Something develops through something else relinquishing its predominance. What recedes, however, has not necessarily been superfluous. It may have prepared the conditions for what subsequently becomes possible.
On the necessity of cultivating living thinking — Die Wandlungskraft im Denken
Humanity has acquired an extraordinary capacity to transform the world materially. It has not yet acquired an equivalent capacity to transform its thinking and its social relationships. The disproportion between these capacities may account for a considerable part of our present difficulties.
We find ourselves confronted with institutions, economic structures and political arrangements of increasing complexity, while simultaneously experiencing a growing inability to imagine their future development other than as a continuation of what already exists. Yet development in nature reveals something quite different. There are moments when further development requires not an extension of the existing form, but its metamorphosis.
In his investigations into the plant, Goethe discovered that the various organs of the flowering plant could be understood as metamorphoses of a fundamental formative principle expressed in the leaf. From the cotyledons to the foliage leaves, the calyx, petals, stamens and pistil, we encounter successive manifestations of a formative activity that is itself not directly visible.
Along the stem, the leaves gradually expand, become increasingly articulated and subsequently contract into more pointed forms as they approach the flowering region. With the flower, however, something qualitatively new appears. An entirely different relationship to light, color, fragrance and the surrounding world becomes manifest. In the anthroposophical understanding of the plant, this is where the astral world finds a particularly delicate expression in the vegetative organism.
Goethe recognizes alternating movements of expansion and contraction, but also a principle of intensification or elevation — Steigerung. Development does not consist merely in an increase in size or complexity. It involves the emergence of qualitatively different possibilities, the passage to another developmental level.
Thomas Göbel, in his essay Metamorphose — Wandlungskraft des Geistes (1988), develops this investigation further. Drawing upon the botanical work of Jochen Bockemühl, he demonstrates how the emergence of one formative element is accompanied by the recession of its polar counterpart. As articulation develops, the expanded leaf surface recedes; as the pointed character becomes predominant, the stalk diminishes. Göbel calls this the Kompensationsprinzip der Metamorphose.
Something develops through something else relinquishing its predominance. What recedes, however, has not necessarily been superfluous. It may have prepared the conditions for what subsequently becomes possible.
The significance of Goethe's discovery extends far beyond botany. It lies equally in the activity of thinking that must be developed in order to comprehend such phenomena.
We can arrange the successive leaves of a plant alongside one another, describe them, compare them and classify them. Yet what brings one form into relationship with another remains invisible to sensory observation. The formative movement must be inwardly reconstituted. We have to become inwardly mobile, allowing our thinking to participate in the transformation rather than merely registering its results.
There is a fundamental difference between deducing one form from another and living inwardly in the metamorphosis through which one form becomes another.
It is this capacity that Rudolf Steiner sought to cultivate through the artistic forms of the first Goetheanum, and subsequently through the architecture of the second. In the seven column capitals of the first Goetheanum, we encounter not seven independently conceived artistic forms, but a formative movement manifesting itself through seven successive configurations. The observer is invited to become inwardly active within that movement.
The exercise cultivates what we could call die Wandlungskraft im Denken — the transformative capacity within thinking itself. Thinking thereby becomes something other than the manipulation of fixed conceptual representations. It becomes capable of accompanying formative activity.
Within anthroposophy, this capacity is also of fundamental importance for approaching the etheric, where what appears to ordinary consciousness as a succession of relatively fixed forms is understood in terms of living, continuously transforming activity.
But this capacity is no less essential in social life.
When we look at the economic and social institutions of the past, we encounter a succession of forms comparable, in a certain respect, to the successive leaves of a plant. Feudal estates, commercial enterprises, industrial factories, multinational corporations and digital platforms represent different configurations of human economic activity.
We can investigate the circumstances under which these forms appeared, the functions they fulfilled and the conditions under which they disappeared or were transformed. But can we also become inwardly active in the formative movement that connects them? Can we recognize what is seeking to develop within a contemporary situation without merely extrapolating from its present configuration?
This does not mean mechanically transferring botanical laws to society. Rather, through the investigation of metamorphosis in nature, we cultivate a capacity of cognition that may subsequently become fruitful in our observation of social phenomena. The plant becomes, in this sense, an Organon — an instrument of cognition.
One of the difficulties in social development is that human beings become personally, economically and psychologically attached to particular historical forms. Those whose existence and influence depend upon an established order have an interest in perpetuating it, while those who expect to benefit from its transformation have an interest in changing it. Social development consequently becomes a struggle between competing interests.
Imagine, by analogy, that every leaf of a plant had an interest in perpetuating its particular form. The expansive leaf would resist the emergence of the articulated leaf, and the articulated leaf would resist the contraction preparing the flower. The plant would become incapable of completing its development.
Something similar may occur in society when we are unable to distinguish between the preservation of a particular structure and the preservation of the life that once brought that structure into existence.
Two apparently antagonistic movements can be observed today. States, financial institutions and technological corporations increasingly seek to concentrate power, capital, information and infrastructure. Simultaneously, technological developments make increasingly decentralized forms of activity possible.
These two movements need not necessarily be understood as mutually exclusive. Centralization may have played an indispensable role in bringing certain capacities into existence. The concentration of resources and knowledge made possible technological achievements that could hardly have emerged through fragmented individual initiatives. Yet the capacities thus developed may now require a different form of organization in order to become fully fruitful for humanity.
Decentralization does not necessarily imply fragmentation, just as unity does not necessarily imply centralized control. A flower constitutes a unity of highly differentiated organs without requiring these organs to become identical. Could society develop forms of unity that arise increasingly from the living relationships between relatively autonomous activities?
The history of technology itself offers interesting examples. The increasing complexity of early electronic apparatus eventually gave way to the transistor and integrated circuitry. What previously required numerous vacuum tubes, extensive wiring and considerable physical space became concentrated into extraordinarily small components. A new simplicity emerged on the other side of complexity, opening possibilities that could hardly have been imagined within the previous technological configuration.
This simplification of the apparatus was, admittedly, accompanied by increasing complexity elsewhere, particularly in its manufacturing infrastructure. Nevertheless, what had previously constituted the limits of a particular technological form was overcome through a transformation of its organizing principle.
Perhaps contemporary technology, including artificial intelligence, can be seen as the flowering of a technological development that began some seventy years ago. But we should be careful not to mistake the flower for the fruit.
Artificial intelligence is commonly approached through the question of competition. Will AI become more intelligent than human beings? Will it replace them? Will individuals, enterprises and nations be able to remain competitive?
Behind these questions lies a more fundamental difficulty: the nature of intelligence itself is insufficiently understood. We readily identify intelligence with the performance of certain intellectual operations, without sufficiently investigating the activity of thinking through which the human being encounters meaning and reality.
If AI makes certain intellectual operations increasingly available through technology, what possibilities for human activity are thereby being released? What could the human being develop that was previously constrained by the necessity of performing those operations?
At one time, entire buildings were occupied by persons engaged in typing and reproducing documents. Technological development progressively rendered much of this activity unnecessary. What had once been a sought-after profession largely disappeared, while entirely new fields of activity emerged.
Yet today, the disappearance of a particular form of work is experienced primarily as a threat, because our economic arrangements make access to the necessities of life largely dependent upon employment and income. The technology has undergone a metamorphosis, while the economic relationships within which it operates have not undergone a corresponding transformation.
What could potentially emancipate human activity consequently threatens human existence.
The question is therefore not merely how humanity can adapt to AI. It is also what metamorphosis of economic life would allow the human capacities released through technological development to become socially fruitful.
The monetary and financial system constitutes another particularly interesting field of investigation. Over time, money has increasingly emancipated itself from its material manifestation. From metallic currency to paper money, bank credit and digital accounting, monetary relationships have become progressively less dependent upon the physical substance in which they were once embodied.
Yet our relationship to money continues to exhibit characteristics belonging to its earlier forms. We accumulate and hoard it as though we were still accumulating gold in a vault, although what is largely being accumulated today consists of claims upon economic activity.
The outer form of money has undergone extensive metamorphosis. Has our thinking about money undergone a corresponding transformation?
Capital historically made possible the concentration of resources required for industrial and technological development. But excessive accumulation can also deprive other regions and individuals of the means through which their productive capacities could become active. What once facilitated development may, through the perpetuation of its predominance, begin to obstruct development.
In his economics lectures of 1922 (Nationalökonomischer Kurs, GA 340), Rudolf Steiner distinguishes between purchase money, loan money and gift money — Kaufgeld, Leihgeld und Schenkungsgeld. Money is thereby approached not simply as a homogeneous quantity, but in terms of the qualitatively different functions it fulfills within the economic organism.
Perhaps a further metamorphosis of economic life will require us to understand capital less as something to be accumulated than as something whose movement enables human capacities to become fruitful.
We are living in a globally interconnected society while continuing to organize much of our social, economic and political life according to principles of rivalry inherited from earlier historical conditions. The development of one nation is perceived as a threat to another; the development of one enterprise as a threat to its competitors; the development of artificial intelligence as a threat to human intelligence.
Yet the emergence of new scientific, artistic or technological capacities anywhere in the world constitutes, potentially, an enrichment of humanity as a whole. Why must the development of the other be experienced as a diminishment of oneself?
Competition has undoubtedly played a role in historical development. The question is whether its predominance has now reached a developmental threshold, and whether a genuinely global society requires a different organizing principle.
Perhaps what is seeking to emerge is not merely a redistribution of economic and political power, but a metamorphosis of the relationships between human beings, through which the development of the individual increasingly becomes a condition for the development of the whole, and the development of the whole a condition for that of the individual.
We cannot yet entirely conceptualize the new social form. Perhaps we should not attempt to do so prematurely. To construct an ideal society in thought and subsequently impose it upon reality would be quite different from recognizing the formative possibilities already present within reality.
The challenge is to develop a capacity through which we can perceive not only what has become, but what is becoming; not only the manifested form, but the activity through which it is being transformed.
Humanity has learned how to transform matter, how to release forces concealed within nature, and how to develop technologies of extraordinary complexity. It must now learn to become equally mobile within its own thinking and within the social relationships that this thinking brings into existence.
The next developmental threshold may therefore require something more than a metamorphosis of our institutions. It may require a metamorphosis of the human being's capacity to think.
And perhaps the cultivation of this capacity would allow humanity to recognize when a historical form has fulfilled its purpose, without needing to experience its disappearance exclusively through conflict, destruction or catastrophe.
Rather than resisting metamorphosis, we could learn to participate in it consciously.
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