The Rudolf Steiner Archive

18. Psychological Cognition

[ 1 ] The first science in which the mind deals with itself is psychology. The mind faces itself in contemplation.

[ 2 ] Fichte only attributed an existence to man insofar as he places it in himself. In other words, the human personality has only those characteristics, qualities, abilities, etc. that it ascribes to itself by virtue of the insight into its essence. A human ability of which man would know nothing, he would not recognize as his own; he would attribute it to a stranger. If Fichte thought he could base the entire science of the universe on this truth, he was mistaken. It is destined to become the supreme principle of psychology. It determines its method. If the mind possesses a quality only in so far as it attributes it to itself, then the psychological method is the immersion of the mind in its own activity. Self-perception is therefore the method here.

[ 3 ] It is natural that we do not limit psychology to being a science of the accidental properties of any (this or that˃ human individual. We detach the individual mind from its accidental limitations, from its incidental characteristics, and seek to elevate ourselves to the consideration of the human individual in general.

[ 4 ] The decisive point is not that we consider the completely random individuality, but that we become clear about the self-determining individual in general. Anyone who would say that we are dealing with nothing more than the type of humanity is confusing the type with the generalized concept. It is essential to the type that it stands opposite its individual forms in a generalized way. Not so the concept of the human individual. Here the general is directly active in the individual, only that this activity expresses itself in different ways, depending on the objects to which it is directed. The type lives itself out in individual forms and interacts in these with the outside world. The human spirit has only one form. Here, however, those objects move his feelings, there this ideal inspires him to action, etc. It is not a particular form of the human spirit; it is always the whole, complete human being with whom one is dealing. You have to detach it from its surroundings if you want to grasp it. If we want to reach the type, we must ascend from the individual form to the archetypal form; if we want to reach the spirit, we must disregard the expressions through which it manifests itself, the particular deeds it performs, and look at it in and of itself. One must listen to him as he acts in general, not as he has acted in this or that situation. In type one must detach the general form from the individual by comparison; in psychology one must merely detach the individual form from its environment.

[ 5 ] It is no longer the case, as in organics, that we recognize in the particular being a shaping of the general, the archetypal form, but the perception of the particular as this archetypal form itself. The human spiritual being is not a figuration of its idea, but the figuration of it. If Jacobi believes that with the perception of our inner being we simultaneously gain the conviction that it is based on a unified being (intuitive self-perception), then the idea is misguided because we perceive this unified being ourselves. What is otherwise intuition here becomes self-observation. This is also objectively necessary in the highest form of existence. What the spirit can read out of the phenomena is the highest form of content that it can gain at all. If it then reflects on itself, it must recognize itself as the direct manifestation of this highest form, as the bearer of it. What the spirit finds as unity in the multiform reality, it must find in its particularity as immediate existence. What it contrasts with particularity as generality, it must recognize in its individual as its essence itself.

[ 6 ] It can be seen from all this that a true psychology can only be gained if one deals with the nature of the mind as an active being. In our time, this method has been replaced by another, which makes the phenomena in which the mind lives, not the mind itself, the object of psychology. It is believed that the individual manifestations of the mind can be brought into an external context in the same way as is done with the inorganic facts of nature. Thus one wants to establish a "theory of the soul without a soul". It follows from our considerations that this method loses sight of the very thing that matters.

[ 7 ] We should detach the spirit from its manifestations and go back to it as the producer of them. One limits oneself to the former and forgets the latter. Here, too, one has allowed oneself to be misled into that false point of view which wants to apply the methods of mechanics, physics, etc. to all sciences.

[ 8 ] The unified soul is just as experientially given to us as its individual actions. Everyone is aware that their thinking, feeling and willing emanate from their "I". Every activity of our personality is connected to this center of our being. If one disregards this connection with the personality in the case of an action, then it ceases to be a soul phenomenon at all. It falls either under the concept of inorganic or organic nature. If there are two balls on the table and I bump one against the other, everything dissolves into physical or physiological events, if one disregards my intention and my will. With all manifestations of the spirit: thinking, feeling, willing, it is important to recognize them in their essence as expressions of the personality. Psychology is based on this.

[ 9 ] Humans not only belong to themselves, they also belong to society. What lives in him is not only his individuality, but also that of the national association to which he belongs. What he accomplishes emerges from the full power of his people as well as from his own. With his mission he fulfills a part of that of his national community. It is important that his place within his people is such that he can fully bring the power of his individuality to bear.

[ 10 ] This is only possible if the national organism is such that the individual can find the place where he can apply his leverage. It must not be left to chance whether he finds this place.

[ 11 ] It is a matter for folklore and political science to investigate the way in which individuality manifests itself within the national community. Folk individuality is the subject of this science. It has to show what form the state organism must take if the individuality of the people is to be expressed in it. The constitution that a people gives itself must be developed from its innermost essence. Here, too, there are not a few errors in circulation. Political science is not regarded as a science of experience. It is believed that the constitution of all peoples can be established according to a certain template.

[ 12 ] The constitution of a people, however, is nothing other than its individual character brought into fixed legal forms. Whoever wants to outline the direction in which a certain activity of a people must move must not impose anything external on it: he must simply express what lies unconsciously in the character of the people. "Understanding does not rule, but reason does: not the reasonable, but reason," says Goethe.

[ 13 ] The method of folklore is to understand the individuality of the people as a rational one. Man belongs to a whole whose nature is the organization of reason. Here again we can cite a significant quote from Goethe: "The rational world is to be regarded as a great immortal individual that inexorably brings about what is necessary and thereby makes itself master even over the accidental." - Just as psychology has to investigate the nature of the individual, so folklore (folk psychology) has to investigate that "immortal individual".