Abstract
This paper is a philosophical study of the nature of thinking based on the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Rudolf Steiner. For Heidegger, the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers exemplified genuine thinking, appreciating the meaning of Being. But this kind of philosophy was soon replaced by the onto-theological approach, in which Being was reductively objectified, and the question of the meaning of Being was forgotten. Hence, according to Heidegger, we still have to learn to think. Commentators on Heidegger point to the similarities between his approach to thinking and that of various mystical teachings, such as those of Meister Eckhart or Zen Buddhism. Another less well known philosopher who devoted himself to this question was Rudolf Steiner. Like Heidegger, Steiner claims that we do not know what it means to really think. Steiner was however more outspoken in insisting that only through a kind of meditative practice can we directly experience the nature of thinking. Present day materialistic explanations of thinking as caused by the brain stand in clear opposition to his spiritual conception of thinking. Drawing upon Heidegger (somewhat) and Steiner (mostly) I argue against the materialistic understanding of thinking as jumping to unwarranted conclusions. The paper ends with describing some of the elements of Steiner Waldorf education which are intended to promote the development of living, creative thinking.
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Notes
Kurzweil is a successful developer of various forms of Artificial Intelligence, such as optical character recognition; see http://www.kurzweilai.net/index.html?flash=1 (Accessed 09/03/2009). For a more elaborate critique of Kurzweil’s transhumanist ideas, see Radovan (2007).
Wood (2002) elaborates Heidegger’s notion of calculative thinking as “the subordination of the world and one's intercourse with the world to determination, whether it be linguistic, aesthetic or economic, so that in a real sense, our relation to it becomes a priori” (p. 16). According to Castoriadis, the thinking of Being “cancelled itself out as soon as it became the thinking of determination” (1997b, p. 295). When determinative thinking becomes more important than existential ontology, meditative thinking cannot maintain itself. In contrast, meditative thinking could be defined as an attentive waiting and listening for things and beings to reveal their nature by themselves. Thinking then does not speak merely out of itself, but lends its voice to the Being of beings.
Steiner proposed that his main philosophical work, Der Philosophie der Freiheit, would be best translated into English as The philosophy of spiritual activity. Steiner’s approach in this work is basically phenomenological and largely focused on the experience of thinking. The concepts of spirituality, spiritual, or spirit are admittedly difficult to define in a clear and incontestable manner. Steiner himself never makes a definition of spirituality in so many words, preferring instead to describe and characterize. If pressed for a definition, I would say that the spirit is that which is active and productive in the processes of thinking, feeling, perceiving and willing. Spirituality has to do with the states of consciousness accompanying these processes. However, this definition says nothing about the spiritual forces in nature or the cosmos, which for Steiner are equally important aspects of spirituality. It would be interesting to compare Steiner’s notions of spirituality with those expressed by present day educational thinkers, for instance Bainbridge (2000), Miller (2006), and Noddings (2008), to name but a few.
See Grauer (2007) for an interesting comparison between this insight of Steiner and the constructivist epistemology of Niklas Luhmann.
It may be argued that the parallels pointed out between Heidegger and mystical or contemplative traditions implies that he also realized that we have to go beyond our everyday state of mind to come to genuine thinking. However, Heidegger did not explicitly emphasize this in his philosophical texts; it is others who have pointed to the similarities. Whereas for Steiner the idea of higher or deeper states of consciousness is central to all his philosophical work, for Heidegger it seems to have a more peripheral and contingent significance. As Caputo (1986) points out, Heidegger was not a mystic but there are mystical elements in his philosophy.
There is of course no contradiction in principle between brain research and a spiritualistic understanding of the human being, or of mental processes. See for instance Austin’s (1998) impressive study of the neurophysiologic aspects of Zen meditation. However, there seems to be a need to uncover and develop other paradigms of brain research than that of scientific materialism.
I am indebted to Marek Majorek for this argument; see Majorek (2008) for a more complete refutation of materialistic reductionism in brain research.
I cannot resist to refer here also to Merleau-Ponty (1992), who in his phenomenological reflections on the cogito of Descartes claims that thought must be understood “in terms of that strange power which it possesses of being ahead of itself, of launching itself and being at home everywhere, in a word, in terms of its autonomy” (p. 371; italics mine). This insight can be reformulated by saying that the normally hidden-from-view thinking activity is that aspect of human mentation which is always “ahead” of thought, i.e., the consciously held idea, notion or representation. Hence Merleau-Ponty can somewhat paradoxically maintain that “thought itself […] put[s] into things what it subsequently finds in them” (ibid., p. 371). Furthermore, Merleau-Ponty brings out the relation between thinking and being when he says: “What I discover and recognize through the cogito […] is the deep-seated momentum of transcendence which is my very being, the simultaneous contact with my own being and with the world’s being” (ibid., p. 377; italics mine).
Heidegger’s philosophical poetics about the hand has recently been (at least partly) illustrated empirically; see Broaders et al. (2007) who report a study showing that encouraging children to make hand gestures while solving mathematical problems brings out their implicit knowledge and facilitates new learning. See also Goldin-Meadow (2005).
Steiner actually wrote a very appreciative book on Nietzsche’s philosophy (Steiner 1985).
Steiner himself did not like to use the term “system” about his educational ideas, probably because it has a dead and static character. His ideas are rather like a living, organic whole.
Cf. footnote 12 above.
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Acknowledgment
I am indebted to Marek Majorek and Arve Mathisen for valuable help in writing this paper. I also want to thank the reviewers for their constructive critique of the first version.
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Dahlin, B. On the Path Towards Thinking: Learning from Martin Heidegger and Rudolf Steiner. Stud Philos Educ 28, 537–554 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-009-9147-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-009-9147-1