The light course : first course in natural science : light, color, sound--mass, electricity

209 Pages·2001·1.35 MB·English

by  Rudolf, Steiner

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THE LIGHT COURSE
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[III]
F O U N D A T I O N S O F W A L D O R F E D U C A T I O N
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R U D O L F S T E I N E R
The Light Course
FIRS T COUR SE IN NATURAL SCIEN CE:
LIGHT, COL OR, SOUND—
MASS, ELECTR ICIT Y, MAGNET IS M
TRAN SLATE D BY RAOUL CANSINO
Anthroposophic Press
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Published by Anthroposophic Press
P.O. Box 799
Great Barrington, MA 01230
www.anthropress.org
Translation copyright © 2001 by Anthroposophic Press
This work is a translation of Geisteswissentschaftliche Impulse zur Entwickelung der
Physik: Erster naturwissenschaftlicher Kurs: Licht, Farbe, Ton—Masse, Elektrizität,
Magnetismus (GA 320); copyright © 1964 Verlag der Rudolf Steiner–Nachlass-
verwaltung, Dornach, Switzerland. Translated with permission.
Publication of this work was made possible by a grant from the Waldorf
Curriculum Fund.
Book design by Jennie Reins Stanton.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Steiner, Rudolf, 1861-1925.
[Lichtkurs. English]
The light course : ten lectures on physics : delivered in Stuttgart, December 23,
1919-January 3, 1920 / by Rudolf Steiner ; translated with a foreword by Raoul
Cansino.
p. cm. -- (Foundations of Waldorf education ; 22)
ISBN 0-88010-499-6
1. Light. 2. Color. 3. Anthroposophy. I. Title. II. Series.
QC361 .S8313 2001
535--dc21
2001003239
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
in any form without the written permission of the publishers, except for brief
quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Printed in the United States of America
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Contents
Translator’s Introduction ................................................................. 7
A Note on the Text ........................................................................ 13
FIRST LECTURE
December 23, 1919 ..................................................................... 15
SECOND LECTURE
December 24, 1919 ..................................................................... 33
THIRD LECTURE
December 25, 1919 ..................................................................... 51
FOURTH LECTURE
December 26, 1919 ..................................................................... 69
FIFTH LECTURE
December 27, 1919 ..................................................................... 85
SIXTH LECTURE
December 29, 1919 ..................................................................... 95
SEVENTH LECTURE
December 30, 1919 ................................................................... 111
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EIGHTH LECTURE
December 31, 1919..................................................................... 124
NINTH LECTURE
January 2, 1920 ......................................................................... 138
TENTH LECTURE
January 3, 1920.......................................................................... 155
DISCUSSION STATEMENT
August 8, 1921 ........................................................................... 172
Notes .......................................................................................... 186
Index ......................................................................................... 197
The Foundations of Waldorf Education......................................... 203
Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures and Writings on Education...................... 205
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Translator’s Introduction
On a parent education evening at Green Meadow Waldorf
School in New York, the class teacher of the seventh grade
demonstrates a first physics experiment for the parents in
attendance. Over a Bunsen burner he heats a beaker of water
containing a piece of ice. The parents watch in rapt silence for
several minutes while tiny bubbles form on the bottom and
sides of the beaker. Losing its milky opacity and gradually tak-
ing on the transparency of the surrounding water, the chunk of
ice becomes more mobile, swimming about slowly in the bea-
ker. Bubbles begin to form around the piece of ice, and, one by
one, little bubbles rise from the bottom of the beaker, describ-
ing erratic paths to the surface. Soon the chunk of ice is no
more than a ghostly semblance of its former self, perceptible
only as a fleeting watery “thickness” or as a sensation of move-
ment. Then, with surprising suddenness, the water itself is full
of motion and no longer transparent but turbulent with large
bubbles that swiftly ascend the sides of the beaker. The water
itself appears to flow upward and then toward the center of the
surface, where it seems to be sucked down again into the boil-
ing cauldron. Surprisingly, very little steam is generated in this
process, but when the teacher turns off the Bunsen burner,
steam suddenly becomes visible, rising from the now quiet
water, in which there is no more ice to be seen. The ice has
“melted.” The parents then offer their observations. What did
they see?
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8 T H E L I G H T C O U R S E
For many of the parents, it is a first glimpse into the phe-
nomenally based science curriculum that their children have
been learning since their botany block in fifth grade. For the
class teacher, it is an opportunity to explain that Waldorf edu-
cation aims to bring the children an understanding of the phys-
ical world that is based on what they can actually observe with
their senses. After observing such an experiment, the children
attempt to put into their own words what they have seen. If
they say that the water boiled and the ice melted, the teacher
encourages them to describe the actual individual moments
until the class has built up a full picture of the process. The
children are learning (or actually relearning) how to attend to a
natural phenomenon without substituting concepts such as
“boil” or “melt” for actual perceptions. This sense-based way of
doing science, which has its roots in Goethe’s scientific prac-
tices, is to continue throughout the children’s education even
through the high school.
As a dyed-in-the-wool friend of the humanities, who as a
schoolboy had avoided the “hard” sciences whenever possible,
I was fascinated by both the demonstration and the explana-
tion. As a student of German literature, I had heard about
Goethe’s ideas on color and had a passing acquaintance with
the controversies surrounding the great poet’s work in science.
A subsequent Waldorf conference, at which science teachers
Stephen Edelglass and Michael D’Aleo spoke about the Goet-
hean approach to physics, once again piqued my interest: here
was a way of looking at the natural world without reducing it
to dry formulas and invisible forces. Where had this approach
come from?
“We can definitely stick with the phenomenon. That is
good,” said Rudolf Steiner in the “Discussion Statement”
(August 8, 1921) that has been printed here in lieu of an
afterword to The Light Course. A simpler description of
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Translator’s Introduction 9
Goethe’s approach could hardly be given, yet it captures the
essence: Goethe was not interested in “natural laws,” in find-
ing a cause lurking behind the phenomena. Instead he sought
by dint of careful observation to create what Steiner called “a
kind of rational description of nature” (First Lecture), which
would reveal the “archetypal phenomenon” (Urphänomen),
consisting of the most basic elements of the observed phe-
nomena. Goethe saw such an archetypal phenomenon in the
colors that appeared when he first looked through a spectrum
toward a window where the darkness of the frame met the
brightness of the sky.
“First Course in Natural Science” was the name Rudolf
Steiner originally gave to this series of ten lectures for the
teachers of the new Waldorf School in Stuttgart from Decem-
ber 23, 1919, to January 3, 1920. Over the intervening years
these lectures gained the sobriquet “The Light Course,” a mis-
nomer perhaps, since the course deals with a much larger range
of phenomena, encompassing, besides light and color, discus-
sions of sound, mass, electricity, and magnetism, and even ven-
turing into areas such as radioactivity, relativity, and quantum
mechanics, which constituted the cutting edge of physics at
that time. Nevertheless the nickname does have a certain justi-
fication, since all of lectures three through seven and a good
deal of lecture two are devoted to light and the related phe-
nomenon of color. Equally significant, the discussion of light
gave Rudolf Steiner the opportunity to establish the phenome-
nological approach of Goethe’s Color Theory as the method-
ological basis for looking at other physical phenomena. Far
from being a straightforward guide to teaching physics in the
Waldorf School with practical suggestions on curriculum and
teaching methods, The Light Course and two subsequent
courses on the natural sciences given in 1920 and 1921 were
intended as a basic schooling in the Goethean approach to