The Rudolf Steiner Archive

8. Thinking as a higher experience in experience

[ 1 ] We find within the incoherent chaos of experience, and indeed initially also as a fact of experience, an element that leads us beyond incoherence. It is thinking. Thinking already occupies an exceptional position as a fact of experience within experience.

[ 2 ] In the rest of the world of experience, if I stop at what is immediately available to my senses, I cannot get beyond the details. Suppose: I have a liquid in front of me that I bring to the boil. At first it is still, then I see bubbles of vapor rising, it starts to move, and finally it turns into vapor. These are the individual successive perceptions. I may turn the matter round and round as I like: if I stop at what the senses give me, I find no connection between the facts; this is not the case with thinking. If, for example, I grasp the thought of the cause, it leads me through its own content to that of the effect. I need only hold the thoughts in the form in which they appear in direct experience, and they already appear as lawful determinations.

[ 3 ] What in other experience must first be obtained elsewhere, if it can be applied to it at all, the lawful connection, is already present in thought in its very first appearance. In other experience, not the whole thing is already formed in that which appears as an appearance before my consciousness; in thinking, the whole thing is absorbed without residue in that which is given to me. There I must first penetrate the shell in order to reach the core; here shell and core are an undivided unity. It is only a general human bias when thinking first appears to us to be completely analogous to the rest of experience. We only need to overcome this our bias. With the rest of experience, we have to solve a difficulty that lies in the matter.

[ 4 ] In thinking, that which we seek in the rest of experience has itself become direct experience.

[ 5 ] This is the solution to a difficulty that is unlikely to be solved in any other way. Stopping at experience is a justified scientific demand. No less so, however, is the search for the inner laws of experience. This inner law must therefore appear as such at some point in the experience. Experience is thus deepened with the help of itself. Our epistemology raises the demand of experience in its highest form; it rejects every attempt to introduce something from outside into experience. It finds the determinations of thought within experience itself. The way in which thinking enters into appearance is the same as in the rest of the world of experience.

[ 6 ] The principle of experience is usually misjudged in its scope and actual meaning. In its harshest form, it is the demand to leave the objects of reality in the first form of their appearance and to make them objects of science only in this way. This is a purely methodological principle. It says nothing at all about the content of what is experienced. If one wanted to claim that only the perceptions of the senses can be the object of science, as materialism does, then one should not rely on this principle. Whether the content is sensual or ideal, this principle makes no judgment about it. If, however, it is to be applicable in a particular case in the harshest form mentioned, then it does, however, make a precondition. For it requires that the objects, as they are experienced, already have a form that satisfies scientific endeavor. As we have seen, this is not the case with the experience of the external senses. It only takes place in thinking.

[ 7 ] Only in thinking can the principle of experience be applied in its most extreme sense.

[ 8 ] This does not exclude the possibility of extending the principle to the rest of the world. It has other forms than its most extreme. If, for the sake of scientific explanation, we cannot leave an object as it is directly perceived, then this explanation can at least take place in such a way that the means it requires are drawn from other areas of the world of experience. We have not transcended the realm of "experience in general" after all.

[ 9 ] A science of knowledge founded in the sense of Goethe's world view places the main emphasis on remaining absolutely faithful to the principle of experience. No one recognized the exclusive validity of this principle as Goethe did. He advocated the principle quite as strictly as we have demanded above. All higher views of nature were allowed to appear to him as nothing but experience. They were to be "higher nature within nature".^{8See Goethes Dichtung und Wahrheit, [3. Teil, 11. Buch] (XXII 24 f.).}

[ 10 ] In the essay "Nature" he says that we are incapable of getting out of nature. Therefore, if we want to enlighten ourselves about it in this sense, we must find the means to do so within it.

[ 11 ] How could a science of cognition be founded on the principle of experience if we did not find at some point in experience itself the basic element of all science, the ideal lawfulness? As we have seen, we need only take up this element; we need only immerse ourselves in it. For it is found in experience.

[ 12 ] Does thinking now really approach us in such a way, does it become so conscious of our individuality, that we are fully justified in claiming the characteristics emphasized above for it? Anyone who directs his attention to this point will find that there is an essential difference between the way in which an external appearance of sensory reality, or even another process of our spiritual life, becomes conscious, and the way in which we become aware of our own thinking. In the first case we are certainly aware that we are confronting a finished thing; finished, namely, in so far as it has become an appearance without our having exercised a determining influence on this becoming. It is different with thinking. Only for the first moment does it appear the same as the rest of experience. When we conceive any thought, we know, for all the immediacy with which it enters our consciousness, that we are intimately connected with its genesis. If I have any idea which has come to me quite suddenly, and whose occurrence is therefore in some respects quite like that of an external event which eyes and ears must first convey to me, I know nevertheless that the field in which this thought appears is my consciousness; I know that my activity must first be called upon in order to make the idea a fact. With every external object I am certain that at first it only turns its outer side towards my senses; with thought I know exactly that what it turns towards me is at the same time its everything, that it enters my consciousness as a wholeness complete in itself. The external driving forces that we must always presuppose in the case of a sensory object are not present in the case of thought. It is to them that we must attribute the fact that the sensory phenomenon confronts us as something finished; we must attribute the becoming of it to them. In the thought I am aware that this becoming is not possible without my activity. I must work through the thought, must recreate its content, must inwardly live through it down to its smallest parts if it is to have any meaning for me at all.

[ 13 ] We have now gained the following truths. At the first stage of looking at the world, the whole of reality confronts us as an incoherent aggregate; thinking is enclosed within this chaos. If we wander through this multiplicity, we find a link in it which already in this first form of appearance has that character which the others are only to acquire. This link is thinking. What is to be overcome in the rest of experience, the form of immediate appearance, is precisely what is to be retained in thinking. We find this factor of reality, which is to be left in its original form, in our consciousness and are connected with it in such a way that the activity of our mind is at the same time the appearance of this factor. It is one and the same thing seen from two sides. This thing is the thought content of the world. On the one hand it appears as the activity of our consciousness, on the other as the immediate appearance of a perfect lawfulness in itself, an ideal content determined in itself. We will soon see which side is more important.

[ 14 ] Therefore, because we stand within the content of thought, penetrating it in all its components, we are able to truly recognize its own nature. The way in which it approaches us is a guarantee that the qualities we have previously attributed to it really do belong to it. It can therefore certainly serve as a starting point for any further way of looking at the world. We can take its essential character from itself; if we want to gain that of the other things, we must begin our investigations from it. Let us be clearer straight away. Since we only experience a real lawfulness, an ideal definiteness, in thinking, the lawfulness of the rest of the world, which we do not experience in this world itself, must also already lie enclosed in thinking. In other words: appearance for the senses and thinking are opposed to each other in experience. The latter, however, gives us no information about its own essence; the latter gives us the same information about itself and about the essence of that appearance for the senses.