The Rudolf Steiner Archive

13. Cognition

[ 1 ] Reality has divided itself into two areas: experience and thought. Experience comes into consideration in two respects. Firstly, in so far as the whole of reality, apart from thought, has a form of appearance which must appear in the form of experience. Secondly, insofar as it is in the nature of our mind, whose essence consists in observation (i.e. in an outwardly directed activity), that the objects to be observed enter its field of vision, i.e. are again given to it in the form of experience. It is now possible that this form of the given does not include the essence of the thing in itself, in which case the thing itself demands that it first appears in perception (experience) in order to later reveal its essence to an activity of our mind that goes beyond perception. Another possibility is that the essence already lies in the immediately given and that it is only due to the second circumstance, that everything must appear to our mind as experience, if we do not immediately become aware of this essence. The latter is the case with thinking, the former with the rest of reality. With thinking it is only necessary that we overcome our subjective bias in order to grasp it at its core. What in the case of the rest of reality lies objectively in objective perception, that the immediate form of occurrence must be overcome in order to explain it, lies in thinking only in a peculiarity of our mind. There it is the thing itself that gives itself the form of experience, here it is the organization of our mind. There we do not yet have the whole thing when we grasp experience, here we have it.

[ 2 ] This is the basis of the dualism that science, the thinking cognition, has to overcome. Man finds himself confronted with two worlds whose connection he has to establish. One is experience, of which he knows that it contains only half of reality; the other is thinking, which is complete in itself, into which the external reality of experience must flow if a satisfactory world view is to result. If the world were inhabited only by sensory beings, its essence (its ideal content) would always remain hidden; the laws would indeed govern the world processes, but they would not appear. If the latter is to be the case, then between the form of appearance and the law there must be a being which is given both organs through which it perceives that sensory form of reality which is dependent on the laws, and the ability to perceive the law itself. From one side, such a being must be approached by the sensory world, from the other by its ideal essence, and it must combine these two factors of reality in its own activity.

[ 3 ] Here we can see quite clearly that our mind is not to be regarded as a container of the world of ideas that contains thoughts within itself, but as an organ that perceives them.

[ 4 ] It is just as much an organ of perception as the eye and ear. Thought relates to our mind no differently than light to the eye, sound to the ear. It certainly occurs to no one to regard color as something that impresses itself on the eye as something permanent, that sticks to it, as it were. In the mind this view is even the predominant one. A thought is supposed to form in the consciousness of every thing, which then remains in it in order to be brought out of it as required. A theory of its own has been founded on this, as if the thoughts of which we are not conscious in the moment were indeed stored in our mind; only they lie below the threshold of consciousness.

[ 5 ] These adventurous views immediately dissolve into nothing when one considers that the world of ideas is a world determined by itself. What has this self-determined content to do with the multiplicity of consciousnesses? Surely one will not assume that it is determined in indeterminate multiplicity in such a way that one partial content is always independent of the other! The matter is quite clear. The content of thought is such that only one spiritual organ is necessary for its appearance, but that the number of beings endowed with this organ is indifferent. There can therefore be an indeterminate number of spiritually endowed individuals standing opposite the one thought content. The spirit thus perceives the thought content of the world like an organ of perception. There is only one thought content of the world. Our consciousness is not the ability to generate and store thoughts, as is so often believed, but to perceive thoughts (ideas). Goethe expressed this so excellently with the words: "The idea is eternal and unique; that we also need the plural is not well done. Everything that we become aware of and can speak of are only manifestations of the idea; we express concepts, and in this respect the idea itself is a concept."

[ 6 ] As a citizen of two worlds, the world of the senses and the world of thought, the one approaching him from below, the other shining from above, man takes possession of science, through which he unites the two into an undivided unity. From one side the outer form beckons us, from the other the inner being; we must unite the two. Our theory of knowledge has thus risen above the standpoint that similar investigations usually adopt and which does not go beyond formalities. We say: "Cognition is the working out of experience", without specifying what is worked into the latter; we say: "In cognition perception flows into thought, or thought, by virtue of an inner compulsion, penetrates from experience to the being behind it." But these are mere formalities. A cognitive science that wants to grasp cognition in its world-significant role must: firstly, state the ideal purpose of cognition. It consists in giving the unfinished experience its conclusion by revealing its core. It must, secondly, determine what this core is in terms of content. It is thought, idea. Finally, thirdly, it must show how this unveiling occurs. Our chapter "Thinking and Perception" provides information on this. Our theory of cognition leads to the positive result that thinking is the essence of the world and that individual human thinking is the individual manifestation of this essence. A merely formal epistemology cannot do this; it remains eternally unfruitful. It has no view of the relationship that what science gains has to the world being and the world mechanism.

[ 7 ] And yet this relationship must arise precisely in epistemology. This science must show us where our cognition leads us, where every other science leads us.

[ 8 ] In no other way than through epistemology does one arrive at the view that thinking is the core of the world. For it shows us the connection between thought and the rest of reality. But from what should we become aware of the relation of thought to experience but from science, which sets itself the direct aim of investigating this relation? And further, how should we know of a spiritual or sensuous being that it is the primal power of the world if we did not investigate its relation to reality? If it is a question of finding the essence of a thing, then this finding always consists in going back to the idea content of the world. The area of this content must not be exceeded if one wants to remain within the clear definitions, if one does not want to grope around in the indeterminate. Thinking is a totality in itself, which is sufficient unto itself, which may not transcend itself without coming to nothing. In other words: in order to explain something, it must not resort to things that it does not find in itself. A thing that could not be encompassed by thinking would be an absurdity. Everything ultimately merges into thinking, everything finds its place within it.

[ 9 ] In relation to our individual consciousness, this means that we must remain strictly within what is given to us in our consciousness in order to make scientific observations; we cannot go beyond this. If we now realize that we cannot go beyond our consciousness without reaching the essenceless, but not at the same time that the essence of things is to be found within our consciousness in the perception of ideas, then those errors arise which speak of a limit to our knowledge. If we cannot go beyond consciousness and the essence of reality is not within it, then we cannot penetrate to the essence at all. Our thinking is bound to this world and knows nothing of the hereafter.

[ 10 ] In our view, this opinion is nothing but thinking that misunderstands itself. A limit to knowledge would only be possible if external experience itself forced us to investigate its nature, if it determined the questions to be asked with regard to it. But this is not the case. Thinking needs to counter the experience it becomes aware of with its essence. Thinking can only have the very definite tendency to see its own lawfulness in the rest of the world, but not anything of which it itself has not the slightest knowledge.

[ 11 ] Another error must be corrected here. It is as if thought were not sufficient to constitute the world, as if something (power, will, etc.) had to be added to the content of thought in order to make the world possible.

[ 12 ] On closer consideration, however, one immediately sees that all such factors arise as nothing more than abstractions from the world of perception, which themselves await explanation by thought. Every component of the world being other than thinking immediately necessitated a different kind of conception, of cognition, than the mental one. We would have to reach that other component other than through thinking. For after all, thinking only provides thoughts. But the very fact that we want to explain the part that this second component has in the workings of the world, and in doing so make use of concepts, contradicts ourselves. Moreover, apart from sense perception and thinking, we have no third element. And we cannot accept any part of the latter as the core of the world, because all its members show on closer inspection that they do not contain its essence as such. The latter can therefore only be sought in thinking.