The Rudolf Steiner Archive

7. appeal to the experience of each individual reader

[ 1 ] We want to avoid the mistake of attributing a property from the outset to the immediately given, the first form of the appearance of the external and internal world, and thus to bring our explanations to bear on the basis of a presupposition. Indeed, we actually define experience as that in which our thinking has no part at all. There can therefore be no question of an intellectual error at the beginning of our explanations.

[ 2 ] This is precisely the fundamental error of many scientific endeavors, especially of the present day, that they believe they are reproducing pure experience, while they are only reading out the concepts that they themselves put into it. Now it may be objected to us that we too have attached a number of attributes to pure experience. We have described it as an infinite multiplicity, as an aggregate of incoherent details, and so on. Are these not also mental determinations? Certainly not in the sense in which we used them. We have only used these terms to direct the reader's gaze to thought-free reality. We do not want to attach these concepts to experience; we only use them to draw attention to that form of reality which is devoid of any concept.

[ 3 ] All scientific investigations must be carried out by means of language, and language can only express concepts. But it is something essentially different whether one needs certain words to directly ascribe this or that property to a thing, or whether one only uses them to direct the reader's or listener's gaze to an object. If we could make use of a comparison, we would say, for example: It is another thing for A to say to B: "Look at that man in the circle of his family and you will gain a substantially different judgment of him than if you only get to know him in his official capacity"; it is another thing for him to say: "That man is an excellent family man." In the first case, the B's attention is directed in a certain sense; he is being instructed to judge a personality under certain circumstances. In the second case, a certain quality is simply attributed to this personality, i.e. an assertion is made. As here the first case relates to the second, so shall our beginning in this writing relate to that of similar phenomena in literature. If anywhere, through the necessary stylization or for the sake of the possibility of expression, the matter is apparently different, we here expressly remark that our remarks have only the meaning here set forth and are far removed from the claim to have put forward any assertion valid of the things themselves.

[ 4 ] If we now wanted to have a name for the first form in which we observe reality, we believe that we find it most appropriate to the matter in the expression: appearance for the senses. ^{a5In these remarks already lies the allusion to the perception of the spiritual, of which my later writings speak, in the sense of what has been said in note a3 in Chapter 4.} We understand by sense not merely the external senses, the mediators of the external world, but in general all physical and mental organs which serve the perception of immediate facts. It is a common term in psychology: inner sense for the perceptive faculty of inner experiences.

[ 5 ] But with the word appearance we simply want to designate a perceptible thing or a perceptible process, insofar as they occur in space or in time.

[ 6] We must now raise another question that should lead us to the second factor that we have to consider for the sake of cognitive science, to thought.

[ 7 ] Is the way in which experience has become known to us so far to be regarded as something founded in the essence of the thing? Is it a property of reality?

[ 8 ] A great deal depends on the answer to this question. For if this kind is an essential property of experiential things, something that is inherent in them in the truest sense of the word, then it is impossible to see how one could ever go beyond this level of cognition. One would simply have to resort to recording everything we perceive in incoherent notes, and such a collection of notes would be our science. For what would be the point of all research into the coherence of things if their true quality were their complete isolation in the form of experience?

[ 9 ] It would be quite different if ^{a6this explanation does not contradict the view of the spiritual, but indicates that for sense-perception, to arrive at its essence is not, as it were, to arrive at its essence by penetrating it and advancing to a being behind it, but by going back to the mental, which reveals itself in man.} if in this form of reality we were not dealing with its essence, but only with its quite insignificant outside, if we had only a shell of the true essence of the world before us, which hides the latter from us and invites us to search further for it. We would then have to strive to penetrate this shell. We would have to start from this first form of the world in order to take possession of its true (essential) qualities. We would have to overcome the appearance to the senses in order to develop a higher form of appearance from it. - The answer to this question is given in the following investigations.