The Rudolf Steiner Archive

17. Introduction: Mind and Nature

[ 1 ] We have exhausted the field of knowledge of nature. Organic science is the highest form of natural science. What is still above it are the humanities. These require an essentially different attitude of the human spirit to the object than the natural sciences. In the latter, the spirit has a universal role to play. It had the task, so to speak, of bringing the world process itself to a conclusion. What existed without the spirit was only half of reality, was unfinished, piecemeal in every respect. The spirit has to call to manifestation the innermost driving forces of reality, which would also be valid without its subjective interference. If man were a mere sensory being, without spiritual perception, then inorganic nature would be no less dependent on natural laws, but they would never come into existence as such. There would indeed be beings who perceive the effectual (the sense world), but not the effectual (the inner lawfulness). It is really the real, and indeed the truest form of nature that appears in the human spirit, whereas for a mere sensory being there is only its outer side. Science has a world-significant role here. It is the conclusion of the work of creation. It is the confrontation of nature with itself that takes place in the consciousness of man. Thought is the last link in the sequence of processes that form nature.

[ 2 ] This is not the case with spiritual science. Here our consciousness has to do with spiritual content itself: with the individual human spirit, with the creations of culture, of literature, with the successive scientific convictions, with the creations of art. The spiritual is grasped through the spirit. Here reality already contains the ideal, the lawfulness, which otherwise only emerges in the spiritual conception. What in the natural sciences is only the product of thinking about the objects is inherent in them here. Science plays a different role. The being would already exist in the object without its work. It is human deeds, creations, ideas that we are dealing with. It is a confrontation of man with himself and his gender. Science has a different mission to fulfill here than towards nature.

[ 3 ] Once again, this mission first appears as a human need. Just as the need to find the idea of nature in relation to the reality of nature first arises as a need of our spirit, so too the task of the humanities first arises as a human urge. Again, it is only an objective fact that manifests itself as a subjective need.

[ 4 ] Man should not, like the being of inorganic nature, act on another being according to external norms, according to a lawfulness that dominates him, nor should he be merely the individual form of a general type, but he should set himself the purpose, the goal of his existence, of his activity. If his actions are the results of laws, then these laws must be those that he gives himself. What he is in himself, what he is among his equals, in the state and in history, he must not be by external determination. He must be it through himself. How he fits into the structure of the world depends on him. He must find the point to participate in the gears of the world. This is where the humanities have their task. Man must know the spiritual world in order to determine his part in it according to this knowledge. This is the source of the mission that psychology, ethnology and historiography have to fulfill.

[ 5 ] This is the essence of nature, that law and activity fall apart, that the latter appears to be dominated by the former; this, on the other hand, is the essence of freedom, that both coincide, that the agent lives itself out directly in the effect and that the effectual regulates itself.

[ 6 ] The humanities are therefore sciences of freedom in an eminent sense. The idea of freedom must be their focus, the idea that dominates them. That is why Schiller's aesthetic letters stand so high, because they want to find the essence of beauty in the idea of freedom, because freedom is the principle that permeates them.

[ 7 ] The spirit only occupies that place in the generality, in the world as a whole, which it gives itself as more individual. Whereas in organic science the general, the type idea must always be kept in mind, in the humanities the idea of personality must be held fast. It is not the idea as it presents itself in the generality (type), but how it appears in the individual being (individual) that is important. Of course, it is not the random individual personality, not this or that personality that is decisive, but the personality in general; however, this does not develop out of itself into particular forms and only then come to sensuous existence, but is sufficient in itself, self-contained, finding its destiny in itself.

[ 8 ] The type has the destiny of first realizing itself in the individual. The person has this, to gain an existence that is already truly based on itself as an ideal. It is quite different to speak of a general humanity than of a general law of nature. In the latter, the particular is conditioned by the general; in the idea of humanity, it is the generality through the particular. If we succeed in extracting general laws from history, then these are only such in so far as they have been set as goals, ideals, by the historical personalities. This is the inner opposition of nature and spirit. The former demands a science which ascends from the directly given, as the conditioned, to that which can be grasped in the spirit, as the conditioning, while the latter demands a science which progresses from the given, as the conditioning, to the conditioned. The fact that the specific is at the same time the lawgiver characterizes the humanities; the fact that this role falls to the general characterizes the natural sciences.

[ 9 ] What is valuable to us in the natural sciences only as a point of passage, the particular, is of interest to us in the humanities alone. What we seek in the latter, the general, only comes into consideration here insofar as it enlightens us about the special.

[ 10 ] It would be against the spirit of science to stop at the immediacy of the particular in relation to nature. But it would also be downright mind-numbing if, for example, one wanted to encompass Greek history in a general conceptual scheme. There, the sense clinging to appearances would not achieve any science; here, the mind proceeding according to a general template would lose all sense of the individual.