The Rudolf Steiner Archive

From Nature to Sub-nature

[ 1 ] It is said that with the overcoming of the philosophical age, the natural scientific age arose in the middle of the nineteenth century. And it is also said that this scientific age still continues today, while at the same time many emphasize that we have returned to certain philosophical intentions.

[ 2 ] This all corresponds to the paths of knowledge that modern times have taken, but not to the ways of life. With his ideas, man still lives in nature, even if he brings mechanical thinking into the conception of nature. With his life of will, however, he lives to such an extent in a mechanics of technical events that this has long since given the scientific age a completely new nuance.

[ 3 ] If we want to understand human life, we must first look at it from two sides. From previous lives on earth, man brings with him the ability to imagine the cosmic from the earthly environment and that which is active in the earthly realm. Through the senses he perceives the cosmic working on earth, and through his mental organization he thinks the cosmic working on earth from the earth's environment.

[ 4 ] So he lives through his physical body in perception, through his etheric body in thinking.

[ 5 ] What goes on in his astral body and in his ego takes place in more hidden regions of the soul. It operates in fate, for example. However, one must first seek it out not in the complicated contexts of fate, but in the elementary, simple processes of life.

[ 6 ] The human being connects with certain earth forces by orienting his organism towards these forces. He learns to stand upright and walk, he learns to place himself in the balance of earthly forces with his arms and hands.

[ 7 ] Now these forces are not those which act in from the cosmos, but which are only earthly.

[ 8 ] In reality, nothing that man experiences is an abstraction. He just does not realize where the experience comes from, and so he forms abstractions from ideas about realities. Man talks about mechanical laws. He believes that he has abstracted them from natural contexts. However, this is not the case, but everything that man experiences in the soul in terms of purely mechanical laws is experienced inwardly in his orientation relationship to the earthly world (in his standing, walking, etc.).

[ 9 ] Thus, however, the mechanical is characterized as the purely earthly. For the natural law, in color, sound and so on, has flowed into the earthly from the cosmos. Only in the earthly realm is the mechanical also implanted into the natural law, just as the human being with his own experience only confronts it in the earthly realm.

[ 10 ] The vast majority of what is at work in culture today through technology and in which he is highly entangled with his life is not nature, but sub-nature. It is a world that is emancipating itself from nature in a downward direction.

[ 11 ] You can see how the Oriental, when he strives for the spirit, tries to get out of the states of equilibrium that come merely from the earthly. He assumes a meditative position that brings him into the mere cosmic balance. The earth then no longer affects the orientation of his organism. (This is not said for the sake of imitation, but only to clarify what has been said here. Anyone familiar with my writings knows how Eastern and Western spiritual life differ in this respect.)

[ 12 ] Man needed the relationship to the merely earthly for the development of his consciousness soul. In recent times, therefore, there has been a tendency to realize everywhere in action that which man must settle into. By settling into the merely earthly, he encounters the ahrimanic. He must bring himself with his own being into the right relationship with this Ahrimanic.

[ 13 ] But in the course of the technical age to date, the possibility of finding the right relationship to the Ahrimanic culture still eludes him. Man must find the strength, the inner power of cognition, in order not to be overwhelmed by Ahriman in the technical culture. The sub-nature must be understood as such. It can only do so if man ascends in spiritual knowledge at least as far to the extraterrestrial super-nature as he has descended in technology to the sub-nature. The age needs a knowledge that goes above nature, because it must inwardly come to terms with a dangerous life content that has sunk below nature. Of course, we are not talking here about returning to earlier states of culture, but about man finding the way to bring the new cultural conditions into a right relationship with himself and the cosmos.

[ 14 ] Today, very few people realize what important spiritual tasks are emerging for man. Electricity, which after its discovery was praised as the soul of natural existence, must be recognized in its power to lead down from nature into sub-nature. Only man must not glide along with it.

[ 15 ] In the time when technology did not yet exist independently of nature itself, man found the spirit in the view of nature. Technology, which was becoming independent, made man stare at the mechanistic-material as that which was now becoming scientific for him. In this, everything divine-spiritual, which is connected with the origin of human development, is now absent. The purely Ahrimanic dominates the sphere.

[ 16 ] In a spiritual science the other sphere is now created, in which the Ahrimanic is not present at all. And it is precisely by recognizing that spirituality to which the Ahrimanic powers have no access that man is strengthened to face Ahriman in the world.

Goetheanum, March 1925.
Guiding Principles No. 183 to 185
(April 12, 1925)

Further guiding principles issued by the Anthroposophical Society at the Goetheanum (with reference to the preceding considerations on nature and sub-nature)

[ 17 ] 183. In the age of natural science, which begins around the middle of the nineteenth century, the cultural activity of man gradually slides down not only into the lowest regions of nature, but under nature. Technology becomes sub-nature.

[ 18 ] 184. This requires man to experience a spiritual knowledge in which he rises just as high into the super-nature as he sinks below nature with the sub-natural technical activity. He thereby creates within himself the power not to sink below.

[ 19 ] 185. An earlier view of nature still contained within itself the spirit with which the origin of human development is connected; gradually this spirit has disappeared from the view of nature and the purely ahrimanic has entered it and flowed over from it into technical culture.