Screwtape Redux
So many wonders have accumulated since Steiner wrote The Philosophy of Freedom that the very Naïve Realism whose sinister partnership with Critical Idealism that book overthrew has shifted its ground. To appreciate conjuring you need a solid world of tables and chairs as a safe normality to be restored at the end of the performance, a world where top-hats no longer pour forth rabbits. But nowadays the cabinet in which Ae lady is sawn in half is no more of a marvel than the television cabinet where you might well be observing the phenomenon, indeed much less so. When people are naïve, it is more likely to be in their ability to absorb the wonderful without astonishment. What are a few unexplained mice and rabbits in a world of lasers and Venus-probes? Modern man, face to face with a healing at Lourdes or the Indian rope-trick, drily observes that a Hollywood version would be better presented. When the entire experienceable universe is manifestly some sort of trick, it is invidious to single out one illusory phenomenon from others as the flaw which gives us a clue to the underlying reality. ‘The world is my mental picture’, says Schopenhauer. ‘So I must be crazy’, concludes modern man.
Nevertheless, at a crucial point of history The Philosophy of Freedom was written, and is very much with us today. If anthroposophy possessed its own version of the Screwtape Letters, the fiend might have observed that the book gave him some very nasty moments.
“Those of us”, he might have said, “who had concerned ourselves from the beginning with diverting mankind through his insatiable curiosity have been obliged to keep a constant eye on his unfortunate tendency to drift from mere inquisitiveness into open-mouthed astonishment, than which nothing draws him so swiftly towards the treacherous realm of heavenly wonder which threatens us all.
“The scientific revolution appeared to be solidly based on the righteous scepticism of Kant. You younger fiends would do well to remember that, while it is excellent to find occasion for pride in a human being, it can be even better to find a spurious reason for humility. Kant convinced scientists that it was impossible to reach a real world of ‘things-in-themselves’. ‘Metaphysics’, their ludicrous name for this ingenious half-truth, has proved as effective a sword as Gabriel’s for keeping man unaware of his imminent reprieve from the Dark Ages. It made an irresistible appeal to the puritan self-lacerating spirit of the West. Since Calvinism and witch-burning were now denied them, they embraced pragmatic science with avidity. Darwinism, Freudianism, and all manner of later psychological hairshirts followed thick and fast.
“Wonderful stuff for us, you would have thought; every wonder accounted for in terms of something ingenious but banal, every flicker of revelation neatly doused by some clever but monumentally boring explanation. But unlike Kant, trotting dutifully about Konigsberg, these dedicated metaphysical pragmatists had to stick their inquisitive noses into the real world of natural phenomena, where their humble, mortified minds revealed a whole new world of wonders. Sure enough their silly mouths dropped open, and wonder and astonishment filled their naïve little souls, and even turned to reverence in some of them (Darwin was a most reverent man).
“Before we knew where we were, half of them would have reached wisdom-filled identification with the laws of the universe, and even submission to the course of karmic evolution, and anthroposophy would have been upon us.
“It was in this sensitive period of history that Rudolf Steiner appeared with his Philosophy of Freedom. Surely science in its youthful upsurgence would have the acuity, filled as it was with a Rowing wonder at the natural world, to perceive that human thinking was the crowning wonder among all wonders, and that in the astonished, wonder-filled and reverent observation of their own thinking as phenomenon among phenomena, that very naivete rightly distrusted by Kant in connection with other observations would here find its justification and sanction.
“As you know, however, to our vast relief, metaphysics proved a strong enough barrier to prevent so cataclysmic an advance in human awareness. The fire was neatly doused in oceans of brain physiology, and the direct observation — seelische Beobachtung [soul observation] — that Steiner had made possible was for the time being diverted. Nobody of importance took any notice of Steiner, and we soon had plenty of opportunities to see that his enemies, and sometimes his supporters, sufficiently misrepresented him.
“In case you are inclined to be complacent, however, I would remind you that our victory was by no means final. The moment passed, but it could have been a very near thing. Steiner failed to shift the barrier established in the midstream of human cognitive advance. Nothing could stop the current of human evolution. But metaphysics has at least ensured for the time being that knowledge remains a closed system rather than an open-ended one. You may object that this operation in the human mind was rather like damming a raging torrent, and that however far in the future we have postponed its reemergence, the time must come when it bursts its bonds. This is no doubt so, but there will certainly be further pickings for us in that very fact, and the longer it is delayed the more we shall retrieve. If the advances of the enemy are inevitable, always ensure that they are cataclysmic rather than organic. Hell thrives on crises.
“What, Wormwood? Speak up! Yes, there are certainly still anthroposophists. Their numbers are small. They are like holes in the dam. So long as that is all they are, they can even help in a minor way to postpone the crisis we rely on, which is to our advantage. But I have already pointed out many times that an illusion, to be effective, must be complete. A very small flaw can in some circumstances collapse the entire structure. Meanwhile, as you know, we have succeeded in creating on the basis of metaphysics and materialism the biggest diversionary circus of all time.
“You could do worse, Wormwood, than study a well-established fighting technique among men, called Judo, based on the principle, ‘if you can’t beat it, join it’. After all, if each of the myriad wonders man is now uncovering in the natural world and beneath it has resulted from experiments based on a sense perception whose ability to reach a real world is denied, and on a thinking chiefly devised to eliminate its presumably subjective bias, we can rely on a growing bias in thinking itself against observation as a principle. Observation then tends to be undertaken by scientists faute de mieux [for lack of something better or more desirable]. And we are fairly safe from the, to us, dangerous results of scientists observing the thinking itself, so long as productive results continue to be possible without doing so. This has already established itself as a psychological block throughout western mankind, which provides us with a sort of built-in Judo. ‘From now on, the more wonders in this field the better. We can rely upon the simple power of association to ensure that the more insistent and overwhelming and space-wide the sensation of a science-fiction universe ‘there’ outside him becomes for man, the deeper will grow his scepticism to match it.
“If it’s corny, it’s phoney, and the cornier the phonier.”
So much for Screwtape, designed brilliantly by C. S. Lewis as an entertaining companion on the path of self-debunking. We have used the method to show how modern consciousness has advanced along a path of debunking a naïve view of the world, and built up scepticism as an instrument not of knowledge of the world (which in the naïve sense is unknowable) but of knowledge of some kind of thinkable reality whose results can be applied to that unknowable world with practical effect.
What Steiner has done in his earliest work is to demonstrate that this truly heroic process of disillusionment with the world leaves virtually untouched a further layer of misapprehensions so close to the most intimate processes of observation and thinking as to escape notice altogether in the sheer vigor of our cognitive activity. He unseats not the theories of the world but the very axioms upon which the theories are based, things not previously thought to be open to question, or even susceptible to treatment by thinking at all. He points out that the unknowable world of things-in-themselves which the heroic disciplined sceptic tilts at with his metaphysical thinking is thought of and also pictured with precisely the same innocent naivete as the simple man’s world which has been discarded for it. But this is to fall victim to a deeper illusion. What if reality is after all not something in relation to which I stand on the receiving end?
Excerpted from the article The Grand Illusion by Stanley Messenger, published in the 1968 Issue of The Golden Blade.