the king and the state, but gradually individual natal charts emerge.

Steiner’s general orientation towards astrology—which you kind of experience when you get to know the world of anthroposophy and talk to people in it—is that he thought it could be dangerous, because he believed that we are in this process of reincarnation that is directed towards a kind of re-education of humanity in the wake of the fall, a kind of overcoming of our karmic debt of actions that have been undertaken in ignorance of our divine essence and our fundamental unity with each other. And so the process of reincarnation is all about redemption for Steiner.

So he says that we have a kind of pre-birth will that orders the events of the coming life such that we will have experiences that will be part of this education of our soul and this process of redemption. And astrology for him is dangerous because it can reinforce the egoistic form of self-interest that is only limited to this particular lifetime. It’s when we believe that this is the only life I have and I only want good things for myself and I want to avoid all the bad things that the use of astrology can be bad. But he says that, in actuality, some of the supposedly bad things might have really important significance according to the deeper, more unconscious will of our reincarnating spirit—that higher, deeper aspect of ourselves. So that was one of the reasons why he was cautious about it. He said only at the end of an occult path does the study of astrology come into consideration—only then does it become necessary.

But when you get into anthroposophy, and this is one of the things that excited me about it, the lore and terminology of astrology is all over it. The names of his cosmic epochs—Saturn, Sun, Moon—for instance. I think he chose them for archetypal reasons and even says that these distant cosmic epochs have a kind of correspondence with the arrangement of the their placements in the current solar system.

It’s a really marvelous vision, and he puts astrology to use in all kinds of different ways and even uses tropical and sidereal astrology at different times. Biodynamic agriculture is very much based on the uneven distribution of the zodiac according to a certain form of sidereal astrology. So gardeners and farmers really focus with their almanacs on celestial influences, and that’s also a factor in anthroposophic medicine and the creation of homeopathic remedies.

It’s also sort of at work implicitly in Waldorf education in the way they structure the unfolding of the pedagogy according to these teachings he had about seven-year cycles—which I don’t know if he explicitly links to Saturn, but we can just assume there’s always a kind of sacred numerology or mathematics going on in anthroposophy. So you could say there’s astrology at work there, and they make a big deal about the nodal return and the Saturn return.

He also used tropical astrology. He did an election for the laying of the foundation stone, which was an important moment in the whole world of anthroposophy. And he has this book of verses called The Calendar of the Soul, which essentially is a way of attuning us to the spiritual process of the light cycle, but he ties them to the tropical zodiac. It’s really interesting that he uses both in different contexts. I don’t know if he made any explicit statements about it.

On more thing that I think is really interesting and unique about Steiner with regard to astrology is that he reconciles the archetypal picture of the solar system that we get in astrology (but which has been passed down to us from a time when the notion of evolution had not arisen yet—when there was a conception of the cosmos as eternal and unchanging (aside from the sublunary sphere) with evolutionary theory in a way that seems pretty coherent.

I mentioned I once studied in this philosophy program—Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness—which Richard Tarnas started. And there’s another professor in that program, Brian Swimme, who is an evolutionary cosmologist. They were bringing different perspectives, and students would always be like, “Okay, well, how do these fit together? Do the archetypes evolve into being? What does it mean that there’s all these other planets and galaxies?” That was always a question for students in this program because of these different perspectives that are being offered.

I have this quote from Steiner from a short essay called “On the Relationship Between Theosophy and Astrology” that kind of gets at this question in a really interesting way. And I can read it, but I just want to stop for a second and see if you have any thoughts or questions.

Dan: I’ve got plenty. We could go in many directions. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that really interested me just then was you mentioned that he used an election for the Goetheanum. Do you know if he found that election himself? So he was trained enough in astrology to pick out elections, or did he kind of use an astrologer to do that? Do you have any more on that?

Ashton: Well, I think he chose this one himself. He wanted to lay the foundation stone when Mercury was in Libra, and it was in tropical Libra. Interesting. So yeah, I’m pretty sure that was him. But one of his main collaborators was a woman named Elisabeth Vreede, and she was the head of the astronomy section. He gave many thousands of lectures throughout his career, and one of the collections of lectures is called On Curative Education. In it he talked about the condition of some albino children, and he had Vreede draw up charts for them because—and they were sidereal, they were in sidereal astrology—because he wanted to understand the combination of the cosmic influences at the time of their birth and the soils that they were born on, and also their heredity, as contributing factors to their albino condition. So that’s another example of him using it.

Dan: Right. That’s really interesting that he was going particularly for Mercury in Libra as well for the Goetheanum. Maybe he was going for a sort of place of peaceful and diplomatic, or well-reasoned and balanced discussion and thinking, or something of that kind. Who knows? But yeah, that’s super interesting.

It’s also interesting that they used both zodiacs, because something that has struck me and haunted me a little bit about astrology is that I’m completely confident that both tropical and sidereal astrology work. You know, I see a sidereal Vedic astrologer myself quite regularly, and yet I also am confident in tropical astrology as well. And it kind of gnaws at me that I don’t fully understand the deep metaphysical reasons why they both work and how they are different and what precisely they are speaking to. Because for me, I feel like it’s quite conceivable that they maybe speak to different levels of reality—maybe one of them is oriented to the stars but the other is oriented more to the earth.

If you had a deep enough understanding of these things, and you maybe had the kind of clairvoyant perception that Steiner did, you might have a very clear idea of what the different zodiacs spoke to. So it’s kind of interesting, and perhaps not surprising, that he used both of them.

Ashton: Yeah, yeah. And I think there have been some anthroposophists who tried to draw out what’s implied by the different uses along the lines of what you described. One thing that may be important to mention is his conception that the celestial bodies, stars, planets were the corporeal or sense-perceptible expression of ecologies of divine beings. And so I guess when we’re dealing with sidereal astrology, that’s maybe what we’re especially focused on—the live influence of those beings. I don’t know. And then maybe with the tropical zodiac we’re dealing with the light cycle and the earth, things that are closer to our experience while incarnated on Earth, because he also gave a lot of emphasis to the death chart as giving information about the whole sort of morphology of incarnations of a given individual.

Really interesting. And one of the things that he emphasizes in this essay on theosophy and astrology is that there’s a lot of wisdom that’s been passed down in the astrological tradition, more wisdom in comparison to the accumulation of information of science. But he says also that it’s necessary to develop this higher capacity of intuition to really do astrology. So maybe that’s a factor as well and informs how one would then understand the connection or the appropriate context for sidereal versus tropical.

But I can relate. Those questions have vexed me as well and were partially why I was ambivalent about practicing astrology professionally. But I think when you trust the intuitive element—and trust the experience of a good reading resonating with actual life —that’s its own kind of proof.

Dan: Absolutely. Yeah. The other thing that I wanted to ask you about, which you already actually touched on, is this whole idea of seven-year phases of life. I know that Steiner had developed some model of the lifespan which divided into seven-year phases, which is pretty interesting astrologically for probably multiple reasons, right? We can think of the phases of the Saturn cycle—we have the start of the cycle, we have the square, the opposition, and Saturn return, roughly speaking divided into seven-year periods. And we have Uranus’s seven years in each sign as well, which also gives us a kind of reason to think that seven-year periods of life could be a thing. Do you know much more about Steiner’s seven-year periods? Is this something he developed intuitively, or do you know where he got it from and if he ever brought any astrology into that?

Ashton: Well, this is something I personally don’t know enough about. I did read a book, a really great book by an astrologer and philosopher and somebody who’s also involved in anthroposophy to some extent. She’s given talks for Mystech; her name is Monique Pommier, and she wrote this great book called Harmony: The Heartbeat of Creation about sacred geometry and the evolution of consciousness. In it she explores how Steiner, among others, recognized that the number seven has this sort of deep significance for the cosmos. He refers to Saturn as the cosmic timekeeper.

Dan: Well, that’s brings up one thing that I sometimes wonder about Steiner—how much of this stuff did he perceive himself with his own explorations and sight, and how much he got from his own connections? I’ve heard it said that he was a Rosicrucian initiate himself. So you’d think that potentially some of this stuff might have been given to him as part of his Rosicrucian training.

Ashton: Yes, definitely. And, you know, he very consistently acknowledges his philosophical forebears, like the German idealists and Goethe and Schiller and all these other philosophers. He he does talk about esoteric brotherhoods and things like that, and he talks about Rosicrucianism. He also had a huge library. And maybe it wasn’t the case for his followers when he was alive, but at least for people today, it can be a little misleading to not have intellectual references or the acknowledgment of borrowings.

He would also say things like, “I’m not just repeating what other people have said. I’ve confirmed all of this for myself through my own research. So if it sounds like a repetition, that’s just because they got it right, basically.” Whether or not that’s the case, I don’t know.

Dan: Yeah. You wanted to move on to showing us something before I jumped in with some questions. What was it?

Ashton: Oh, yeah. Well, it’s just a quote from this essay called “On the Relationship Between Theosophy and Astrology.” And it’s just really interesting—it’s just kind of a seed for now—but trying to understand this question that I mentioned earlier: What is the relationship between evolutionary cosmology and astrology? Because astrology was originally interpreted according to a worldview that didn’t yet know that the cosmos had—the solar system had—formed and gone through this process of development rather than just being eternally there. At least that’s how I understand it.

And so here’s Steiner describing his research. Through this whole process of training and meditation that he outlines for others, he says he sort of fumbled his way through, I guess. He reads what he calls—and other theosophists and esotericists refer to this as well—the Akashic Record, or the Akashic Chronicle, or the invisible cosmic memory of the world. And this is where he’s discovering the past events of the cosmos, because again, the cosmos is—for him, the visible cosmos is just the manifestation of celestial beings in this sort of ongoing process of creation. So for him, reading the inner events of cosmic evolution is like reading the history of these interactions between these beings.

Anyway, so this is what he says: “One need only look at the relationship between humans, the sun, and the moon as determined by the results of the Akashic Chronicle. From this it will be seen that there was a primeval development of man in which his dwelling place was a celestial body that still consisted of the sun, moon, and Earth together.” So there’s this picture of a primordial unity that gradually differentiates and separates, and so astrology reflects this.

And then he says, “Therefore, even today man still has powers in his being that are related to those of the celestial bodies mentioned. These relationships also explain the connection that still exists today between the effects of the celestial bodies mentioned and what goes on in human beings. However, these effects are very different from those of a purely material nature, which is all that modern science talks about.”

So it’s just a really interesting perspective. I don’t know if it’s true, you know, and it somewhat conflicts with the interpretations of astrology that are kind of popular today, which want to make this really hard distinction between natural science and divination. But we have to remember that in the past there wasn’t that distinction. So yeah, that was just something I thought might be interesting to bring.

Dan: Yeah, yeah. What I find really interesting about this perspective is the idea that we had been in contact with the gods easily, let’s say, and that over time we started to lose that contact, and that drove us towards trying to find other ways of connecting with them. And so astrology kind of arose from the silence of the gods. So they stop talking to us, and we start looking to—or trying to understand—the mechanics of what we see in the sky in a bid to kind of rekindle that connection somehow.

So there’s a sort of process of growing silence, but then that also has this side effect of leading us to actually understand the natural world a lot better, ultimately leading to the development of modern science and, interestingly enough, ending up with astrology almost completely in the doghouse as it is now. But I think it’s an interesting picture of how we got where we are today.

I wondered if we could maybe shift a little bit now and just talk a little bit about the current time, the early 21st century, because I think Steiner had some interesting things to say about this particular time and about some of the things that we’d be dealing with in the world at the moment. I wonder if you could speak to that. What did Steiner say about this period of history?

Ashton: One thing I didn’t mention is that his whole worldview is thematized or animated by the notion of polarity—this creative dynamism of polarity, yin-yang, but it’s this creative process where one thing is changing into another. And every phase of cosmic evolution includes this sort of upbuilding process where something is being born and coming into being, and then a phase of the process where it starts to decay and fall apart and die.

And for him, especially in our Earth condition of solidity and material incarnation, what we think of as death is actually a kind of re-entrance into a higher life. And so that’s one way to think about what I’m about to say, which is: according to Steiner, during this larger cosmic period called the Earth epoch, we’re in the decline phase. The Earth is in this process of dying and falling apart and that one expression of this is the increasing intellectualization of the world—a kind of sclerotic hardening of it.

And he sees this as borne out by the increase in mechanical technologies. iIn this larger cosmic vision, the poles are identified by him with these two—he calls them adversaries—these figures who represent different faces of evil: Lucifer and Ahriman. And Ahriman is the more Satan-like, devil-like figure associated with the process of death and decay and becoming sclerotic.

So he says that these beings actually incarnate in the course of Earth history. And Lucifer has already incarnated before the coming of Christ. Christ comes at the midpoint of the whole thing. And then Ahriman is said to be soon to incarnate upon the Earth and to facilitate this process of mechanization and the gradual merging of human beings with machines to maintain ourselves on the Earth long enough to bring it forward to the point of evolution that it needs to reach.

That’s a sketch of the picture he gives. He says that there will be this ongoing dilemma of merging with machines and this increasing externalization of our intellect in the form of machines. And that Ahriman is this dark force that he says must incarnate. It’s like the necessity of, I guess you could say, the death process in the whole life cycle of an organism.

I didn’t initially find this a very exciting depiction of the future. But it also made current events more intelligible. You know, just this attitude we hear from AI developers where it just seems like there’s something happening that they’re facilitating, but they can’t just stop it. They don’t want to stop it. It’s just like a force of its own.

And so many people have associated, you know, the coming potential emergence of artificial general intelligence with the incoming incarnation of Ahriman. And so there’s—you could think of it as this polarity—as you noted, Dan, there’s this kind of waxing or rising of self-consciousness and the gradual dimming of the world as a revelation of the gods into the opacity of just the material world, and now it’s even intensifying with this sort of onslaught of technology and the possibility of losing our potential as free spirits to creatively participate in the unfolding of cosmic evolution and make ourselves diaphanous once more to a spiritual world.

So it’s like intensifying this and so making it necessary today that we take on spiritual exercises for our own mental health.

Dan: Yeah, I’ve talked about that a little bit on the channel before. The incarnation of Ahriman and what Steiner said about it is definitely some of his work that really caught my imagination a little bit. It was some of his lectures on the incarnation of Ahriman and Lucifer—the things I read that made me think that he really did have an ability to see things which he perhaps shouldn’t have been able to see by normal methods. And a lot of what he describes in his lectures about Ahriman are what we’re experiencing now—the sort of ever-deepening surrender to technology and technocracy and abstract systems and data.

And these are the kinds of things I think a lot of people are picking up on now as having been taken to the extreme. You hear people talking more and more about everything needing to be data-driven. What’s important is the data, not so much the human experience of things. And this ever-growing drive to make everything more efficient—it’s all about efficiency—and seeing if we can create digital models of the world which almost seem to be seen as more important than the world itself these days.

I wonder what your thoughts are on the actual incarnation of Ahriman, because if you read Steiner, he does say that Ahriman will incarnate as a human being. And yet, some people have suggested, “Well, was he really speaking about the systems that we’re putting in place?” Because I think it’s a lot easier for us today to imagine that he was kind of seeing the growth of information technology and, as you mentioned, AI as this kind of personification in the form of Ahriman. But from what I understand, he literally said it would be a person. I’d be interested to know what you think personally about this, and what do people in anthroposophy tend to think. Will Ahriman incarnate as an actual human being, or is it enough to say that Steiner caught on to the development of the IT systems that we see today?

Ashton: Yeah. Well, in the world of anthroposophy there are a lot of different opinions. So I’ve heard people be like, “Oh, it’s Elon Musk. Oh, it’s [someone else].” But then there’s an anthroposophist named Andrew Linnell who has really dedicated himself to excerpting and collecting as much of Steiner’s statements about the future and the transhumanist trajectory and the incarnation of Ahriman and all these things as he can. And he has a timeline that he’s developed for this, and he thinks that the actual incarnation of Ahriman won’t come for, I think, another hundred years or something like that.

And, personally—if it is to be, if it is to happen, if it is to be a real, actual human—I don’t think it’s happened yet. I sort of remain agnostic about it. But yeah, I guess my sense is that it hasn’t happened yet if it is to happen.

Dan: Yeah. Well, one interesting thing about the way Steiner talks about Ahriman is, as you say, that it kind of has to happen—that it’s almost like an initiation or something that we have to pass through. And so in Steiner’s conception—does he see Ahriman and Lucifer as ultimately doing God’s work somehow, even though they have their own agendas which they will try to take as far as possible and which can lead human beings to ruin? Are they sort of there necessarily, like as the adversary, and that the act of fighting the adversary is necessary for our growth and becoming?

Ashton: You know, one of my professors in my philosophy program would say, “Always pay attention to when a philosopher plays the mystery card, because that will tell you a lot about them.” And I think, you know, for Steiner the question of evil is where mystery comes in.

But if you read Occult Science, you see in the whole depiction of these phases of cosmic evolution, when there is a kind of intervention on behalf of one of the adversaries, the higher beings always come in and transmute it and turn it into something good. So there’s this sense that—one of these ancient words I use in my dissertation to kind of characterize Steiner’s whole vision of cosmic evolution is apokatastasis, which basically means that everything comes from and then returns to God. That’s kind of the whole process.

So yeah, you know, he even says—I feel like I remember Linnell repeating this, or maybe I just read it—that whoever Ahriman incarnates as will be received very well and will be perceived as someone who’s doing good things for the world and will have a kind of—I don’t know if charm is the right word—but a positive reception. And that what he’s bringing is necessary, and that anthroposophists—because that was his audience—need to be able to recognize him when he arrives and know how to skillfully participate and negotiate with what he brings.

And so yes, to answer your question, yes. From what I understand of Steiner, there is this sense that evil is somehow necessary. I think one way he characterizes it someplace is that evil is an influence that is either too soon or too late. But yeah, it’s part of the cosmic drama and does seem to be always transmuted towards the good.

Dan: Well, let’s hope that’s true. That sounds good to me. I think we’ve covered a lot of ground. It’s been a super interesting conversation. You are a practicing astrologer yourself. Perhaps you could tell the audience what you do and how people can find you if they want to contact you or maybe get a reading and learn more about what you do.

Ashton: Yeah, thanks, Dan. Well, yeah, I just in recent months decided to launch a practice after working with astrology for 16 years. And what I’m offering now is a combination of archetypal astrology—you know, what I’ve learned from studying with Rick Tarnas—and also incorporating Hellenistic astrology as I’ve been learning it from Adam Elenbaas’s school and others. So yeah, that’s what I’m offering—just natal chart transits and other timing techniques, and also supplemented by tarot card pulls. And you can find me at micr0k0sm.com.

Dan: Thank you, Ashton. It’s been super interesting. I’ve learned a lot myself just listening to you as well, and it’s been great. So thanks so much for joining us.

Ashton: Likewise, Dan. Thanks so much. Really appreciate it.

Language appears in this discussion not as a neutral conduit but as a living medium of participation. Opening with Whitehead’s suggestion that metaphysics experiments with its own instrument—language— cautions against mistaking this very metaphor for literal fact. If language is instrumentalized, treated as a mere tool for information transfer, we as speakers risk becoming the tools instead. This sets the tone for Barfield’s central poetic argument: that vehicle and tenor, outer and inner, fact and value must be held in a dynamic relation in order for metaphor to do its real cognitive work, rather than being reduced to a decorative flourish.

Against the modern myth of “born literalness,” participants emphasize Barfield’s thesis of “achieved literalness”: the capacity to speak literally is a late accomplishment of reflective consciousness. Earlier speech arose within a participatory field where mind and nature were not yet prised apart. Words were not simply labels “about” things but gestures of communion with them. Several participants connected this to sound: before there was “noise,” there was only meaningful emotional tone and rhythm. Examples like English “tree” versus German “Baum” evoke distinct gestural qualities, suggesting that phonetic textures can carry tenor as much as they denote vehicles.

Philosophical frames were introduced to clarify the stakes. C. S. Peirce’s triadic semiosis (sign, object, interpretant) is contrasted with F. de Saussure’s binary structuralist account, loosening the sense that meaning is a closed circuit of words pointing only to other words. Peirce’s triad legitimates worldly resonance beyond words while preserving the role of a participating subject. Whitehead’s process vision further reframes propositions as lures for feeling: the literal consolidates order while metaphor releases novelty. Poetry thus becomes not ornament but metaphysical method—an experimental mode for re-entering the figurative power of participatory consciousness where, at times, trees may symbolize words.

From here, the discussion arcs into embodiment, healing, and education. Participants thread Barfield’s insights through music and mathematics, where scores and symbols are necessary frameworks yet never exhaust the performed meaning. In healing narratives, “literal” symptom and “metaphorical” significance interpenetrate, reframing illness as a bearer of meaning rather than mere malfunction. In pedagogy and language acquisition, the early plenitude of sound narrows into learned distinctions, implying that conscious practice is required to regain qualitative sensitivity to tone, rhythm, and color—keys to what Barfield calls regained or final participation.

The conversation also confronts the politics of speech. “Communication,” often imagined as the transfer of abstract data across isolated minds, is contrasted with “communion,” a term that connotes resonance and shared presence. Etymological play around “communication” and “munitions” underscores how language can harden into armament. The counter-move is attunement: connotative depth over denotative fixation, description as bridge rather than definition as boundary. A Steiner verse is invoked to map a path from the sense of speech to its soul and spirit, moving through imagination, inspiration, and intuition into receptive will.

Finally, theological motifs surface at the metaphysical horizon of metaphor itself. C. S. Lewis’s distinction between magistral and pupillary metaphors helps name conscious invention versus meanings that crystallize from deeper participation. The Eucharistic notion of concomitance becomes a figure for Barfield’s worldview: vehicle and tenor present together without remainder. In this light, the Incarnation appears as the consummation of metaphor—spirit borne into matter and matter borne into spirit. The meeting ends by modulating “atonement” into “attunement,” inviting a practice of speech that straightens enough to build and swirls enough to keep meaning alive—an ethics of language equal to the evolution of consciousness.

“The cat is on the mat.”

This proposition has obvious literal meaning. It also has metaphorical meaning as language’s way of referring to its own ability to refer.

Click here for a PDF of the essay “Dream, Myth, and Philosophical Double Vision.”

Kat framed Barfield’s essay as a rethinking of “ordinary” and “extraordinary” consciousness: ordinary consciousness emerges from the extraordinary, not vice-versa (“interior is anterior,” as Barfield says elsewhere). She traced Barfield’s preference for “extraordinary consciousness” over Jung/Freud’s “unconscious,” and his adoption of an Eastern, continuum model of mind with liminal thresholds rather than hard binary categories like conscious and not conscious. Drawing on the Māṇḍūkya Upanishad, Barfield outlined four states—waking, dream, deep dreamless sleep, and a background “a-consciousness” that undergirds the rest and bears a flavor of the infinite/eternal, not bound to a single organism (suggesting the trans-individual). Kat also shared her hunch that “a-consciousness” names a plurality (Latin a-/multi-) rather than a negation (Greek a-), consistent with Barfield’s “super-individual” emphasis.

From there, she contrasted dreams and myths as parallel expressions of extraordinary consciousness: dreams as personal/ontogenetic and myths as historical/phylogenetic metamorphoses. To illustrate, she followed Barfield’s retelling of Oedipus, centering the Sphinx’s riddle as the breakthrough into subject–object consciousness, an awakening that also dramatizes how flight from fate becomes its fulfillment when the range of consciousness is truncated. A second example, Medusa, was read as the petrification of the mind-world relation once consciousness was severed from its earlier participation; the snake-hair suggests brain formation in an imaginal-evolutionary key.

The group tested Barfield’s East/West contrast as regards “liberation.” To summarize Barfield’s portrayal: Eastern paths were depicted as seeking absorption into a-consciousness (a kind of “quantum leap,” in Kat’s terms), while Western paths are understood as “visual/additive,” layering extraordinary into ordinary via creative imagination, so the two work in tandem. Metaphor, on this account, is a quickening device: it holds a productive tension between literal sense and incompatible experience, jolting us out of clock-time into time-freedom while also schooling us in the intermediate phases—an apprenticeship in bringing the extra- into the ordinary. Barfield’s “double vision” is an invitation to sustain ordinary awareness while actively seeking the extraordinary, a participatory or co-creative engagement rather than a flight from the world.

Matt situated Barfield’s critique of Jung: even with his “collective unconscious,” Jung often presupposes psyche as emergent from many separate brains—an example of unresolved positivism. Matt touched on Schelling’s late philosophy of mythology as a key influence on both Jung and Steiner that treats myth as recollection of cosmogenesis, and as the birth of God in human consciousness, marking a path beyond any residual materialism.

Bruce challenged Barfield’s East/West binary through later Buddhist developments: Theravāda “stream-entry” as an intermediate taste of the divine; the Bodhisattva vow as a renunciation of final absorption for the sake of all beings. These are evidence of graded paths and incarnational return. He suggested Barfield’s framing reflects Steiner’s lens and limited mid-century knowledge of Buddhism.

Jeff offered a reframing: Barfield’s “absorption (East) vs visual/additive (West)” isn’t about dissolution vs visioning but about cultural sensoria. In a McLuhan-ish mood, he read the West’s “plus-sign” habit as a visual bias, both a liability and an opportunity, contrasted with an “absorptive,” life-process orientation. This keeps Barfield’s critique of the West while preserving what’s promise-laden in its visual culture.

Lorenzo proposed the Sphinx as a “hieroglyph of hieroglyphs,” emblem of articulation: the hybrid form signals both the gain of individuated awareness and the forgetting of participation. A note about early Sphinx iconography (a reptile issuing from the forehead) became a springboard for evolutionary/initiatory readings that run in parallel with Medusa.

Lisa brought the temporal texture: beware linearity in the present meaning crisis. Mythopoetic, non-linear thinking lets us tap the story that never was but is always happening, carrying new complexity into the now. Language, as a time-binding faculty, mediates this. We can contrast the thinness of certain mathematical idioms with the richer chemistry of a language that can hold living processes.

Matt returned to language evolution: the West fuses Jerusalem (hearing/willing) and Athens (vision/thinking) in the alphabet—perhaps a necessary stage toward “final participation,” which could demand a post-alphabetic (neither purely ideographic nor alphabetic) language-form, implying a subtle re-organization of the senses. Jeff then sharpened the symbol–metaphor distinction: symbols participate in what they show; metaphors compare across difference.

Matt offered an extended reflection on lucid dreams and metaphors as living bridges between ordinary and extraordinary consciousness. Lucidity in dreams mirrors the double vision Barfield calls for: a state in which awareness of the dream as dream allows one to participate in it creatively rather than being passively carried along. This lucidity is not about waking up from the dream but within it, cultivating the imaginative poise that can also operate in waking life when we become aware of the normally unconscious process of what Barfield elsewhere calls figuration.

We can draw a parallel between lucid dreaming and the imaginative use of metaphor. Metaphors such as “the soul is a sky” are not ornamental but ontologically revelatory. They stretch the boundary of meaning until ordinary and extraordinary overlap, revealing how consciousness itself can modulate the world’s structure. In saying “the soul is a sky,” for instance, one experiences the soul not as a closed psychological container but as an open expanse in which the twinkling of thought and the clouds of feeling move, an imaginal experiment that transposes inwardness into cosmic form.

Thus both lucid dreaming and metaphor are trainings in participation: they momentarily suspend the subject–object split and let consciousness feel its creative agency. Metaphor, in this sense, functions like a micro-lucid dream embedded in language, an exercise in waking imagination that can re-enchant perception and remind the human spirit of its cosmogenetic power.

Brad asked me to introduce myself, which led me to share my self-understanding as a process-relational philosopher and transdisciplinary researcher. “Transdisciplinarity” is my way of signaling that even though I’m rooted in philosophy, I insist on collaborating with scientists, artists, theologians, and practitioners of many kinds. I want to build bridges across the increasingly complicated civilization we inhabit. One of my deepest callings is integration: that is, reconnecting the many ways human beings have learned to know, feel, and engage the world so that we can sustain a coherent sense of the whole and of our human place within it. Without that integrative effort, cosmos and psyche fray. We slide into fragmentation, disorientation, and confusion.

Process-relational transdisciplinarity is not just a theoretical method. It is also an integrative ethos that shapes how I strive to relate to what we might call “malevolent” beings. What makes a being malevolent is often that it has been ignored, pushed out, or unloved. The most appropriate response to evil is love. By “appropriate,” I mean the most helpful response, that which is most likely to reduce the suffering of everyone involved. We cannot defeat evil by shunning, avoiding, or repressing it. Those who attempt to annihilate evil become evil. We have to meet it with love. This is terrifying, and I don’t always live up to it myself. Loving thy enemies is not an easy teaching in our or any time. But it remains the deepest teaching available to us.

Beneath the headlines, there is a deeper sense of collective suffering and civilizational disorientation. In the United States, in the global North, and increasingly everywhere, people feel cut off from cosmic, spiritual, and religious purpose, and more immediately from community, culture, and family. Parents and children often struggle to understand one another. From an anthroposophical perspective, one could read this as an expression of the “consciousness soul” epoch unfolding since the fifteenth century: a long arc of increasing individuation that can also feel like alienation.

Urphänomen Research Guild

Becoming Michael's Companions

In October of 1922, Rudolf Steiner met with about 80 young people between the ages of 18 and 25 in Stuttgart to deliver a series of 13 lectures that have since been translated and published as Becoming the Archangel Michael's Companions: Rudolf Steiner's Challenge to the Younger Generation…

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2 years ago · 29 likes · 5 comments · Urphänomen and Matthew David Segall

Raising and educating children in this context is extraordinarily difficult. The only certainty about the near-term future is uncertainty. Yet precisely here we must renew two linked commitments: cultivating free individuals, and building loving communities. Each child arrives with a karmic seed, but only becomes the individual they are capable of becoming if they are mirrored by parents, teachers, and communities who, through love, draw them more fully into incarnation. Given the saturation of our lives by screens, social media, and Allegedly Intelligent algorithms—technologies that both connect and disconnect us—it has never been more important to treat education as a sacred process. One lesson of adulthood is that no one is coming to save us. The adults are us. Old national and global systems are breaking down. Individuals and communities must step up locally to create the structures we need to survive and thrive.

Both Rudolf Steiner and Alfred North Whitehead have been crucial teachers for me. Whitehead offers a metaphysical grammar, a flexible categoreal scheme and “philosophy of organism” that brings the universe back to life. Steiner offers a spiritual practice that transforms thinking and perception, exercises that train attention to meet the world empathically and imaginatively, not only as a physical arena but as a moral drama. Balancing academic philosophy and religious studies with esoteric spirituality is not easy, but without some contact with initiatory experience, academic philosophy becomes alienating. I’d go so far as to say specializing in purely analytic philosophy is bad for your health.

Steiner has given me permission to press beyond the limits of knowledge that academic philosophy and the natural sciences have tended to put in place. The basic modern common sense among intelligent people is that we possess a rational intellect, understood as a kind of sophisticated calculator or information processor, and we have our senses: eyes, ears, skin, etc. Anything that is not mathematically computable or empirically measurable through the five senses or their extensions is deemed unreal.

For a variety of reasons—phenomenological reasons that many twentieth-century thinkers acknowledge even without getting esoteric—there is a great deal left out by the standard rationalist-empiricist-materialist worldview. Long before we broach spirituality, problems multiply for the assumption that thinking is only calculation and that our access to reality is limited to five senses.

Steiner builds on Goethe’s participatory scientific method, developing a form of intuitive perception or participatory knowing. Imagination becomes a valid way of knowing textures of reality that do not immediately show themselves to vision or hearing, but that, through a certain attunement of attention, we can in fact come to experience. He not only gives permission to take super-sensory knowledge seriously, he provides practices to cultivate it.

The possibility of participatory knowing has become important for me as a philosopher because otherwise there are so many dead ends, not only regarding knowledge of the physical universe, life, and the human mind, but also in the most personal task of making meaning of my own existence. Many people are flippant or evasive when the topic of death arises. Most do not want to think about what happens when we die. The default common sense says the mind is what the brain does; when the body dies and the brain shuts down, my sense of self disappears. It is as if I never existed.

Since childhood I have thought about death, and I have recognized the stark implication: if that view is true, then none of this means anything. A civilization that assumes mind is reducible to brain and death is the end risks becoming a theater of the absurd. The meaning crisis stems largely from this (mis)understanding of death and its implication for human life.

A transpersonal approach is necessary. Even a spiritual approach, but still disciplined and scientific. Steiner’s “spiritual science” is helpful because it allows me to think clearly about the implications of a non-materialist metaphysics and cosmology. I do not want vague mysticism; I want to ask, rigorously: if we do not simply blink out of existence when blood stops flowing to the brain, what happens? To whatever extent I am capable of knowing, I want to know.

Steiner provides so much—at first, food for thought, nourishing concepts that help me think beyond the default materialist common sense of our time. But it does not end with thought. Gradually, one begins to grow organs of perception. I can say, for example, that perceiving the etheric formative forces at work in the plant world is possible. Anyone can do this. Once you have felt it, you cannot simply dismiss it and return to the old materialist common sense.

Whitehead remains my bread and butter in the academy, and interest in his work is growing across disciplines. He speaks a generative language that both mathematical physicists and biologists can recognize, and he renders the abstractions of twentieth-century science consistent with an animate conception of cosmogenesis. Steiner, coming out of Goethean science, complements this with the participatory and initiatory dimension that Whitehead hints at but does not fully develop. Together, they help us articulate an educational philosophy worthy of human beings: an initiation into cosmic co-creation rather than mere information transfer. Education belongs at the center of cultural life. It is cosmology in miniature. Every curriculum presupposes a picture of the universe and the human. If the cosmos is dead matter, education becomes job training. If the cosmos is creative evolution, education becomes the art of becoming.

Let me reiterate that learning should be at the center of everything we do as human beings. To be human is to be engaged in a lifelong process of open development. It is not simply that adults teach children; children also teach adults. Where do heaven and earth meet? Children enter the world fresh, closest to heaven in the spiritual sense, and they meet adults who have been tempered by life on earth. At that meeting point—at that living interface—a transformation occurs that keeps the spiritual world and the earthly world one world.

I do not believe we need a new planetary religion or universal human story. I find it difficult to avoid affirming not just cultural but ontological pluralism. Reality is not a single, static substance “out there” upon which we each have partial perspectives. There may be a oneness underlying everything, but if life is to realize its fullest value the particularity of each of the many must also count for something. There is no ready-made continuity of becoming; rather, each creature is responsible for maintaining the becoming of continuity. Reality is one and many, an unbroken relational process of perspectives on perspectives all the way down. In Steiner’s idiom, the world is not made of bits of matter or disembodied ideas but of real animate beings, up and down the scales of existence. What reality is depends on the kinds of communities that compose it (electronic, protonic, galactic, etc.). Communities emerge from the decisions of the individuals composing them. We become what we value together.

Translating this back into educational theory and practice, this means we must move in two directions at once. We need deeper individuation—each individual human being is a species unto themselves—and we need deeper communion. In Jung’s terms, individuation opens us to the Self; in Steiner’s terms, the “I” is both universal and unique. The paradox is that the more uniquely you incarnate the infinite activity that is the I, the more universal your participation becomes. Our cultural task is to build loving communities that allow each unique being to flower. If we focus here, the solutions to larger national and global challenges may emerge naturally from the quality of our more intimate relationships.

All of this bears directly on our entanglement with technology. On the one hand, I do not think that large language models are conscious or could become so. On the other hand, I take seriously the idea that the incarnation of Ahriman could manifest through some future form of machine intelligence. Life on planet earth is going to continue to get weirder. The human–machine interface—symbiosis even—will continue in the direction we are already seeing. Amid the growing threats of transhumanism, extropianism, effective altruism, and other tech-amplified iterations on utilitarianism (which Steiner long ago pegged as a dangerous ethical philosophy), we need a double posture. We must resist, to stay human, and yet we cannot avoid getting our hands dirty. The machines are here to stay. In anthroposophical terms, Ahriman will incarnate; in terms a secular intellectual can accept, human and machine are going to fuse, if they have not already. Our task is to avoid the spiritual confusion of materialism in the process.

The question that interests me in this context is what can machine intelligence teach us about human consciousness? I try to flip the script: stop worrying about LLMs hallucinating and start worrying about human beings using LLMs hallucinating. That is the danger, and that is what we need to be attentive to.

There is a real tension to be held. Children should be protected from screens as much as possible, because otherwise we do not learn how to become incarnated, how to work in the world with our hands and our senses, meeting the resistance of materials and of other wills. Seeing two-year-olds with iPads is alarming. Without yet bringing anything spiritual into it, there is no question that a certain kind of brain damage is occurring in such cases, an instant-gratification conditioning that trains us physiologically in ways that are nearly impossible to recover from later.

At the same time, the world is evolving as it is, and we do not want to raise children who, upon coming of age, have no way to interface with the dominant society. We do not want kids swallowed by the dominant worldview; yet they need to be conversant with it. The question becomes: how do we resist the technologization of everything without repressing the fact that we live in a technological civilization?

If you simply go with the flow of default culture, you become too Ahrimanic; if you merely repress it, you risk becoming overly Luciferic. The latter shows up as spiritual pride or denial, forgetting that we are at a phase in the evolution of consciousness that tends toward increasing materialization, and that there is something necessary and appropriate about that. It is precisely this process, including the movement toward the incarnation of Ahriman, that is facilitating human freedom in a way that would not otherwise be possible. We need resistance to technologization, but not repression of it, as if we could avoid or not face it.

Protecting childhood from premature technologization is not Luciferic but an essential means of maintaining the balance of cultural life. The task is to facilitate the development of each child so that, by the mid or late teens, they can begin to interface with these technologies equipped with skills, attention span, and the capacity to understand the power of their own thinking. Then they are best positioned to help society integrate these tools. What is a good use of AI and robotics? Deployed within a healthy social organism and economy—when we are clear about what cultural life is for, and clear that the human mind is not a software algorithm running on the hardware of the brain—these technologies can alleviate menial labor and human suffering. With the wrong understanding of the human being, we will create a prison for ourselves.

So we must protect younger people so that they can develop the human consciousness capable of managing the impact of these increasingly autonomous technical systems. Otherwise we risk becoming the tools of our machines.

What is unfolding feels like chiaroscuro: the mix of dark and light that creates intricate shadow and color. We are in a sunset moment: an ending, but a beautiful transition as well. Predicting what the world will look like in a year, five years, or ten is difficult. I can’t offer an unambiguously optimistic take. At the level of the large-scale civilizational and national structures that we used to take for granted, there will be a lot of breakdown. I hope we can avoid increasing geopolitical instability; it would be good if major wars did not continue to break out. Still, whatever happens at that macro level, and as the old structures continue to collapse, something new becomes possible.

As these systems decay, we are forced to connect locally, forging networks of care, empathy, and curiosity; reestablishing community life; learning to lean on and help our neighbors. As institutions that no longer serve us die away, we are given the opportunity to return to what is most immediate and significant about being human: serving our communities and building new support systems with the people we are actually in contact with.

This also means not getting pulled into the endless, frustrating battles at the level of national politics. What happens there matters, but so much attention and energy is consumed by blue-team/red-team combat. How does that help my child live a healthier life? How does it help my family or my neighborhood? The real opportunity now is to look locally for solutions to problems we once expected to be handled from on high by institutions that no longer function.

Though I had already been startled awake by Saving the Appearances, it was probably my first reading of “The Rediscovery of Meaning” that precipitated my conversion to being a Barfield enthusiast. My reception of his ideas was backgrounded by many years of working with astrology and my resultant deep knowing (having accumulated many confirmations of astrology’s legitimacy) that life has a meaningful patterning to it that one can come to understand or read (more akin to poetry than prose). What Barfield provided me with was a way of understanding how the once universal (transcultural) recognition of the world’s meaningful patterning—systematized into divinatory crafts like astrology—had somehow become eclipsed in the course of history, and—to my excitement—how it might one day be rediscovered.

Barfield opens the essay referencing one of the “menacing signs that surrounded us in the middle of this twentieth century”—what persists today as the so-called “meaning crisis.” For him the, issue of meaninglessness is concomitant with the historical rise of a habit we associate with science—meticulous observation of the phenomenal world as a collection of objects and their systematization according to the concepts of cause and effect. Among the benefits of this fundamentally technological approach to the world is an increased mastery over the “dashboard” (as he puts it in STA) of nature; the downside: a gradually developing, and eventually entrenched, inattention to the world as meaningful, semantic.

The entire essay is actually a performance of the very method Barfield recommends at the end (with the example of Goethe’s systematic training of the imagination in the study of nature) as he goes on to read meaning off the surface of the recent history of consciousness. If, as Barfield claims, “the meaning of a process is the inner being which the process expresses”—a great take on the meaning of ‘meaning’ which I have quoted many times—then the inner being which emerges from Barfield’s interpretation of recent intellectual history is that our forgetting of the world’s legibility and its enculturation through doctrines like Comtean positivism (for which only physicalist science can deliver knowledge, a claim which cannot be falsified by the method it crowns as king), and the inevitable development of logical positivism in linguistics (which dismisses all words that do not refer to physical reality as meaningless) depicts the ultimate undoing of materialism if only it be pushed to its logically consistent extreme.

If that extreme is reached, we arrive at a view of the human which is totally emptied of soul—wholly extrinsic: a mere machine to augment, improve, manipulate. And the realities we designate with words dismissed by logical positivism (such as those associated with moral judgment—virtue, goodness, love)—these would evaporate too. “At last the choice is plain,” as Barfield puts it, “Either we must concede that 99 per cent of all we say and think (or imagine we think) is meaningless verbiage, or we must—however great the wrench—abandon positivism.”

Anyone who has a fidelity to personal experience, especially interpersonal experience—though perhaps challenged by the deliverances of technology and the compelling ideology based upon it—rightly resists the ontological flattening of positivism, but as Barfield insists, the familiar view which posits that there are two truths: those of Science and of Religion—a view which temporarily forestalled total colonization by the technological view of nature—cannot hold out any longer.

We need some way of bringing the two together, some way of rediscovering meaning in the world, now assisted by the habit of meticulous attention and systematization of phenomena demonstrated by physicalist science. As Barfield notes, the enculturation of this habit has eventually led to the assumption that something like a “science of meaning” is impossible, and this is precisely why the gift of his semantic approach to history is so significant, why—I think—Barfield, though not as well known as other philosophers, has such fervent enthusiasts in his wake, for he provides us a way to rediscover meaning by recollecting its forgetting: “How did it come about,” he asks in this vein, “that a very high proportion of the words in any modern language do refer (or appear to refer) to matters and events which are not part of the world accessible to our senses?”

He goes on to reference an oft-noted feature of languages discovered by etymological researchers: that the biography of words which include reference to a reality not amenable to the senses tends to begin with a seemingly “metaphorical” character (“‘expression’ means ‘what is squeezed out,’ ‘to employ’ is to ‘twine in’”) suggesting that inner experience was articulated by means of the outer world as a means of symbolizing—or, as Barfield aptly refers to nature in another very quotable phrase, “a series of images symbolizing concepts.” In other words, the world itself is semantic and the source of our own symbolizing capacity:

We owe the existence of language to the fact that mental images, into which memory converts the forms of the outer world, can function not only as signs and reminders of themselves but as symbols for concepts. If this were not so, they could never have given rise to words—which make abstract thoughts possible. If we reflect on this fact unprejudiced by any positivist assumptions, we must conclude that this symbolic significance is inherent in the forms of the outer world themselves. The first metaphors were not artificial but natural.

The significance of this take on human psychogenesis is quite radical when one applies to evolutionary theory, for it suggests that—initially—there was no “inner” and “outer” world distinction, but that through our capacity to symbolize (our Logos-power, one could say), this distinction has been brought about. As my former professor Jacob Sherman used to quote (I do not know whether it was Barfield or Leibniz or someone else from whom this quote came), prior to this differentiation the cosmic All was experienced as a “clear lake of meaning.” The world, as we would say today, had an “inside” which symbolized itself through the fleeting appearances of the “outside.”

The problem with many contemporary approaches to “fixing” today’s meaning crisis is that they tend not to give priority to the world itself as semantic. True, the burden is on us, but not to reinvent the wheel—rather, what we need is a renewal of participation, or an approach to the world recognized (however inchoately) as macrocosmic Speaker and not just collection of manipulable objects. The old microcosm-macrocosm cosmologies, humoral theories, and astrology, Barfield suggests, are all vestiges of humanity’s immediate, atavistic participation in the excess of meaning that is the inner Life of the world.

Barfield notes that Romantic poets and philosophers were onto something with their revaluation of Nature as a living symbol of the Beautiful, but, as with those who affirm something like the non-overlapping magisteria of science and religion, they don’t go far enough upon halting at the beautiful image. “In the book of nature,” as Barfield puts it, “the whole may mean something, but the details mean nothing; or if they do, we can never know it.” Instead, he argues, we must become fully literate and read the entrails of this evolutionary book called Nature, but with a newfound precision associated with science.

This is a tall order, however, because when one advances from the simple cause-effect meaning studied by mechanical science to the less univocal and much more contextual meanings of biology, psychology, sociology, and religion, the aspiration for precision must be accommodate complexity accordingly.

Though Barfield holds Goethe up as an exemplar, it’s clear elsewhere that he believed Steiner had achieved the former (though he does acknowledge in his biography Romanticism Comes of Age that there are things the latter said which he doesn’t understand). Whether one agrees with Barfield or not, it’s clear that both Goethe and Steiner thematize the notion of nature as “a series of images symbolizing concepts” (if this phrase reminds one of The Philosophy of Freedom, I think it should) as our starting point. The insights garnered from participatory knowing may be communicated, but they will always fall short of actual experience. So unless we are content to collect dead husks of meaning, it would be prudent of us to take up Barfield’s invitation to learn how to read the world by way of Goethe’s “sinking himself in contemplation of the outward form” such that, like his, our “imagination [might then] penetrate to the activity which is producing it.” Thereby we might unite with the beings symbolizing themselves through Nature—“the creative thoughts which underlie phenomenal manifestation”—beings which used to be called gods.

Perhaps—through such a practice—what comes to us as a husk-like vestige in the tradition of astrology might be re-enlivened as a true oracular device for communing with the gods once again. Then we wouldn’t be so concerned with the meaning crisis, but thoroughly awake to the fact that meaning has always ever been nigh (and in excess)—coursing through our passions, thoughts, and the strokes of destiny that define our lives.

Owen Barfield’s short introduction to the first edition (1977) of his collection of essays titled The Rediscovery of Meaning has a remarkable potency, even if only in a suggestive manner, because—in his usual way of distilling the vastly complex into an elegant conceptual one-liner—he provides the golden thread of his oeuvres’ abiding concern: “the importance of penetrating to the antecedent unity underlying apparent or actual fragmentation.”^[1] But what does he mean by this “antecedent unity”? And how does one go about discovering it?

Those familiar with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s will no doubt recognize the phrase above from his Biographia Literaria with reference to the organic form of a work of art—it’s ideal underlying unity—and the isomorphism this aesthetic experience has with our perceptual relationship with the cosmos itself. Echoing Friedrich Schelling, Coleridge envisioned the world as woven from a polar process which, in the Time before time, was primordially One (an antecedent unity)—and so must be construed as in truth a tri-unity. One could claim that this insight goes all the way back to myth and symbol, in the Trimurti found in many traditions around the world, in the familial dynamic of Osiris-Isis-Horus, in the Monad-Dyad-Triad of Pythagoras and Hermeticists ever after him.

Barfield’s familiarity with these thinkers and symbols no doubt informed his capacity to elegantly articulate the key insight and salvific power of his principle theme—the evolution of consciousness—but it was his own discovery of evidence for that antecedent unity in the history of linguistic meaning which enflamed him with a faith in its reality.

Initially, it was his youthful fascination with the psychological impact of genuinely poetic diction—which, he realized, was sometimes catalyzed by the strange meaningfulness of ancient words—that led him into the dreamy annals of semantic history—a transdisciplinary mix of etymology, anthropology, psychology, and philosophy.

The further he looked back, the more ancient words seemed to have what he referred to as a “compact” meaning, partaking of both a literal-material and subjective-symbolic-inner-psychological meaning (the oft cited Greek pneuma, which meant breath, wind, and spirit all at once, is one of countless examples). For Barfield, this implied that the experience correlative to ancient semantics involved a kind of unity between what we today refer to as the subjective or psychological pole of experience and metaphorically deem “inside” and the supposedly material “outside” world. Spirit then was in the wind, in the breath… somehow indissociably one—an antecedent unity.

Though some words we use today still retain that compact meaning (heart for instance, as the physical organ and inner-psychological organ of feeling-perception), we mostly have polarities: we have wind and breath, but not with spirit in them; whereas spirit, unless you are spiritually inclined, is for many just a mere idea. As I suggested with Barfield in my dissertation, this historical process can be described as a polarization of an original unity into the dyad of subject and object.

Barfield then goes on in his introduction to say that the discovery of this antecedent unity bodied forth in the history of language has value for us as we face what many refer to as the “meaning crisis”—an absence of cosmological orientation in the midst of disciplinary fragmentation. Its value is the realization that our conception of knowledge has shifted in accordance with this fragmentation and forgetfulness of that antecedent unity, and that it might shift again through this recollection.

Rather than an accumulation of information about the objectified world through the silos of separate disciplines—a process which breaks meaning apart—knowledge which reflects an awareness of the primordial (and ever-present) unity of subject and object—what Barfield refers to as “participation” in Saving the Appearances—threads meaning back together, brings it back to Life.

For Barfield, returning to meaning required a practice of historical recollection—a practice of allowing the evolution of consciousness depicted in the historical transformation of linguistic meaning and other cultural media to demonstrate through portrayal (Goethe’s method) this movement from unity to fragmentation. “If knowledge formerly connoted a certain awareness of an antecedent immaterial unity,” as he writes in this vein, “then the perception or intuition of such unities is a historical as well as an ontological topic.”^[2] This is Barfield’s way of saying that it is not only an evolution of consciousness suggested by the history of meaning, but also its correlative—the phenomena of the objective world, subject and object co-constituted in the process of their gradual polarization from antecedent unity. As he describes it, this evolution “must be seen as the progressive metamorphosis of a universal or generalized consciousness, which embraced both man and nature, into the individualized and alienated self-consciousness we have today; and further that there are indications that this contraction seeks to be followed by an expansion from the separate new centers thus created.”^[3]

As Barfield envisions it, the rediscovery of meaning and the renewal of genuine knowledge begins to alight through this expanding, expanding beyond our insulated self-consciousness into a new intimacy with the living cosmos, though without annihilating our centers of selfhood. One could call that movement Love. “This, it is argued,” as Barfield continues, “involves realizing that the centers — human beings — are still, in their subconscious depths, transpersonal. It can be understood, as he quotes from Saving the Appearances, “if, but only if, we admit that in the course of the Earth’s history something like the Divine Word has been gradually closing itself with the humanity it first gradually created — so that what was first spoken by God may eventually be respoken by man.”^[4] And therewith we get a taste of the Christology Barfield gradually embraced as a result of his studies in semantic history.

Though “reared an agnostic,” he would eventually have the “startling experience” of recognizing the special relation between the revelations of semantic history (which one might justifiably refer to as the biography of the Word) and the lore of the Gospels. “Here is the antecedent Unity of unities, here is the interior Transforming Agent of evolution, here is the positive meaning of life on Earth, here is the Meaning of meaning itself staring me in the face!”^[5]

For my part, I think Barfield was onto something. For me, insight into that antecedent unity and the depiction of its polarization in the evolution of consciousness depicted by semantic history have been and continue to be like a golden thread—guiding my heart through the maze of today’s chaos with faith in a new unity woven between us through our happy obedience to that transpersonal light within, that ever-present emissary and image of primordial oneness—Love.

May it be so.

^[1] 4.

^[2] 4.

^[3] 6.

^[4] 6.

^[5] 7