The Methodology Necessary for a New Social Science

 (written for this book in the Season of Michaelmas, 2007)

One of the potential capacities, of those who seriously follow in the footsteps of Rudolf Steiner, involves the ability to give birth to the New (Living) Thinking.  However, merely reading Steiner, or joining the Society, does not bring about this birth. Moreover this birth, when accomplished, does not just arise in the abstract, but realizes its deepest self awareness when this Living Thinking is applied to a specific field of knowledge.  In fact, the New Thinking very much needs earthly application in order to have a proper moral grounding.  In this earthly connection a kind of training occurs, which has the consequence that when a will thus trained enters on spiritual experience, it brings with it capacities otherwise not obtainable.

Now within the anthroposophical movement, the dominant field of knowledge in which an embryonic version of the New Thinking has appeared is what is called Goethean Science.  We also find its mature birth in the works produced by such individuals as Owen Barfield, Georg Kuhlewind, Bruno Abrami (a member of the overlooked Italian School) and Jessiah Ben-Aharon.

Thus, in the Goethean Scientific work of such as Schwenk (Sensitive Chaos: the creation of flowing forms in water and air), Schad (Man and Mammal: toward a biology of form, Grohmann (The Plant vols. 1 and 2) and the related institutions, such as the Nature Institute [http://www.natureinstitute.org/index.htm] featuring Craig Holdrege, the goetheanistic application of the embryonic version of the New Thinking is slowly taking its proper place in the world.  The methodology of such a science is developed in its basic form and structure in Ernst Lehrs' book: Man or Matter: Introduction to a Spiritual Understanding of Nature on the Basis of Goethe's Method of Training Observation and Thought.

Rudolf Steiner unveiled these first (embryonic) steps of the path of a knowing doer of the spiritual in Nature, in his book: A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception.  We also owe to Steiner the revival of an interest in Goethe himself, and in particular Goethe's scientific works such as The Metamorphosis of Plants and A Theory of Color.  Anyone wanting to develop their thinking, such that it can be prepared to work within a New Social Science, will want to become well acquainted with all these books, but in particular with A Theory....

In moving from the embryonic aspect of the New Thinking, to its maturity via The Philosophy... there appears a boundary condition, which this New Thinking can encounter during its development.  This is where the phenomena being studied lacks a definite physical sense world existence.  Thus, Goethe's idea of exact sensorial phantasy (the use of the imagination to recreate inwardly in the soul a sensory experience as it occurs over time) can reach a limit when the phenomena sought to be studied is only available in the soul as a mental picture or concept and has no corresponding appearance in the world of the senses.

This is a problem that Owen Barfield certainly had to meet in his studies of language, which he clearly thought about imaginatively and in movement over time (see for example his remarkable: Speaker's Meaning).  Once we no longer have a sense world necessary given (see Steiner's A Theory of...), thinking acquires an additional responsibility, for the object of its considerations now only arrives in the soul out of our own activity in the creation of mental pictures and the apprehension of concepts.

In a proposed answer with an apparent awareness of this problem, the anthroposophical mathematician Lawrence Edwards, in his book Fields of Form, suggested that in addition to a kind of Goethean thinking, there is a thinking which needed to be called: polar Goethean thinking.  As this essay proceeds, I'll be trying to develop such ideas in a deeper fashion, so that the reader can find their way to understanding the kind of thinking needed in order to be able to behold the living and spiritual elements of human social existence, in all its dynamic expression (see my The Meaning of Earth Existence in the Age of the Consciousness Soul, for a demonstration).

One last point of reference concerns the study of projective or synthetic geometry.  This geometrical discipline will be very helpful to anyone wishing to find their way into the New Thinking.   Working with this geometry exercises our inherent picture thinking qualities in such a way that we can behold and transform mobile imaginative pictures without losing any quality of exactness.  The development of this geometry among anthroposophists (by such as George Adams Kaufman, Lawrence Edwards and Olive Whicher - to name just a few) is very much a consequence of the polar Goethean thinking to which Edwards pointed, and this as well needs to be appreciated.  The best book, in my view, (which is, of course, out of print) is Olive Whichers: Projective Geometry: Creative Polarities in Space and Time.

As a cautionary tale, so as to not forget that is possible to follow paths that can lead to errors of thought, we will also here take a look at what has been called (among anthroposophists) symptomatology, which is a well intended effort to apprehend with the thinking the deeper aspects of the social and historical, but has (alas) led instead to much confusion.

And finally, we need to recognize that it is Steiner's The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity or Freedom, that resolves the dilemma posed by the transition from working directly with sense experience, to working with mental pictures and concepts (abstractions) that have no definite exact reference in the world of the senses.  This resolution is made available when we understand the practice of pure thinking.

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As we begin to get into details, I want to share with the reader that what is to be written here was not by me understood in the beginning.  I wandered in many strange places and down a number of false paths, before I slowly came awake to the real inner processes and activities.  If there was a guiding light, it was that as I proceeded thoughts would arise in my consciousness that clearly revealed a deeper than before understanding of my riddles (the social).  In effect, I would have small successes, and this would lead me on.
 

I say this here so that the reader will not think that they have to have arrived at some kind of inner state first, before taking up their riddles.  It is clearly true that it is the riddles themselves that guide us on our personal path to the discover of the secrets of the New (Living) Thinking.  We hunger to know, and are thus drawn forward into the adventure that awaits.

I will also below have to make reference to my previous essay: In Joyous Celebration of the Soul Art and Music of Discipleship, in which I have laid out certain moral arts that I found it necessary to develop in order to acquire the capacities to enter more deeply into a contemplative picture thinking of the social.  These capacities first arose as a consequence of learning how to think more consciously about my fellow human beings, but the polished development of these capacities was in the work of seeking answers to my riddles.  In that essay I placed human relationships in the foreground, but at the same time everything said there can be applied to problems of knowledge in general, as will be made more clear as we proceed.

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Lets begin with the riddles.

We have an experience that we want to know something.  We may also have the experience that knowing what we want to know might be a bit harder than we think.  This latter experience usually comes in the biography in the form of failures.  We think we know, only to discover from experience that we do not know.

After a time we might come to understand that the seeking of knowledge comes to our consciousness first in the form of a question, or a riddle.  In its higher sense we can sometimes think of this as a Parsifal Question - a question that if we don't seek to answer it when the answer is nearby and available, results in our having to undergo trials that may have been unnecessary and avoidable.  What we are likely to discover over time is that these riddles really present themselves as a series of nested questions.  We move deeper into our riddles by moving from question to question, following a trail in the world of thought.

At the same time, the above books can help us understand from various directions this inner process, its dimensions and how we can find our way into the world of pure thinking in a scientific fashion.  At least a few scientists understand this is possible, because (in particular) of the nature of pure mathematical thinking.  At the same time their understanding of the art of thinking itself is weak.  It was Rudolf Steiner in his A Theory ... that laid out the basic rules underlying this discipline of the soul by the spirit, which was later revisited with another and deeper emphasis on the moral element in The Philosophy....

The mathematician Roger Penrose, in his book The Emperor's New Mind, makes this remarkable admission: "...I cannot help feeling that, with mathematics the case for believing in some kind of ethereal, eternal existence, at least for the more profound mathematical concepts, is a good deal stronger..." (pp. 97).  There is other evidence that Einstein and Godel (as well as Penrose) are considered by some to be modern Platonists, because of their views on the independent existence of ideas (see Incompleteness: the Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel, by Rebecca Goldstein).

Once we understand that the thinking process is drawn forward by riddles and nested questions, then we can take a more careful look at some aspects of thinking itself.

Generally thinking has an object, in relationship to which we are the thinking subject.  In Joyous... above, I wrote of a moral process connected to renunciation and love (Tomberg speaks of learning to think on your knees), wherein thinking about gave birth to thinking with, which in turn gave birth to thinking within, and then that to thinking as.  In this slowly unfolding process (about > with > within > as), the relationship between the object of thinking, and our subjectivity slowly becomes more intimate - the separation narrows.  Eventually "it thinks in me", and the subject object nature of the conversation can disappear.

Now in A Theory... Steiner takes us carefully toward organic thinking and then through that toward spiritual thinking.  Lets look at the problem of organic thinking first, which is more accessible in a way.  Sometimes this thinking is called phenomenology, and above I have called it thinking with.  This is a kind of thinking very suited to coming to knowledge of the living or organic aspects of existence, which is why this process of Goetheanism gives birth to works in the field of Goethean Science.

For Goethe, the matter concerned the world of perceptions (the sense world), which Barfield sometimes called the world of appearances (see Barfield's Saving the Appearances: a study in idolatry).  Goethe discovered that the world of appearances, which Natural Philosophy (science) was at that time beginning to dismiss (it was thought the truth had to be found somehow and somewhere other than the realm of the senses), could be read.  He called it: reading the Book of Nature.

For example, using microscopes and telescopes led Natural Philosophers to realize that there was enormous detail not apprehended by the therefore limited human sense organs, which then suggested to them that the unaided senses would not lead to the discovery of the truth.  Goethe thought otherwise, which was a kind of act of faith.

Goethe's researches led him to conclude that the sense world spoke, and if we studied it in the right way (various rules of thinking discipline needed to be applied - see Man or Matter above), then Nature Herself would teach all that we needed to know.  My work has shown to me that not only does the natural world speak, through its phenomenal appearances, but so also does the social world.   There is not only a Book of Nature, but also a Book of the Social World.

For those who would like a bit of explanation for this, you might consider  the following: Picture that the Creation has come to rest in a living equilibrium.  Although it is true from a spiritual-historical view that the senses experience a world of maya - an illusion, a more modern view (Goetheanism),which has arisen since the Incarnation, realizes that this maya is not disorganized.  What appears to us as the illusion reveals its own nature, because the Word Itself is embodied in it.  The Word has clothed Itself in the Creation, and when thinking wakes up in its true nature, the speaking of the Word in the appearances becomes capable of being beheld within human consciousness by the I ("it thinks in me"); or as Steiner has pointed out in The Philosophy...: knowledge (the speaking of the Word through the Creation) is the union of percept (experience) and concept (thought).

Steiner put it this way in A Theory...: "Thought is the last of a series of processes by which Nature was formed".  Or Emerson, in his essay Nature: "Nature is a thought incarnate, and turns to thought again as water becomes vapor and then gas.  The World is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is forever escaping into the state of free thought".

If there is a caveat, it is this.  We must be active inwardly.  Our thinking needs to become disciplined - ordered.  Our will-in-thinking needs to awaken.  Only the I can bring about the metamorphosis in the soul, which leads the thinking from its given state, through an organic qualitative picture thinking, to an awake and pure (living) thinking.

Let us return once more to the subject object aspect of thinking.

What Goethe discovered was that if he recreated the gestures of Nature, particularly of the Plant, in his imagination in as an exact a fashion as possible, that which was within the appearances made itself known to his inward picturing.  This is why we are introduced to such work in the contemplation of changes in leaves over the becoming cycle of a particular plant.  We collect or draw the various kinds of leaves made by a plant over the course of its life, and then recreate inwardly with our imagination, this series of form gestures the plant has made over time.  We think with the plant's expression in the sense world.

In doing this thinking with we open ourselves up to that which stands within the different forms that arose over time, but which was all the while continuously living behind each individual form.  Such work is, however, merely an appetizer for the real work, which is why I encouraged the reader to become well acquainted with such books as Sensitive Chaos.  From such reading we can come to understand how much detail can be gone into while exploring this relationship between ourselves as thinking  subject and the objective world of changing form.

A major aspect of the needed discipline involves realizing that we must hold back our own gesture of thinking that tends to want at once to bring a ready made concept (a thought) to our experience.  We instead give our consciousness over to the experience - let It speak - and then will arise the true related thought.  We do not want to impose an already thought thought or mental picture or concept on the phenomena, but wait, holding back the cognitional gesture, until the phenomena Itself leads us to the thought-concept.

Only practice, which is carefully self-aware, will understand this.  Learning this is something that can't really be known as a mere thought from reading a text.  We must develop the tools of introspection, so that we can make inner observations of our own activity.   We not only study the phenomena of the sense world, but the phenomena of the own soul as well.

There is a bit of a trick here, in that when we are thinking, we can't self observe.  What makes self-observation possible is that our inner activity leaves behind it a kind of fading away impression in the soul, such that after a certain inner activity, we can for a time observe this slowly disappearing mirror image of our own activity.  Again, this is an experience which must be gained directly, and cannot really be understood as a mere thought from reading.

Now when we move from thinking about sense world objects (or other kinds of the necessary given), to the pure thinking in mental pictures or concepts of objects which have no necessary given, a certain problem arises.  How do we trust the mental picture or concept which we have abstracted from our experience?  The necessary given aspect of the sense world is obvious, but when we think about, with or within a non-sense world object (such as the concept: family), there is no true sense percept (no true sense experience).  The abstract concept has already been taught to us by our culture.  In fact, our ordinary consciousness has many such abstract concepts, for which there is no sense world percept.

The solution to this is to understand something which is part of the discipline of Goethean Science, namely to learn to be purely descriptive.  So we can then ask: What is a family? (to continue the example).

This is such a simple abstract concept that we have no problem at all with it.   We were raised (most of us) in a family.  We lived in communities made up of many families.  We can say all manner of things about families in general, and in particular, out of our own experience.  We also know that such a term (word) as family can be used metaphorically, as in: the family of man.  Or, a family of related types of plants.

To help us further understand this, let us next look briefly at two kinds of errors which arise in thinking in relationship to social questions, one of which is mostly part of the anthroposophical movement (symptomatology), and the other mostly part of conventional social science. 

The error in conventional social science arises in the tendency to emulate the past of physics, a problem true also in conventional economic theory.  This is the tendency to reduce complex phenomena to number, and then to seek to find laws of the phenomena in the number relationships (statistics).  This was not always the case (and is still being resisted in some quarters), witness, for example, C. Wright Mills: The Sociological Imagination, but there lies a whole other story.  In Goetheanism, that is in learning to Listen to the World Song, or to behold the speaking of the Book of the Social World, we live into the appearances, and do not try to analyze for some kind of hidden behind-the-appearances rule or law.

Instead of seeking number relationships among large populations for our understanding of the social, we carefully practice description (for more, see below).

The error in symptomatology (as done by anthroposophists) is as follows: First, one studies Rudolf Steiner, and acquires from Steiner certain concepts.  Then one looks at the social-political world as if it presented symptoms, to which we attach the already thought concepts we acquired from Steiner.  In the last phrase just above we come to the problem.  There is in this activity no phenomenology and the social-political world is not allowed to speak, for we already have the concept (borrowed from Steiner) which we attach to the contemporary historical phenomena.

In addition, our experiences of the social world may be driven by unconscious feelings of antipathy and sympathy.  Any thought arising out of an unconscious (shadow driven) feeling has lost its objectivity.  Such that when an anthroposophist, who is trying to work with symptomatology, is reacting unconsciously out of antipathy to the phenomena being observed, this further distorts away from any objectivity the falsely practiced joining of the pre-thought Steiner thought that is now being attached erroneously to the social phenomena.

Thinking in this case is then not listening, but instead is a bringing to the phenomena of social existence a pre-thought thought, which has the effect inwardly in the soul of placing a ghost (Barfield called these idols) in between our thinking and the phenomena.  Similar kinds of things exist in contemporary social science as well, when certain points of view are elevated to near-eternal verities (dominant world views), and are then used to interpret all social phenomena in accord with that particular view.  Here, for example, we see today the use of Darwinian evolutionary theory, especially in the form of evolutionary psychology, as the main interpretive meaning given to understanding humanity's social life in the modern world.

In both cases, whether it is the application of pre-thought concepts borrowed from Steiner, or from modern theories of human nature, the result is the same.   The phenomena are not experienced - not heard.  Only the pre-thought ghost (the idol) is known in the soul.

So then, what is the incipient, striving for the new (living) thinking, social scientist to do?

Describe!

No theory, no conclusions, no idols, no ghosts.  Simply pure description, which is not an easy craft at all by the way.

About 12 years ago, I went through old files, and made a pile on the floor of my bedroom/office of years of descriptive writings set down on loose leaf notebook paper.  The stack was higher than my knee.

Of course at that time I was only guessing as to method.  I had discovered that when I carefully described, new perceptions of the social would arise, which new thoughts led me on (nested questions and riddles).  I also had the advantage of a deeper introspective life, such that when thinking about the outer and inner aspects of social existence, my sense of the inner was more accurate and less confused by contemporary and false conceptions of the nature of mind, assumed by modern social scientists to stand behind human behaviors. 

I also held back on publishing, such that I had, by the time I threw out that stack of paper, offered for publication (to the Threefold Review) only one paper: Threshold Problems in Thinking the Threefold Social Order [http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/thpts.html].  That was written in 1991 or so, and remained unpublished until 1997 when I begin to construct my own website.  After being available for a time on that website, this essay received some recognition on anthroposophically oriented aspects of the Internet.  I have been, during my biography, mostly a father (five children, two marriages) and a member of the working  poor (but never an academic), so my offerings never really had a chance of receiving much recognition in traditional ways, and the research was always being done in fits and starts.

At the same time this was a blessing, because I didn't have to fight against the tide of contemporary thought.  I share this, by the way, so as to encourage others to do such work in whatever circumstances of life they find themselves, knowing that it is the questions and riddles and work that has the most meaning, not success or achievement or notoriety.

Some may recall that Steiner held back on publishing his research about the threefold form of the human being for 17 years!  Much can be gained by letting our work in the world of pure thinking mature over time.

Now let us go forward, continuing our example with the family.

Using the imaginative faculty, and our related carefulness with regard to the fact that we are working with what can become an idol (an abstraction), we make descriptive pictures of the family over time.

Here I'll be brief, but many texts by social anthropologists contain important data, just not yet developed in full consciousness in a Goethean fashion.

Take an old world village, perhaps about 500 years ago (at the beginning of the Age of the Consciousness Soul), for example.  Many large families.  Often a dozen births for each mother, not all of them live.  Many relations, as well.  An old world village might contain any number of large extended families (a few grandparents, many parents and several dozens of children and related cousins).  Rules as to marriage across these complicated lines of blood existed for very practical and obvious reasons.

Such a village would often have one language, one general culture, one religion and social political structure.  Different villages in different locales in Europe would have differences of language, culture, religion and social political structure, but all would have large extended families as the dominate basis of the community.

Everyone would know most everyone else.  Children born into such families would have destinies almost fixed in nature (the son becomes like the father, the daughter like the mother).  No one violates social norms without severe consequences.  Individualism is generally unheard of.  People almost do not have a thought outside the standard and shared point of view.  Most are uneducated, and few can read and/or write.

Now let us jump forward a bit - say New York City in the late 19th Century.

Here we have neighborhoods.  Large extended families continue, but not as large or as extended as an old world village.  As immigrants, parts of families were left behind in the Old World.  It is harder now to keep tradition alive.  Religions, cultures and languages butt up against each other, often in conflict (mirroring in a small way the frequent wars in Europe rooted in the same differences).  Children are less inclined to follow in the footsteps of the parent.  Marriages across lines of religion, language and culture are frequent.  Individualism increases, and the ability of the community (now fractured from within, and attacked from without) to cause conformance to its dominate values lessens.

During the transition from the older isolated villages to the neighborhoods in the great cities, two important changes have appeared - natural science and industrialization.  Religion is weakened by natural science, and the family by the industrial revolution (the father is driven from the home and into the factory, along with many of the children).

Flash forward now into the present - Los Angeles 2007.

An inner core and an outer rim.  Mere vestiges of neighborhoods, mostly racial ghettos in the inner core, with smaller families.  Better education, similar poverty.  In the outer rim, a different racial mix, tiny (nuclear) families.  In neither place does a coherent community exist as once did in the Old World village.

A staggering increase in homelessness.  None of these has a place to call home.  Even the family has fractured into individual splinters.  The I is alone, even within the family (c.f. Riesman's The Lonely Crowd).  Children wouldn't think of following in their parents footsteps.  Individualism triumphs and community and family is near dissolved.

What happens in our consciousness when we move these abstractions through time?  What happens when we recreate in the imagination the gesture of social form over the last 500 years in Western Civilization?

One of the things that becomes apparent is that we begin to see that something from the inside of the human being is driving these changes.  Yes, there are huge transformations of outer circumstance, but individuation is itself a force moving from within outward into social existence, transforming it.

Now this idea is not new (its obvious to many ordinary social scientists), but a Goetheanisticly oriented pure thinking begins to behold something which ends up speaking of the death and the becoming of civilizations.  A great metamorphosis at the level of social order is in process.  One of the early ways I wrote of this logos speaking  of the world song, was that as the loss of social form increased (family and community becoming less coherent) such was necessary for moral freedom to arise.  The outer social form had previously coerced the I into conforming to social values, and as the I pressed itself outward from within, it reached a point where it had overwhelmed this coercive effect of the family and the community, enabling the I to act as an individual determiner of what was moral (this has been called by some - who understandably could only think in a finished and fixed way instead of an organic way - the family values crisis and the culture wars).

A number of social phenomena reveal this - I'll just point to one.  In the 1950's in America, it was not unusual for a parent to say to a child: you should do what is right, with right meaning the shared value of the community.  As the transition through the 1960's to the 1970's took place, do the right thing became do your own thing.

Now above I used the phrase: logos speaking of the world song.  I had years ago (1984) written a first version of: Listening to the World Song.  In these last years, as my thinking penetrated more deeply into this Song, I began to behold inwardly that Christ was the Author of this situation.  In some of the essays below (or above) you will see such language in the newer pieces, while the older ones do not have it.  The culmination of my research was in the essay The Meaning of Earth Existence in the Age of the Consciousness Soul.

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Above I have tried to indicate, through both ideas and a demonstration, the existence of certain questions, about the thinking processes and observational process of a new science of the social, such that stand behind my research work on the social.  I fully expect the above to be inadequate, and that others, who in following their own riddles and nested questions, are likely to discover much that I have overlooked.  Hopefully the above will provide an adequate beginning.