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Plato argued that only the purified soul is able to see and to understand (because they also contain profound meaning) these forms. This is because when the souls fell from the divine realm, they became weighed down and blinded by the material.
He believed that the soul could only purify itself through “philosophy” (philo-sophia: the pursuit of wisdom). As the soul was progressively purified by repeated philosophical practice, it became possible to perceive the forms; re-enter their immortal mental realm and escape the cycle of reincarnation in a physical body: a kind of “salvation”.
Although the Greek system of philosophy is seen as being a “rational’” system, and hence as the basis for the development of science and reason in the West, by “philosophy” Plato did not mean the kind of things that you might learn in a British university. He was referring to an inner knowing that is more akin to a kind of visionary, mystical intuition. The Platonic idea of (spiritual) knowledge does not rely on divine revelation but emphasizes the innate ability of the human mind to apprehend spiritual reality through its own efforts. This is a philosophy that takes the place of religion rather than aiding it.
Plato was very pessimistic that any but a select few would be able to attain this kind of “salvation”. Salvation through the development of mystical knowledge and the science of the soul would be open only to “practising” philosophers.
It seems to have become something of a mission of some eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German philosophers to extend this “gnostic” salvation (redeeming oneself through the acquisition of knowledge) to all people. This became particularly evident in the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831).
It was Hegel who developed the modern theory of the Absolute mind. He thought that knowledge of the higher realm also existed in the form of unconscious archetypes (images and folk-themes; a concept later pursued vigorously by Jung) that lie in the völkisch lore and myths of all nations. This was a sort of “as above, so below” safety net. In other words, simple people could achieve some level of divine knowledge and admittance to the Absolute mind if they were encouraged to focus on and open themselves up to the folkish images present in the lower world of the collective unconscious.
It was already commonly accepted by this era, the early industrial Europe of the turn of the nineteenth century, that simple country folk often had clairvoyant and second-sight abilities that had apparently been lost to their more rational and domesticated fellows in the towns and cities.
Father Alois Wiesinger, Abbot of the Cistercian Schlierbach Abbey in Upper Austria, was one of the few twentieth-century Christians to take an active interest in parapsychology. He argued that many paranormal phenomena have their origin in a kind of waking sleep in which the individual experiences a partial freeing or loosening of the bonds between the body and soul:
A special form of these pathological dreams is to be found in the waking dreams which intermittently occur in the so-called second sight of the Spokenkieker [spook-seers] in Westphalia and among similarly endowed persons in Scotland, the Tyrol, and other places where the inhabitants live far away from the noise and bustle of ordinary life and consequently lead a relatively monotonous life conducive to day-dreaming.
Steiner agreed that the hypnagogic state, especially that liminal zone between waking and sleeping, was conducive to the knowledge of the spiritual realms. However, he believed that it was possible to approach the spiritual world scientifically and in clear consciousness with a discriminating mind because he himself had been able to do this. He believed this faculty was open to all human beings, but only if people would turn their minds towards its development.
It is this development of the faculty to perceive the spiritual world in clear consciousness that is the core of Steiner’s science. This was an aim that he pursued with messianic fervour.
Steiner makes it clear in his autobiography that his early objective was to develop a philosophy of his own. It was to this end that he studied Hegel. And, although he remained a lifelong admirer of the philosopher, he found his work “distressing” because he confined his work to the abstract world of thought.
Steiner, on the other hand, wanted to march on from the world of living thought “to the perception of a world of concrete spirit”. He explains:
I saw that many persons felt there was a difference between experience and thought. To me thought itself was experience, but of such a nature that one lived in it, not such that it entered from without into men.
His explanation brings to mind Tesla’s account, where, rather than experiencing a vivid inner life, he seemed—in a very real way—to inhabit his “inner space” bodily.
In spite of his experience with the spirit of his dead relative, Steiner was not a spiritualist. He despised the rappings and fluidic manifestations of contemporary spiritualism. Rather, he grouped this experience with his early awakening to geometry! Indeed, a grasp of geometry was a requirement in Plato’s academy, as well as among the Pythagoreans. Contemplation of geometrical forms was designed to lead to the recognition of their reality: that they had a very real existence outside of material manifestation which could be grasped by the human mind. This was held to be a necessary step in grasping the reality of immaterial forms and an essential step on the road to pure philosophical knowledge. Steiner seems intuitively to have understood this on being given his first geometry textbook when he was nine years old.
He states:
Mathematics was very important for me as the foundation under all my strivings after knowledge. In mathematics there is afforded a system of percepts and concepts which have been reached independently of any external sense impressions. And yet, said I to myself constantly at that time, one carries over these perceptions and concepts into sense-reality and discovers its laws. Through mathematics one learns to understand the world, and yet in order to do this one must first evoke mathematics out of the human mind.
So, it is only through a grasp of the living mathematical forms in the human mind that one can unlock the scientific laws of the solid material world that is open to our ordinary senses. Moreover, for Steiner, this is absolutely the same ground of inner knowing or philosophy that includes the spirits of the dead, whose discovery should be just as open to scientific knowledge as the worlds of geometry and calculus.
A Science of the Mind
Steiner employed his own abilities as a “seer” into the spiritual world of causation and the supposed supersensible historical records (the Akashic records) to devise an eye-wateringly elaborate narrative of cosmic evolution which is beyond the scope of this piece. It is this account that has pulled him into the racial controversy and tainted his reputation. This is through an association of ideas with the “applied biology” and eugenics of the Third Reich, which includes the concept of the Aryan race attributed to Steiner and to the theosophist Madame Blavatsky, as highlighted by J. Paul Greenaway.
The understandably fraught arguments regarding the racial theories of the Nazis, however, perhaps obscure the true nature of Steiner’s account of historical and future human evolution, which involves the transformation of humanity into a completely new species, or the next of many “root races” that have evolved through cosmic “epochs”. The next phase of evolution will see humanity begin to shed some of the density of our descent into matter.
Steiner was extremely interested in the emerging Darwinist theories of evolution and he cultivated a somewhat surprising relationship with the German promoter of Darwin’s ideas, Ernst Haeckel. Whilst they approached evolution from opposite ends of the spiritual-material spectrum, they were both (unlike Plato or Christianity) monists. This means that they both believed that our reality ultimately derives from one substance. For Haekel, matter came first (ontology recapitulates phylogeny); but for Steiner, matter arose from spirit.
It is human evolution that preoccupies Steiner, and he believed that the next evolutionary stage must be based on the development of the ability to perceive the supersensible world.
He opens his book Theosophy: An Introduction to the Supersensible Knowledge of the World and the Destination of Man (1904) with a quotation from the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte regarding his Science of Knowledge:
This doctrine presupposes an entirely new inner sense organ or instrument through which a new world is revealed having no existence for the ordinary man.
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