The Rudolf Steiner Archive

12. Understanding and Reason

[ 1 ] Our thinking has a twofold task to accomplish: firstly, to create concepts with sharply defined contours; secondly, to combine the individual concepts thus created into a unified whole. In the first case it is a matter of differentiating activity, in the second of unifying activity. These two intellectual tendencies are by no means cultivated in the same way in the sciences. Acumen, which goes down to the smallest details in its distinctions, is given to a considerably larger number of people than the summarizing power of thought, which penetrates into the depths of beings.

[ 2 ] For a long time, the task of science was sought only in the precise differentiation of things. We need only think of the state in which Goethe found natural history. Through Linné, it had become its ideal to search for the exact differences between individual plants in order to be able to use the slightest characteristics to establish new species and subspecies. Two animal or plant species that differed only in the most insignificant ways were immediately assigned to different species. If an unexpected deviation from the arbitrarily established species character was found in any living being that had previously been assigned to any species, no thought was given to how such a deviation could be explained by this character itself, but a new species was simply established.

[ 3 ] This distinction is a matter for the intellect. It only has to separate and hold the concepts in separation. It is a necessary preliminary stage of all higher science. Above all, we need clearly defined, clearly delineated concepts before we can search for harmony between them. But we must not stop at separation. For the mind, things are separate which it is an essential need of mankind to see in a harmonious unity. For the mind, cause and effect, mechanism and organism, freedom and necessity, idea and reality, spirit and nature, and so on, are separate. All these distinctions are brought about by the mind. They have to be brought about because otherwise the world would appear to us as a blurred, dark chaos that would only form a unity because it would be completely indeterminate for us.

[ 4 ] The mind itself is not able to get beyond this separation. It holds on to the separated limbs.

[ 5 ] This getting beyond is a matter for reason. It has to allow the concepts created by reason to merge into one another. It has to show that what the intellect holds in strict separation is actually an inner unity. The separation is something artificially brought about, a necessary point of passage for our cognition, not its conclusion. He who grasps reality merely intellectually distances himself from it. He puts in its place, since it is in truth a unity, an artificial multiplicity, a multiplicity that has nothing to do with the being of reality.

[ 6 ] This is the source of the conflict between rational science and the human heart. Many people whose thinking is not so developed that they are able to arrive at a unified view of the world, which they grasp with complete conceptual clarity, are, however, quite capable of penetrating the inner harmony of the world as a whole with their feelings. The heart gives them what reason offers the scientifically educated.

[ 7 ] When the intellectual view of the world approaches such people, they reject the infinite multiplicity with contempt and cling to the unity, which they do not recognize but feel more or less vividly. They see very well that the mind distances itself from nature, that it loses sight of the spiritual bond that connects the parts of reality.

[ 8 ] Reason leads back to reality. The unity of all being, which was previously felt or even only darkly perceived, is completely seen through by reason. The view of understanding must be deepened by the view of reason. If the first is regarded as a necessary point of passage instead of an end in itself, then it does not provide reality, but a distorted image of it.

[ 9 ] It is sometimes difficult to connect the thoughts created by reason. The history of science provides us with ample evidence of this. We often see the human spirit struggling to bridge differences created by the mind.

[ 10 ] In the rational view of the world, man merges into the latter in undivided unity.

[ 11 ] Kant has already pointed out the difference between understanding and reason. He describes reason as the ability to perceive ideas, whereas the understanding is limited to merely seeing the world in its separateness and isolation.

[ 12 ] Reason is indeed the faculty of perceiving ideas. Here we must note the difference between concept and idea, which we have so far ignored. For our purposes so far, it was only important to find those qualities of thought that are represented in the concept and idea. Concept is the individual thought as it is held by the intellect. If I bring a majority of such individual thoughts into a living flow, so that they merge into one another, combine, then thought-like formations arise which are only there for reason, which the intellect cannot reach. For reason, the creatures of the intellect give up their separate existences and continue to live only as part of a totality. These entities created by reason are called ideas.

[ 13 ] Kant already stated that the idea reduces a multiplicity of concepts of understanding to a unity. However, he portrayed the entities that appear through reason as mere illusions, as illusions that the human mind eternally imagines, because it eternally strives for a unity of experience that is not given to it anywhere. According to Kant, the unities that are created in the ideas are not based on objective relationships, they do not flow from the thing itself, but are merely subjective norms according to which we bring order into our knowledge. Kant therefore does not describe ideas as constitutive principles that should be decisive for the matter, but as regulative principles that only have meaning and significance for the systematics of our knowledge.

[ 14 ] But if we look at the way in which ideas come about, this view immediately proves to be erroneous. It is true that subjective reason ^{10conceived as a human mental faculty} has the need for unity. But this need is without any content, an empty striving for unity. If it is confronted by something that is absolutely devoid of any unified nature, it cannot generate this unity out of itself. If, on the other hand, it is confronted by a multiplicity that allows it to be traced back to an inner harmony, then it accomplishes the same thing. Such a multiplicity is the conceptual world created by the mind.

[ 15 ] Reason does not presuppose a certain unity, but rather the empty form of unity; it is the ability to draw harmony into the light of day when it lies in the object itself. The concepts are composed into ideas in reason itself. Reason brings to light the higher unity of the concepts of the intellect, which the intellect has in its formations but is unable to see. The fact that this is overlooked is the reason for many misunderstandings about the application of reason in the sciences.

[ 16 ] Every science, even in its beginnings, and indeed everyday thinking, requires reason to a small degree. If in the judgment: Every body is heavy, we combine the concept of the subject with the concept of the predicate, and this is already a union of two concepts, i.e. the simplest activity of reason.

[ 17 ] The unity which reason makes its object is certain before all thinking, before all use of reason; only it is hidden, is present only as a possibility, not as a factual appearance. Then the human spirit brings about the separation in order to see through reality completely by rationally uniting the separated parts.

[ 18 ] Those who do not presuppose this must either regard all thought connection as an arbitrary act of the subjective mind, or they must assume that the unity stands behind the world we experience and forces us in a way unknown to us to trace the multiplicity back to a unity. Then we combine thoughts without insight into the true reasons for the connection we establish; then the truth is not recognized by us, but imposed on us from outside. We would call all science that proceeds from this presupposition dogmatic. We will come back to this later.

[ 19 ] Any such scientific view will encounter difficulties if it is to give reasons why we make this or that thought connection. It has to look for subjective reasons for combining objects whose objective connection remains hidden from us. Why do I make a judgment if the thing that requires the subject and predicate concepts to belong together has nothing to do with the case of the same?

[ 20 ] Kant made this question the starting point of his critical work. At the beginning of his "Critique of Pure Reason" we find the question: How are synthetic judgments a priori possible? that is, how is it possible for me to combine two concepts (subject, predicate) if the content of one is not already contained in the other and if the judgment is not a mere judgment of experience, i.e. the establishment of a single fact? Kant thinks that such judgments are only possible if experience can only exist on the condition of its validity. The possibility of experience is therefore decisive for us to make such a judgment. If I can say to myself: experience is only possible if this or that synthetic judgment is a priori true, then it is valid. But this cannot be applied to the ideas themselves. According to Kant, they do not even have this degree of objectivity.

[ 21 ] Kant finds that the propositions of mathematics and pure natural science are such valid synthetic propositions a priori. He takes, for example, the proposition \(7 + 5 = 12\). In \(7\) and \(5\) the sum \(12\) is by no means contained, Kant concludes. I must go beyond \(7\) and \(5\) and appeal to my intuition, then I find the concept \(12\). My perception makes it necessary that \(7 + 5 = 12\) is presented. However, my objects of experience must approach me through the medium of my perception, i.e. they must obey its laws. If experience is to be possible, such propositions must be correct.

[ 22 ] This whole artificial structure of Kant's thought does not stand up to objective consideration. It is impossible that I have no point of reference at all in the subject-concept which leads me to the predicate-concept. For both concepts are derived from my intellect, and that from a thing that is in itself unified. Make no mistake here. The mathematical unit on which the number is based is not the first thing. The first is the magnitude, which is such and such a repetition of the unit. I must presuppose a magnitude when I speak of a unit. The unity is an entity of our understanding, which it separates from a totality, just as it separates the effect from the cause, the substance from its characteristics, etc. By thinking \(7 + 5\), I am actually holding \(12\) mathematical units in my mind, but not all at once, but in two parts. If I think the entirety of the mathematical units at once, it is quite the same thing. And I express this identity in the judgment \(7 + 5 = 12\). It is the same with the geometrical example Kant gives. A bounded straight line with the end points \(A\) and \(B\) is an inseparable unit. My mind can form two concepts of it. First, it can assume the straight line as a direction and then as a path between the two points \(A\) and \(B\). From this flows the judgment: The straight line is the shortest path between two points.

[ 23 ] All judgment, insofar as the links that enter into the judgment are concepts, is nothing more than a reunification of what the mind has separated. The connection is immediately apparent when one considers the content of the concepts of understanding.