79. The Inadequacy of Natural Scientific Concepts for Sociology

In anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, realistic concepts are important. In the purely scientific field, the unrealistic concept remains inadequate. In the legal, moral, and social fields, it becomes a real danger.

In more recent times, there has been an effort to permeate the moral and social spheres with natural science ideas.

Benedikt gave a lecture at the 48th meeting of natural scientists in 1875 (previously 1874) and said in the course of it that the results of natural science knowledge must become a gospel:

To achieve this, the world view must first have reached such breadth, depth and clarity as to create a catechism that dominates the spiritual and ethical life of the people.

And about psychology, he says:

Psychology, too, has become a natural science since it, like physics and chemistry, has thrown off the ballast of metaphysics and no longer chooses hypotheses that are unfathomable for our present-day organization as premises.

One can cite Benedict because he naively introduces reality into his ideas.

But in general, the leap that is made from scientific ideas to “world views” is disastrous, because one takes those ideas that one has a good command of from a certain field and transfers them to other things that one does not know. As a rule, world views therefore contain an idealized world content that people express about things they know nothing about.

This has been particularly evident in recent times in the field of sociological ideas.

It is not possible to come to terms with the most essential impulses. At the center stands the concept of freedom. The natural scientist cannot do anything with it. Within the conceptual world that he has developed for the time being, only determinism makes sense.

In the area touched on here, analytical psychology plays its role. It has come to an area that is likely to open up the deepest insights. It also relates to an area that is connected to a non-utopian sociological view. However, it shies away from the idea of the spirit. And it operates with the inadequate concept of the “unconscious mind”.

First we must understand the human being. The threefold nature of his bodily life opens up a view into the real world of the spirit.

A degenerating natural life extends into the nervous life. The human being dies into his nervous life. The natural process that takes place here is a interrupted process of reproduction and growth. The process of cell division does not extend into the nerve cells and the red blood corpuscles. At the bottom of this process of degeneration, the soul life arises. What appears here is a living soul that has as little to do with physical life as a child has with its parents. And when you carry something within yourself that is so detached from the determining factors, you are a free being in this.