The Spirit in Human Evolution - Waldorf Research Institute

distinction between knower and known, what we call in grammatical terms, subject and
object. The predicate describes what we do to the object. This kind of knowledge always
means doing something to or with the object of our knowledge. We can also, however,
know something in the sense “I know her,” which is different from “I know about her.”
The difference is one of intimacy. The Biblical phrase, “Abraham knew Sarah,” makes the
intimacy clearer. This second knowing implies that we unite ourselves with the object,
or at least intend to approach as closely as we can. Both kinds of knowing are stages in
the act of knowing. If the things we know about remain things, we remain detached, our
sense of responsibility is diminished, because the meaning of the thing we know about
is insignificant in relation to the totality of its living context. When we know something
more intimately, when we recognize the other as being, we enter into dialogue with it.
It is a two-way process. In dialogue we give, perhaps even risk, something of ourselves;
otherwise it is no true dialogue.
The problem arises when our method of knowing stops at the “knowing about”
stage. This is especially so when our object is the human being, humanity in general, or
simply ourselves, though the tendency is equally true of other objects. If our method
of knowing about the human being filters out aspects of human nature, if we focus on
the parts and ignore, or fail to recognize the other parts, we cannot know the whole, or
even approach it. To be blunt, if we treat the human being only as a mechanism, however
complex, as a gene machine, as a collective of biochemical systems, we overlook the
human as being. This is the main problem with the materialistic reductionist approach.
It is true whenever this method is exclusively applied to the living world as a whole.
Firstly it denies the fundamental quality of being to living organisms or processes, since
being makes no sense to a materialistic point of view, and secondly, its methods only
allow us to know about things.
To some extent this is understandable. It is difficult to take the whole context into
account, it is much easier to start with parts. In focusing on one point, in trying to pin it
down, other points of reference recede and go out of focus. The object becomes dislocated
or displaced from its context, from the ordered whole with which we started.
Each attempt to gain clarity sooner or later fails. Things lose their meaning when
they lose their context. Faced with complexity (Is there anything in the living world
that is not complex?) the scientist seeks to simplify, remove as many factors as possible,
except what they consider to be the essential, and establish norms for comparison. With
each attempt to establish norms, general structures or predictable patterns (which we
hope will provide us with security), we permanently risk distorting or losing the very
phenomena being studied. Why? Because each case on closer examination turns out to
be different, to vary from the norm in ways which make generalization a largely fruitless
and often semantic task. Thus the phenomenon may have to be altered so that we can
deal with it. This is very obvious in the whole field of the sciences that try to understand
the human being. The complexity we discover threatens to overwhelm the means we
have of understanding it.
This is not in any way an anti-science position. We can form concepts and
generalize or categorize on the basis of our observations if we follow a path of knowledge
that goes from the whole to the parts and back to a whole imbued with meaning, or
at least as much of the whole as we can encompass, as many of the parts as we can
distinguish, and as much of the meaning as we can apprehend.
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