The Rudolf Steiner Archive

4. Establishing the concept of experience

[ 1 ] There are thus two opposing areas: our thinking and the objects with which it is concerned. The latter, insofar as they are accessible to our observation, are referred to as the content of experience. Whether there are objects of thought apart from our field of observation, and what their nature is, we will leave entirely undecided for the time being. Our next task will be to sharply delimit each of the two designated areas, experience and thought. We must first have experience before us in a definite outline and then investigate the nature of thought. We approach the first task.

[ 2 ] What is experience? Everyone is aware that his thinking is fueled by conflict with reality. Objects in space and time approach us; we perceive a highly structured, extremely diverse external world and experience a more or less richly developed inner world. The first form in which all this confronts us is ready before us. We have no part in its creation. The reality initially presents itself to our sensory and spiritual perception as if emerging from an unknown beyond. At first, we can only let our gaze wander over the diversity that confronts us.

[ 3 ] This first activity of ours is the sensory perception of reality. We must hold on to what presents itself to it. For this is the only thing we can call pure experience.^{a3You can see from the whole attitude of this epistemology that what matters in its arguments is to find an answer to the question: What is knowledge? In order to achieve this goal, the world of sensory perception on the one hand and mental penetration on the other are considered. And it is shown that the true reality of the senses is revealed in the interpenetration of the two. Thus the question: "What is cognition?" is answered in principle. This answer becomes no other by extending the question to the contemplation of the spiritual. Therefore, what is said in this writing about the nature of cognition also applies to the cognition of the spiritual worlds, to which my later writings refer. The sense world in its appearance is not a reality for human perception. It has its reality in connection with that which is revealed in man's thoughts about it. Thought belongs to the reality of what is sensually perceived, except that what is thought in the senses does not manifest itself outside the senses, but inside the human being. But thought and sense perception are one being. By appearing in the world through sensory perception, the human being separates thought from reality; however, this only appears in a different place: within the soul. The separation of perception and thought has no meaning at all for the objective world; it only occurs because man places himself in the midst of existence. For him this creates the appearance as if thought and sense perception were a duality. It is no different for spiritual perception. If this occurs through the processes of the soul, which I described in my later writing "How does one attain knowledge of the higher worlds?", then it again forms the one side of - spiritual - being; and the corresponding thoughts of the spiritual form the other side. A difference arises only in so far as sense perception is, as it were, completed upwards through thought towards the beginning of the spiritual in reality, while spiritual perception is experienced from this beginning downwards in its true essence. The fact that the experience of sense perception occurs through the senses formed by nature and that of the perception of the spiritual through the spiritual organs of perception, which are only formed in a soul-like manner, does not make a principal difference.}

In truth, in my later publications there is no abandonment of the idea of cognition that I have developed in this writing, but only the application of this idea to spiritual experience.

[ 4 ] We immediately feel the need to penetrate the infinite variety of forms, forces, colors, sounds, etc. that appear before us with the organizing mind. We endeavor to elucidate the interdependence of all the details that confront us. If an animal appears to us in a certain region, we ask about the influence of the latter on the life of the animal; if we see a stone rolling, we look for other events with which it is connected. But what comes about in this way is no longer pure experience. It already has a dual origin: experience and thought.

[ 5 ] Pure experience is the form of reality in which it appears to us when we confront it with the complete externalization of our self.

[ 6 ] The words that Goethe used in the essay "Nature" ^{a4in the writings of the "Goethe-Gesellschaft" are applicable to this form of reality, that this essay originated in such a way that Tobler, who was in contact with Goethe in Weimar at the time of its composition, wrote down ideas that lived in Goethe as recognized by him after conversations with him. This transcript was then published in the "Tiefurter Journal", which was only distributed in manuscript form at the time. In Goethe's writings we now find an essay written much later about the earlier publication. Goethe expressly states that he does not remember whether the essay was his own, but that it contains ideas that were his own at the time of its publication. In my essay in the Schriften der "Goethe-Gesellschaft" I have tried to prove that these ideas, in their further development, flowed into Goethe's entire view of nature. Subsequent remarks have now been published which claim for Tobler the full right of authorship of the essay "Die Natur in Anspruch. I do not wish to get involved in the dispute over this question. Even if full originality is claimed for Tobler, it still remains the case that these ideas were alive in Goethe at the beginning of the eighties of the eighteenth century, and in such a way that they prove - even according to his own admission - to be the beginning of his comprehensive view of nature. Personally, I have no reason to depart from my view in this respect, that the ideas originated in Goethe. But even if they were not, they experienced an existence in his mind that has become immeasurably fruitful. For the observer of Goethe's world view, they are not significant in themselves, but in relation to what they have become.} has said: "We are surrounded and embraced by it. Uninvited and unwarned, it takes us into the cycle of its dance."

[ 7 ] With the objects of the external senses, this is so obvious that hardly anyone will deny it. A body first confronts us as a multiplicity of forms, colors, impressions of warmth and light, which suddenly appear before us as if emerging from a source unknown to us.

[ 8 ] The psychological conviction that the sensory world as it is presented to us is nothing in itself, but already a product of the interaction of an unknown molecular external world and our organism, does not contradict our assertion. Even if it were really true that color, warmth, etc. are nothing more than the way in which our organism is affected by the external world, the process that transforms the events of the external world into color, warmth, etc. lies entirely beyond consciousness. Our organism may play whatever role in this process: the finished form of reality (experience) imposed on our thinking is not the molecular event, but those colors, sounds, etc.

[ 9 ] The matter with our inner life is not so clear. However, closer consideration will dispel any doubt that our inner states also enter the horizon of our consciousness in the same form as the things and facts of the outside world. A feeling imposes itself on me in the same way as an impression of light. The fact that I relate it more closely to my own personality is irrelevant in this respect. We must go still further. 'Thinking itself also appears to us at first as a matter of experience. Even as we approach our thinking inquiringly, we confront it, we imagine its first form as coming from something unknown to us.

[ 10 ] This cannot be otherwise. Our thinking, especially if we consider its form as an individual activity within our consciousness, is observation, that is, it directs its gaze outwards, towards something opposite. In doing so, it initially stops as an activity. It would gaze into emptiness, into nothingness, if it were not confronted by something.

[ 11 ] Everything that is to become the object of our knowledge must submit to this form of confrontation. We are incapable of rising above this form. If we are to gain from thinking a means of penetrating deeper into the world, then it must first become experience itself. We must seek out thinking as such within the facts of experience itself.

[ 12 ] Only in this way will our worldview not lack inner unity. It would do so immediately if we wanted to introduce a foreign element into it. We confront mere pure experience and seek within it the element that sheds light on itself and on the rest of reality.