The Light Course

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 approach to the study of nature. Acknowledging that modern physicists had come to regard Goethe's ideas on physics as a "kind of nonsense", 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.