What does the recently discovered triviality of spacetime and material reality, as shown by Donald Hoffman’s The Case Against Reality (2019), mean for historians and history teachers?
Reality as we experience it, Hoffman showed, has zero percent chance of being real. It is an effect, a mirage compared to what lies beyond the material. Hoffman’s discovery creates an urgency for studying, describing and teaching history in a more truthful way, one that is in accordance with a world in which spacetime is not fundamental.
One century before Hoffman’s scientific findings, teacher Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) offered highly detailed, practical guidance on how to study, describe and teach history. The notes and summaries below are based on the wealth of information that Steiner provided on anthroposophic historiography.
Contents: The Meaning of History / Six Pillars of Historiography / Rudolf Steiner on World War I / Materialism and ‘Cleverness’ / Losing a Heritage
The Meaning of History
The below is summarized and paraphrased from Steiner’s Cosmosophy volume 1, Cosmic Influences on the Human Being, 1921, as well as some of the lectures in The Tension Between East and West, 1922.
There exists not enough courage for people to admit that history has no meaning, that it has lost its meaning. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was an exception. Since ancient times, humanity has lost the awareness of the beginning and end of the world, as well as that of the human being connected to these moments. Thus, history has no meaning. History used to be a story with a beginning and an end. Now, the beginning and the end of humanity and the world are unknown, because the spiritual world is more out of reach than our reality of appearances, the appearances are now our main reality, like a mirror image. In the evolution of human consciousness, this was not always so, in fact, it has been turned upside down: in Oriental Culture the spiritual world was more dominant than the physical world.
The essence of the mystery of Golgotha, in human evolution, is an opportunity for the world of appearances and the spiritual world to be reunited, through a knowledge expressed in feeling. This is part of a process: the development of human freedom, the emancipation from daily experience, which can be cultivated and developed only through a reality of appearances. In ancient times, this freedom was absent, the knowledge of the beginning and end of the world and humanity were imprinted in consciousness, it was not achieved out of free will as is the case in the current stage of human evolution. Freedom, however, can bring modern-day humanity to the abyss; only freedom that is rooted through knowledge of Golgotha forms a bridge over the abyss.
Six Pillars of Historiography
The following six pillars form a practical approach to historiography. They are summarized and partially paraphrased from Rudolf Steiner’s lectures given between October 17-31, 1920, later published in The New Spirituality and the Christ Experience of the Twentieth Century.
- Are historic events mainly brought about by individuals or by the masses? This is a main point of contention, and conclusions are often drawn from sympathy and antipathy rather than real knowledge. At other points in history this question wasn’t as essential because the individuals and the masses used to be in accordance with each other.
- History does not consist of merely individual facts but is rather to be seen as a synthesizing force: What can be seen in the unfolding? This paints a poetic but true picture. This was, for example, advocated by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835).
- Ideas are abstractions and therefore can not be driving forces; spiritual forces are behind physical facts, these are propelling forces that are subsequently expressed through human ideas. This is by no means solely a spiritual scientific perspective but has been proven by Donald Hoffman’s mathematics.
- Historiography requires symptomatology: behind what takes its course lay driving spiritual forces. In science, this coincides with functional thought. Penetrate via the awareness of phenomena (that which comes to the surface) into the depths of historical development. Identify the significant points within this flow, and see history as a river.
- What is a significant historic fact? When that what comes to the surface shows what lies underneath. A phenomenom arises, which offers an opportunity for awareness of something that is at work anywhere (a manifestation). It is therefore essential to look at significant moments. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) advised to start at significant points and then the remaining content of world events can be recognized; neighboring areas can be deciphered.
- Different soul constitutions and their consequences. Soul constitutions are more fundamental than worldviews, they can be considered realities, types of consciousness. For example, the movement from Oriental Culture, ancient cosmic views and a broad, spiritual soul reality, in pictures and images, above physical reality, the “I” (the higher, transcedental being) is soul-like, art, science and religion are part of one and the same consciousness; to Center Culture, a back-and-forth between the spiritual and the physical and legal, changes in the definition of what is a soul, the “I” crystallizes as a counter-reaction for the last time through medieval mystics; to the Western Culture of our current time, a purely physical, legal, political state reality, the “I” has become a black hole of associated ideas, feelings, sensations and will impulses as fragmented forces. Underneath these forces, what was once a soul-like “I” became absorbed and smothered.
Rudolf Steiner on World War I
The views below have been summarized, and partially cited and paraphrased from the lecture “New Spiritual Impulses in History – Their Rejection by the Materialistic World Conception and the Result of the Catastrophic Events of World War I”, published in: The Influence of the Dead on Destiny (1917) as well as some of the lectures published in Michael’s Mission (1919).
Regarding World War I, it is erroneous to speak of “an outbreak” and it is erroneous to speak of a “world war”. About 40-50 people were involved at the start. A major consequence of the catastrophe is that people increasingly consider suffering, or conflict, as normal and as necessary. In 1945, Wilhelm Reich, for instance, also warned of this conditioning and reminded people that until 1914 passports did not exist.
Around 1870-1880, many people received spiritual impulses to prevent or mitigate the impending destruction of World War I, but they rejected, ignored and suppressed them, they did not act on them: ‘sins of omission’. This, Steiner says, is the main reason for the catastrophy. Only a few people did act on them, in exactly the right moment, like the prescient German philosopher Karl Christian Planck (1819-1880), but nobody listened to him. People commonly do not turn to those who know something, they turn to those who can do nothing for them.
In 1917, Steiner said that the conviction that war is normal is getting stronger. We observe the assumption that historic events are unavoidable, necessary and normal, in other words, we observe that materialism aims to eliminate free will. It rejects the spiritual impulses that are coming to us, bringing new revelations. By rejecting them, humanity remains stuck in a dry, barren loop of dead results instead of bringing about a living result. There is an antipathy, an aversion, against feelings of wonder. Steiner warned in 1919 that if this trend were to continue, much of the world would be in ruins in thirty years (1949).
Materialism and ‘Cleverness’
The views below have been summarized, and partially cited and paraphrased from the lecture “New Spiritual Impulses in History – Their Rejection by the Materialistic World Conception and the Result of the Catastrophic Events of World War I”, published in: The Influence of the Dead on Destiny (1917) as well as some of the lectures published in Michael’s Mission (1919).
In the materialistic, mechanistic thought paradigm that has come to dominate science and everyday life, often termed by Steiner as ‘cleverness’, history is seen as a tight causation. The happenings of this year logically evolve out of the happenings of last year in a sequence of events, like a fast game of ping-pong. The spiritual forces and impulses that manifest in the physical world, however, do not arise out of causal connections. In fact, cause and effect is completely absent and causes of the driving forces of history are unknown.
It is clear that in this light, human free will, freedom, responsibility and morality instantly become more important. ‘The Christ Impulse’, the urge to do good, through good actions, requires a careful inner discernment from the impulse for self-interest (Lucifer) and the impulse for denying free will (Ahriman) as much as it requires wonder, attention for the unseen world and, subsequently, human action.
Steiner reminds people that the dead, outside spacetime, have more information than the living, that they have more mature knowledge on social affairs and that humans should therefore consult them, they should ask them what to do. This is not to be done in a spiritualistic manner, but in a receptive, feeling, dutiful manner, in which the living human sees itself as an instrument.
Materialistic, mechanistic and physicalist cleverness is excellent only for the political realm. Anywhere else, it leads humanity astray. It has been applied too widely and it is the wrong method for approaching anything else, like history, because it focuses only on one side of human existence. There is no point in focussing only on the physical world, with its cause and effect ping-pong matches, because the driving forces of history arise from the spiritual world. Materialistic history can therefore never be anything more than a description of spectres. Instead, we study the unfolding of history as an effect.
Losing a Heritage
Below are a few examples of significant historical events marking the rise of human materialistic cleverness. It is summarized, cited and paraphrased from the lecture “New Spiritual Impulses in History – Their Rejection by the Materialistic World Conception and the Result of the Catastrophic Events of World War I”, published in: The Influence of the Dead on Destiny (1917).
Plato (427-348 BC), and later Neoplatonism (third century AD), Greek Culture, can be seen as the last shred of primal ancient wisdom, the last recognizable part of Oriental Culture. Existing in pictures, a broad perception of the soul, not yet irradiated, is permeated by the “I” consciousness and “I” experience. The contrasting elements in Aristotelianism (384–322 BC) are one of the first markers of the subsequent decay into decadence.
Around the year 800, at the Court of Charlemagne, a debate took place between the court’s philosopher, clergyman Alcuin (735-804) and The Greek. They spoke on a principle of Christianity, the principle of redemption: to whom was the ransom actually paid? The answer of The Greek: the ransom is paid to death by the cosmic powers. Alcuin replied that ransom can not be paid to death, because death is not real. With this, Alcuin moved the problem in a whole different direction, revealing two different constitutions of soul. To The Greek, it was self-evident that death was something real, just like cold or warmth. This debate is important because in Alcuin, Aristotelianism is present. It was the first sign of the rise of the logical, dialectical, legal constitution of soul. The Occident here permeated the Orient, to which guilt and atonement were completely alien; the oriental soul constitution was based on karma, reincarnation and continuous movement. But now, Christ was a judge and life static and fixed, a life between birth and death. Opposing realities clashed: from a soul and spirit in a body, the outside in, to the body first, the inside out.
Center Culture: Medieval mystics like Eckhart von Hochheim (1260-1328) and Johannes Tauler (1300-1361) come to the rescue to protect the “I” as divine. Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) is exemplary of the back-and-forth between the new versus the ancient Orient heritage, as is also palpable in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) and Christian Wolff (1679-1754).
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) forms a bridge between the Center Culture and Western Culture: all of Kant’s philosophies revolve around the “I” but nowhere does he acknowledge the existence of the “I”. His pupil Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) is stupified by this and distances himself from Kant, and vice versa. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel can be seen as some of the last thinkers to not exclude the “I”. David Hume (1711-1776) gives Kant the final push, as Kant himself described, to justify the full-blown exclusion of the “I”. As a consequence, a worldview is drawn from legal thought that confines everything to life between birth and death. Kant was still a pupil of 18th century rationalism: proof was his main goal; a clean, self-contained system of proof squeezed out of the Center Culture.
Finally, later philosophers like John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) and Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) fully exclude the “I” from their work. It is absorbed, soaked up, smothered under associated thoughts, feelings, sensations and will impulses. If the developments described here would have been applied only to political or economic life, it would have been magnificent. But it became all encompassing and today, the decadent, dialectical political paradigm has served its purpose, the material age had to come, its departure is long overdue, it once had its benefits but it became obsolete with the catastrophe of World War I. Spiritual science resolves the loss of the Orient heritage through acknowledging and identifying a realm of the spiritual, another realm of the political and a third realm of economic associations between people.
This particular movement in history could also be described, for example, through the changing human attitude towards the mystery of Golgotha throughout the centuries.
To be continued.