"The watchmaker must never be forgotten. Through thoughts, the watch has come into existence. The thoughts have flowed, as it were, into the watch, into the thing.” - Rudolf Steiner, GA 108 – Practical Training In Thought – Karlsruhe, January 18, 1909.

Our ideas and imaginations pour into our physical creations, whether these be technical, artistic, social, practical or anything else. And the situation is no different in the case of digital technology.

To build a watch, the watchmaker begins with an idea such as ‘personal timekeeping’, imagines how it may be done with ‘a regularly ticking dial’, and then gets to work designing and manufacturing the watch.

The only part of this process that we get to know about through our senses is the final product, the physical watch. Our senses only have access to creative endpoints.

Thousands of satellites are being launched each year as part of efforts to build out the infrastructure for our digital technologies and networks. The night sky is now crisscrossed by traveling techno-stars visible to the naked eye. The celestial order of the constellations host more and more movement, and light pollution, which has led many astronomers around the world to protest. There is also an acceleration of dynamism in normal perception through our phones and computers, images change, come and go, as do messages and sounds, with tremendous speed. There is so much more to everything. As a part of this movement many experience a static void and a great paradox of our newest “communication technologies” that they easily isolate and separate. In inner work we see a countermovement, where we start with bringing our distracted thoughts to stillness and focus with our will, and then we find a plane of spiritual movement, of warmth and light, imbued with an ethical life. In this episode, these two gestures of modernity form the backdrop for an exploration of artistic projects that are being prepared for the Youth Conference at the Goetheanum for February on Digital Technology and Spirituality.

While growing up, I had many such deeply meaningful musical experiences, and yet it was only later in life that I decided to dedicate myself to the service of music. As a 28-year-old, I was pursuing a scientific career studying computational biology, and during my Ph.D., I became ever more frustrated with the reductionistic approach so common in the academic world. To enrich my daily life, I started attending a course on music in the 20th century, and for the first time, I discovered that the evolution of music did not stop with Beethoven or Coltrane, as some of my previous piano teachers had claimed, but that entirely new worlds of sound came into being at the turn of the century and especially after the Second World War. The latter was a time of great upheaval where composers wanted to completely dissociate themselves from any shred of the aesthetics that were associated with nationalism and the great atrocities of the war, and at the same time, to embrace new technologies for the synthesis, recording, and manipulation of sounds that opened up doors to new types of music. To quote Karlheinz Stockhausen, one of the leading figures in the post-war avant-garde: “New means change the method; new methods change the experience, and new experiences change man. Whenever we hear sounds, we are changed: we are no longer the same after hearing certain sounds, and this is more the case when we hear organized sounds, sounds organized by another human being: music.”

The word public comes from the latin term “publicus”, which, at the same time, is a confluence of two other words: “pubicus”, which is relative to young women, and “poplicus”, which is relative to the people. And the Republic is nothing else than a matter of the people, matter of the young, since they are the ones with the ability to bear arms. In contrast to them are the elders, the ones that make up the senate and have the privilege of not going to war. The public is that which is done collectively for the social and private, from the term 'privatus,' meaning separated from the public. But these meanings are being lost, they are being transformed, and much of it has to do with digital technology, which was initially conceived as a means of emancipation for society but is now quite the opposite.

Dr. Sebastian Lorenz will be one of the presenters at the upcoming Youth Conference “Digital Technology and Spirituality” (February 1-4, 2024) and here we are sharing a summary of a lecture that he gave on transhumanism and the importance of the body. This summary is in German though Dr. Lorenz will be lecturing in English at the upcoming event. We are publishing it with thanks to Christine Pflug who both wrote the summary and gave us permission to share it further. It first appeared here.

"Der Mensch soll optimiert werden, er soll sein Aussehen, seine physischen, seelischen Möglichkeiten selbst bestimmen, Alterung und Tod verhindern. Und das mit den Mitteln der Technologie. Die Idee von einem Jungbrunnen oder einem Lebenselixier sind uralt und gehen bis auf das Gilgamesch-Epos zurück. Die technologischen Mittel aber werden immer besser, genialer und ermöglichen eine Lebensqualität, von der wir alle profitieren. Eine Weiterentwicklung des Menschen ist auch das Ziel der Anthroposophie. Was aber ist der Unterschied zum Transhumanismus? Wie steht der einzelne Mensch darin, einerseits der technischen Entwicklung nicht ausweichen zu können, sich von dieser aber nicht überrollen zu lassen? Und inwiefern ist der Mensch in all diesem „umkämpft“?Dr. Lorenz ging diesen Fragen nach in der Reihe: Umkämpftes Menschenbild. Transhumanismus – Die Optimierung des Menschen?"

“I can – whilst facing thee – but weep – and cry –.” These are words spoken by Strader, the natural scientist, to Ahriman at the moment in Rudolf Steiner’s third mystery drama when Strader realizes that this being is trapped within the limits of calculating intellectual thinking. But the words could just as easily be addressed to a Minister of the Environment who decides to import coal from Bolivia because Germany has decided to phase out coal production to protect the climate. Inherent in such a dilemma is a madness that cleaves the human soul.