11 lectures, Stuttgart and Dornach, Dec. 23, 1919 - Aug. 8, 1921 (CW
320)
"Now the time has actually arrived when...we have a subconscious
glimmering of the impossibility of the modern approach to nature and
some sense that things have to change."--Rudolf Steiner
This course on light--also exploring color, sound, mass, electricity and
magnetism--presages the dawn of a new worldview in the natural sciences
that will stand our notion of the physical world on its head.
This "first course" in natural science, given to the teachers of the new
Stuttgart Waldorf school as an inspiration for developing the physics
curriculum, is based on Goethe's phenomenological approach to the study
of nature. Acknowledging that modern physicists had come to regard
Goethe's ideas on physics as a "kind of nonsense."
Rudolf Steiner contrasts the traditional scientific approach, which
treats phenomena as evidence of "natural laws," with Goethean science,
which rejects the idea of an abstract law behind natural phenomena and
instead seeks to be a "rational description of nature." Steiner then
corrects the mechanistic reductionism practiced by scientific
positivists, emphasizing instead the validity of human experience and
pointing toward a revolution in scientific paradigms that would reclaim
ground for the subject--the human being--in the study of nature.
German source: Geisteswissenschaftliche impulse zur Entwikkelung der
Physik, Erster Naturwissenschaftlicher Kurs: Licht, Farbe, Ton-Masse,
Elektrizität, Magnetismus (GA 320).
