The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Preface to the new edition

[ 1 ] This epistemology of Goethe's world view was written down by me in the mid-eighties of the last century. At that time, two thoughts were living in my soul. One was focused on Goethe's work and endeavored to shape the view of the world and of life that revealed itself as the driving force in this work. The fully and purely human seemed to me to prevail in everything that Goethe gave to the world by creating, contemplating and living. Nowhere else in recent times did the inner certainty, harmonious unity and sense of reality in relation to the world seem to me to be so evident as in Goethe. From this thought must have sprung the recognition of the fact that the way in which Goethe conducted himself in cognition is also that which emerges from the essence of man and the world. - On the other hand, my thoughts lived in the philosophical views on the nature of knowledge that existed at that time. In these views, cognition threatened to spin itself into man's own essence. Otto Liebmann, the witty philosopher, had said that man's consciousness could not transcend itself. It must remain within itself. It cannot know what lies beyond the world it creates within itself as true reality. Otto Liebmann developed this idea for the most diverse areas of human experience in his brilliant writings. Johannes Volkelt had written his thought-provoking books on "Kant's Theory of Knowledge" and "Experience and Thought". He saw in the world that is given to man only a connection of ideas that are formed in man's relationship to a world that is unknown in itself. He admitted that there is a necessity in the experience of thinking when it intervenes in the imaginary world. One feels, as it were, a kind of piercing through the world of imagination into reality when thinking becomes active. But what was gained by this? One could thereby feel entitled to make judgments in thinking that say something about the real world; but with such judgments one stands completely inside the human being; nothing of the essence of the world penetrates into it.

[ 2 ] Eduard von Hartmann, whose philosophy was very valuable to me without me being able to recognize its foundations and results, stood in epistemological questions entirely on the standpoint that Volkelt then presented in detail.

[ 3 ] Everywhere there was the admission that man reaches certain limits with his cognition, beyond which he cannot penetrate into the realm of true reality.

[ 4 ] All of this was contrasted with the fact, which I experienced inwardly and recognized in my experience, that man lives with his thinking, if he deepens it sufficiently, in the reality of the world as a spiritual one. I believed that I possessed this knowledge as one that can stand in consciousness with the same inner clarity as that which is revealed in mathematical knowledge.

[ 5 ] Before this realization, the opinion cannot exist that there are such limits to knowledge as the marked line of thought believed it had to establish.

[ 6 ] In all of this, I was influenced by an inclination towards the then flourishing theory of development. In Haeckel it had assumed forms in which the independent existence and activity of the spiritual could not be taken into account. The later, the perfect was supposed to have emerged from the earlier, the undeveloped in the course of time. This made sense to me in relation to the external sensory reality. But I knew the spirituality that was independent of the sensory, fixed in itself and autonomous, too well to agree with the external sensory world of appearances. But the bridge had to be built from this world to that of the spirit. In the sensually conceived course of time, the human spiritual seems to develop from the preceding unspiritual.

[ 7 ] But the sensuous, correctly recognized, shows everywhere that it is the revelation of the spiritual. In the face of this correct recognition of the sensible, it was clear to me that "limits of knowledge", as they were established at that time, can only be admitted by those who come across this sensible and treat it in the same way as someone would treat a fully printed page if he focused his view only on the letter forms and said, without any idea of reading, that one could not know what was behind these forms.

[ 8 ] So my gaze was directed from sensory observation to the spiritual, which was fixed in my inner cognitive experience. I was not looking for unspiritual atomic worlds behind the sensory phenomena, but for the spiritual, which apparently reveals itself within the human being, but which in reality belongs to the sensory things and sensory processes themselves. The behavior of the cognizing human being creates the appearance that the thoughts of things are in the human being, while in reality they are in the things. Man needs to separate them from the things in an illusory experience; in the true experience of cognition he returns them to the things.

[ 9 ] The development of the world is then to be understood in such a way that the preceding unspiritual, from which the spirituality of man later unfolds, has a spiritual beside and outside itself. The later spiritualized sensuality, in which the human being appears, then arises through the fact that the spiritual ancestor of the human being unites with the imperfect unspiritual forms and, transforming these, then appears in a sensual form.

[ 10 ] These ideas led me beyond the epistemologists of the time, whose acumen and sense of scientific responsibility I fully recognized. They led me to Goethe.

[ 11 ] I have to think back today to my inner struggle at the time. I didn't make it easy for myself to get over the thought processes of the philosophies of the time. But my shining star was always the recognition, brought about entirely by myself, of the fact that man can see himself inwardly as a spirit independent of the body, standing in a purely spiritual world.

[ 12 ] Before my work on Goethe's scientific writings and before this epistemology, I wrote a small essay on atomism that was never printed. It was along the lines indicated. I must remember how pleased I was when Friedrich Theodor Vischer, to whom I sent the essay, wrote me a few words of approval.

[ 13 ] Now, however, my studies of Goethe made it clear to me how my thoughts lead to a view of the nature of knowledge that emerges everywhere in Goethe's work and his position in the world. I found that my points of view gave me a theory of knowledge which is that of Goethe's world view.

[ 14 ] In the eighties of the last century, Karl Julius Schröer, my teacher and fatherly friend, to whom I owe much, recommended me to write the introductions to Goethe's scientific writings for Kürschner's "National-Literatur" and to take care of the publication of these writings. In this work I followed Goethe's life of knowledge in all the fields in which he was active. It became increasingly clear to me in detail that my own views placed me in an epistemology of Goethe's world view. And so I wrote this epistemology during the aforementioned work.

[ 15 ] As I present it to myself again today, it also appears to me as the epistemological foundation and justification of everything I later said and published. It speaks of an essence of cognition that clears the way from the sensory world into a spiritual one.

[ 16 ] It might seem strange that this youthful writing, which is almost forty years old, appears again today unchanged, only expanded by annotations. In the way it is presented, it bears the hallmarks of a way of thinking that settled into the philosophy of the time forty years ago. If I were writing it today, I would say many things differently. But I would not be able to state anything else as the essence of knowledge. But what I would write today would not be able to carry so faithfully the germs of the spiritual world view I represent. One can only write in such a germinal way at the beginning of a life of knowledge. That is perhaps why this youthful writing may reappear in its unchanged form. Whatever theories of knowledge existed at the time of its writing have found a continuation in later theories of knowledge. I have said what I have to say about this in my book "The Riddles of Philosophy". This is being published at the same time by the same publisher in a new edition. - What I outlined some time ago as the epistemology of Goethe's world view in this little book seems to me to be as necessary to say today as it was forty years ago.

Goetheanum at Dornach near Basel
November 1923, Rudolf Steiner