FEW would deny that Steiner’s greatest influence was the famous German poet and playwright, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), after whom he named the world centre for his Anthroposophical movement. The Austrian cites a verse from Goethe’s two-part play, Faust (1790), to illustrate man’s inherent restlessness: “Two souls, alas! Reside within my breast / And each withdraws from and repels its brother.”

These words, he tells us, epitomise humanity’s constant desire to obtain more than the world can possibly provide:

We seem born to dissatisfaction. And our desire for knowledge is but a special instance of this unsatisfied striving. Suppose we look twice at a tree. The first time we see its branches at rest, the second time in motion. We are not satisfied with this observation. Why, we ask, does the tree appear to us now at rest, then in motion? Every glance at nature evokes in us a multitude of questions. Every phenomenon we meet presents a new problem to be solved. Every experience is to us a riddle. (p.17)

Being an accomplished scientist, Goethe himself – far more than most men and women of his generation – sensed this intense disquiet and agitation within himself.

The divided individual of whom Goethe spoke is portrayed by Steiner as a profound contrast between “Self and World,” something that we perceive at the very moment of our birth. This is not to suggest that we do not feel part of the world in which we live, of course, and it remains a challenge for us to bridge this gap to the best of our abilities. As Steiner rightly observes, this perennial drama is constantly played-out in the fields of religion, art and science, being an attempt to make the “world-content” part of our “thought-content”.

This juxtaposition between Self and World usually manifests in two distinct forms: Monism and Dualism. In the case of the second, an eternal dissimilitude reinforces the boundaries of the estranged spheres by presenting reality as a two-sided affair consisting of either “Mind and Matter,” “Subject and Object” or “Thought and Appearance”.

As Steiner explains, he who looks at the world from the perspective of dualism believes that

there must be a bridge between the two worlds, but is not able to find it. In so far as man is aware of himself as “I,” he cannot but put down this “I” in thought on the side of Spirit; and in opposing to this “I” the world, he is bound to reckon on the world’s side the realm of percepts given to the senses, i.e., the Material World. In doing so, man assigns a position to himself within this very antithesis of Spirit and Matter. He is the more compelled to do so because his own body belongs to the Material World. Thus the “I,” or Ego, belongs as a part to the realm of Spirit; the material objects and processes which are perceived by the senses belong to the “World.” All the riddles which belong to Spirit and Matter, man must inevitably rediscover in the fundamental riddle of his own nature. (p.18)

Alternatively, the Monist tries to retain his one-world viewpoint at all costs and this often leads to the absorption of those more subtle distinctions which nonetheless exist for a reason.

Steiner therefore finds both viewpoints unsatisfactory, not least because whilst the Dualist will accept materialism as merely the other side of the spiritual coin, the Monist who leans in one direction rather than another is often purely materialistic in nature. The materialist, for Steiner, is unable to offer a realistic analysis of the world because he begins simply by analysing matter and thus fails to entertain the idea that thinking about the nature of phenomena is anything more than a “material process”. This, from Steiner’s perspective, ascribes the power of thought to matter rather than dealing with the more important issue of why matter is able to think about its own nature:

Why is it not simply satisfied with itself and content to accept its own existence? The Materialist has turned his attention away from the definite subject, his own self, and occupies himself with an indefinite shadowy somewhat. And here the old problem meets him again. The materialistic theory cannot solve the problem; it can only shift it to another place. (p.19)

Having considered the errors of the materialist, Steiner turns his attention to the spiritualist who reduces matter to a mere “product of spirit”. Just as the Dualist finds it hard to reconcile himself with the world, so too does the spiritualist have to grapple with the thorny question of the human senses. A prime example, for Steiner, is German Idealist philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) and his tendency to view the world solely from the perspective of “the Ego”. To banish matter in this way, we are informed, is comparable to a materialist ignoring the possibility that mind amounts to potentially more than a mental process. Consequently, when man

directs his theoretical reflection upon the Ego, he perceives, in the first instance, only the work of the Ego in the conceptual elaboration of the world of ideas. Hence a philosophy the direction of which is spiritualistic, may feel tempted, in view of man’s own essential nature, to acknowledge nothing of spirit except this world of ideas. In this way Spiritualism becomes one-sided Idealism. (p.20)

This means that a philosopher such as Fichte has a propensity to associate spirituality with ideas, making it impossible to explore the nature of the spirit in any independent or meaningful capacity.

Ultimately, the very perception that there is a division between what Steiner calls “Self and World” is something that has arisen from human consciousness. Needless to say, to imagine that we are somehow detached from nature is disastrous and we are urged to look within – using nature itself as a guide – with a view to understanding that the “I” is far more than it appears.