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

Now I have had to bring forward these considerations in order to come to confrontation with the natural scientific conception of Man which is taught today to all children in our Western world. Man is limited to the matter and its motions of which our bodies are composed. There is nothing special about living as distinct from dead or mineral things other than complexity; there is nothing special about animate beings as distinct from merely vegetable or living things. Feelings are the life of the nervous tissue. And Man is only another animal with a larger more complex brain which exudes thoughts. All this moreover is understood, or at any rate taught, as coming into existence under the exclusive play of blind natural forces, mechanical forces, because for our modern natural science nature herself is mechanical through and through. In so far as living things, organisms, are not graspable by mechanical models then our human intellect cannot grasp them and we must resign ourselves to helpless and hopeless ignorance. We come up against one of the limits of cognition which Steiner maintains afford us experiences of the greatest significance for the future.

How then can we characterise the phenomena of living organisms which present essential problems to the human intellect? In the first place the uniformity in structure of minerals, for instance crystals, makes their characteristic form indifferent to size. A crystal of common salt has the same form whether it has the size of a microscopic grain or ofa room. It is not, so to say, inwardly differentiated and organised but has only a uniform structure throughout. A living organism on the other hand carves out for itself a characteristic space, of a characteristic size neither smaller nor larger within limited variations. Elephants and mice have their characteristic sizes. Further this space is inwardly differentiated and organised into tissues and organs which, whilst distinct, are mutually interdependent and together constitute a whole. This whole lies latent in all its parts so that when we propagate, for instance, a Begonia from a single leaf, it is able to develop afresh root, stem, leaves and blossom.

There is further a relation to time which distinguishes the living from the lifeless. For the mineral, length of life is not significant. Whether a salt crystal lasts a second or thousands of years makes no difference to our understanding of it, of the laws

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