CHAPTER II – Where Do We Stand To-day?
‘Death is the price man has to pay for his brain and his personality’ – this is how a modern physiologist (A. Carrel in his aforementioned book, Man the Unknown) describes the connexion between man’s bodily functions and his waking consciousness. It is characteristic of the outlook prevailing in the nineteenth century that thinking was regarded as the result of the life of the body; that is, of the body’s matter-building processes. Hence no attention was paid at that time to the lonely voice of the German philosopher, C. Fortlage (1806-81), who in his System of Psychology as Empirical Science suggested that consciousness is really based on death processes in the body. From this fact he boldly drew the conclusion (known to us today to be true) that if ‘partial death’ gave rise to ordinary consciousness, then ‘total death’ must result in an extraordinary enhancement of consciousness. Again, when in our century Rudolf Steiner drew attention to the same fact, which he had found along his own lines of investigation, showing thereby the true role of the nervous system in regard to the various activities of the soul, official science turned a deaf ear to his pronouncement.6 To-day the scientist regards it as forming part of ‘unknown man’ that life must recede – in other words, that the organ-building processes of the body must come to a standstill – if consciousness is to come into its own.
With the recognition of a death process in the nervous system as the bodily foundation of consciousness, and particularly of man’s conceptual activities, the question arises as to the nature of those activities which have their foundation in other systems, such as that of the muscles, where life, not death, prevails. Here an answer must be given which will surprise the reader acquainted with modern theories of psycho-physical interaction; but if he meets it with an open mind he will not find it difficult to test.
Just as the conceptual activity has as its bodily foundation the brain, with the nervous appendages, so it is volitional activity which is based on processes taking place in the muscular region of the body and in those organs which provide the body’s metabolism.
A statement which says that man’s will is as directly based on the metabolic processes of the body, both inside and outside the muscles, as is his perceiving and thought-forming mind on a process in the nerves, is bound to cause surprise. Firstly, it seems to leave out the role commonly ascribed to the so-called motoric part of the nervous system in bringing about bodily action; and secondly, the acknowledgment of the dependence of consciousness on corporeal ‘dying’ implies that willing is an unconscious activity because of its being based on life processes of the body.
The first of these two problems will find its answer at a later stage of our discussion when we shall see what entitles us to draw a direct connexion between volition and muscular action. To answer the second problem, simple self-observation is required. This tells us that, when we move a limb, all that we know of is the intention (in its conceptual form) which rouses the will and gives it its direction, and the fact of the completed deed. In between, we accompany the movement with a dim awareness of the momentary positions of the parts of the body involved, so that we know whether or not they are moving in the intended manner. This awareness is due to a particular sense, the ‘sense of movement’ or ‘muscular sense’ – one of those senses whose existence physiology has lately come to acknowledge. Nothing, however, is known to us of all the complex changes which are set into play within the muscles themselves in order to carry out some intended movement. And it is these that are the direct outcome of the activity of our will.
Regarding man’s psycho-physical organization thus, we come to see in it a kind of polarity – a death-pole, as it were, represented by the nerves including their extension into the senses, and a life-pole, represented by the metabolic and muscular systems; and connected with them a pole of consciousness and one of unconsciousness – or as we can also say, of waking and sleeping consciousness. For the degree of consciousness on the side of the life-pole is not different from the state in which the entire human being dwells during sleep.
It is by thus recognizing the dependence of consciousness on processes of bodily disintegration that we first come to understand why consciousness, once it has reached a certain degree of brightness, is bound to suffer repeated interruptions. Every night, when we sleep, our nervous system becomes alive (though with gradually decreasing intensity) in order that what has been destroyed during the day may be restored. While the system is kept in this condition, no consciousness can obtain in it.