On Attaining Spiritual Sight (Part I)

[Federica]

Last year in this thread we had a long discussion on Steiner's views on heart function, and sensory and motor nerves. I feel that an important element was not mentioned then, which I believe brings something fundamental to what Steiner meant with his famous contention that motor nerves don't exist. I am not trying to reopen that discussion, I simply want to add this element for future reference. I think it makes an important difference.

Regarding the following supersensible observation, it would be interesting to know how it may be wrong, and what could explain that Steiner, as a result of 30 years of research, had continuously unobjective imaginative observations of the human organization:



"In this state, however, in which the soul can think without the body, it can also see the body. Just as you see something that is outside of yourself, as you know that you see the table with your eyes, so too do you look back with imaginative, inspired, and intuitive cognition at your physical and etheric bodies. You are there within yourself only as a soul being. You are what you otherwise are in unconscious sleep, but now conscious. And now something very peculiar occurs.

It happens that we do not see everything within this physical body. Only the nervous system is objectively visible to the soul. Seen thus from the outside. The human being is a nerve sense being. Our nervous system together with the senses becomes visible from outside. I emphasize this because it has played a role although not in these evening lectures, but in many of the day lectures. I emphasize this because not only the so-called sensory nerves but also the so-called motor nerves become visible, and it is precisely at this stage of cognition through direct observation that we arrive at this research result. There is no difference in principle between sensory and motor nerves. The sensory nerves are there to mediate the perception of the external world through our senses. The motor nerves which are also sensory nerves are there so that we perceive the position and the presence of our limbs within ourselves.

That we have within ourselves a perception of ourselves is mediated by the motor nerves which are actually sensory nerves in this respect. Such research results arise on this path of soul research. Thus on the one hand you have now attained in this way to the greatest extent what belongs to the human nervous system. You have it before you like an objective thing."



From "Becoming Fully Human: The Significance of Anthroposophy in Contemporary Spiritual Life CW 82"

Federica,

Isn't this what we have been saying?

Steiner makes it very clear in this passage that the idea of "motor nerves are also sensory nerves that perceive the position and presence of our limbs" is an Imaginative observation, that can only be attained and verified through 'this path of soul research', at 'precisely this stage of cognition'. Thus, it is not something that can be reasoned out from entirely within the focal plane (here he makes that clear, but in other passages, it seems he is not so clear about it). There is nothing "unobjective" about observations at the Imaginative scale of our intuitive navigation, but we need to be clear that it is an entirely different sort of "objective" than what can be considered as such from the focal plane perspective. We certainly can't imagine that we remain as a homunculus perspective that views the branching nervous system as clear-cut mental pictures, like a diagram we may find in a physiology textbook. It is better to understand "seeing the nervous system" at this scale as developing an intuitive orientation to how the system mediates our perceptions within the soul-spiritual landscape.

What does this Imaginative observation of the motor nerves, as perceivers of our internal states, translate to when we zoom back in to our ordinary focal scale of objectivity? It becomes the fact that these nerves are preconditions for muscle contraction in response to our will impulses. There is only a contradiction between these two if we try to flatten the Imaginative observations onto the focal plane and treat them as commensurate with physical observations in terms of their 'objectivity'. As we mentioned in the other thread, our deeper soul being has an entirely different perspective on 'what reality is', what 'we are', what is 'objectively true', and so on. It is no longer interested in forming rigid pipelines with its mental images to mimic the phenomenal flow and predict what that flow, as some independent reality, will do next. It doesn't consider such pipelines "correct," in contrast to all other pipelines, which are considered "incorrect". As Cleric put it in the latest essay, at the Imaginative scale:

"We no longer try to calculate a prediction about what our next thought would be (while the calculating thoughts themselves still cannot be pre-calculated), but we attain finer sensitivity for the curvature of the flow through the here and now. Just like we have some intuitive orientation for our inner process when we shape it consciously, like when we count to ten, so we begin to intuitively feel how aspects of the contextual flow also stream in ways that make intuitive sense. In other words, instead of stacking a prediction within the picture-in-picture sub-flow and then seeking correlations with the primary flow, we begin to gain an expanded intuitive sense about the rhythms and interferences of certain real-time tendencies of the contextual flow, about where they ‘come from’ and where they are ‘headed’. This is known not as an intellectual guessing or interpretation, but by directly feeling the in-phaseness of the intuitive curvature of the flow and the receding phenomena."

So we should be clear that everything Steiner conveys in this domain of occult physiology, whether about the deeper understanding of heart function, motor nerves, or something else, is a result of the process described above, which is certainly a process of objective inquiry but a different kind of objective inquiry than we are accustomed to within the focal plane. He then artistically depicts these Imaginative observations through various concepts available to the intellectual palette of his time, generally motivated by the critical aim of loosening the rigid, materialistic-reductionist perspective on the human organism and its soul-body relations, as we discussed earlier. That can lead to certain passages where he seems to indicate that the motor-sensory nerve distinction (or heart pump-flow distinction) collapses even with ordinary focal-plane observations and reasoning. Yet that is where it is up to us to become discerning and see how such passages take shape through a certain intermixing of one scale of 'objective' with another scale of 'objective'.

I was being ironic. Of course I don't consider that imaginative observation unobjective. And I know that the observation can only be arrived at in higher cognition, and that the physical plane responds to different laws. Indeed, we have discussed that through a long series of posts. But I do think that, once the observation is known, the result should illuminate focal-plane physiology too. And I think this was one of Steiner's goals as well. In this sense, something is still missing. It's not enough to say that the observation is objective in imagination but unobjective on the focal plane. It remains to be explained precisely how that comes about, beyond the generic statement that the observation translates into the fact that these nerves are preconditions for muscle contraction. Steiner too says that they are precondition for muscle contraction. But how does the metabolic reason for that translate into sense-observable physiology? This remains to be elucidated, because the planes are different but they should stand in harmonious relationship with each other. So there should be a way to find in the observable physiology of the motor nerves something that is traceable to metabolic activity, as opposed to "the brain sends a signal through the nerve which activates the muscle". Don't you think that something is still missing?

[Federica]

I was being ironic. Of course I don't consider that imaginative observation unobjective. And I know that the observation can only be arrived at in higher cognition, and that the physical plane responds to different laws. Indeed, we have discussed that through a long series of posts. But I do think that, once the observation is known, the result should illuminate focal-plane physiology too. And I think this was one of Steiner's goals as well. In this sense, something is still missing. It's not enough to say that the observation is objective in imagination but unobjective on the focal plane. It remains to be explained precisely how that comes about, beyond the generic statement that the observation translates into the fact that these nerves are preconditions for muscle contraction. Steiner too says that they are precondition for muscle contraction. But how does the metabolic reason for that translate into sense-observable physiology? This remains to be elucidated, because the planes are different but they should stand in harmonious relationship with each other. So there should be a way to find in the observable physiology of the motor nerves something that is traceable to metabolic activity, as opposed to "the brain sends a signal through the nerve which activates the muscle". Don't you think that something is still missing?

I think the same with regards to the heart - which is why I previously shared this hypothesis. Steiner wrote a book (Riddles of the Soul) with the specific intent to highlight and emphasize these "results of anthroposophical research". He was concerned with bringing together natural and spiritual science, and I don't think we can settle the question simply saying "these are imaginative perceptions, but in the world of the senses it's another story. Steiner in this field communicated sort of awkwardly and unclearly. He used to intermix the planes in the same sentence, and there's actually nothing about his heart and the nervous system statements that can be practically traced to the physical body. We can still use a different vocabulary that includes words like 'metabolism' but for all intents and purposes nothing changes in how physiology can be done on the focal plane, until someone develops Imagination." He published a book about that, that is he addressed a public who did not have access to higher cognition. I think something is missing in this story.