The nature of man : approached through the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner

being, that Ego, whom one can meet in this spatial world, shake hands with, and come to know in his biography. For in the biography of the individual man we can find evidence of his individuality stamped on all that he does and that happens to him. It is not the events common to man as a species that constitute the biography, it is rather all that is exceptional and unique. In this uniqueness of the biography one sees the utter distinction of the human from the animal. An animal’s life story is only an example of the species, the potentialities of which come to expression and vary only according to the circumstances. But in the case of Man, every biography is unique and it is the uniqueness which reveals the individuality, the spiritual kernel in the man.It is also possible to trace between the phases of a man’s life the operation of a moral law of cause and effect. And we can see how the individuality wrestles with the experiences which destiny brings and builds a sort of seed kernel within the ageing, hardening husk of the body This inner growth in man can continue right up until bodily death.

I must now approach one last aspect of our subject, the nature of man. To omit this would utterly distort Steiner’s approach of the subject. But we may first agree that the basic outlines as I have presented them are in essential content the same as have been presented in Oriental religions, in Platonism and neo-Platonism, and in the thought of many mystics throughout the ages. What is most significant in Steiner’s work is that he accepted as foundation the scientific revolution. As Owen Barfield has pointed out, this revolution resulted in matter being utterly freed from contamination by all psychic and even sensory qualities, and all socalled occult qualities. These were thrown into the realm of ‘only in the mind’, Science proceeded to study the mineral world and its mechanisms. The mineral world is so much a dead world, excreted from and by the living, that man is related to it almost only as an observer. In his study of it and the development of the abstract thinking applied in science he was for this very reason however able to develop the germs of freedom. In this onlooker consciousness he is left uninfluenced by what he observes. This thinking now became the Trojan Horse, to use Barfield’s phrase, in the citadel of science, because it was itself a supersensible element in the cognitional process. It was by strengthening and

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