The Rudolf Steiner Archive

2. The Fundamental Drive Toward Science

Two souls dwell, alas! within my breast,
One seeks to part from the other;
One, in crude lust for love,
Clinging to the world with grasping limbs;
The other rises forcefully from the dust
To the realms of lofty ancestors.
—Faust I

[ 1 ] With these words, Goethe articulates a trait deeply rooted in human nature. Human beings are not uniformly organized beings. They always demand more than the world willingly gives them. Nature has given us needs; among these are some whose satisfaction it leaves to our own efforts. The gifts bestowed upon us are abundant, but our desires are even more so. We seem to be born into discontent. Our thirst for knowledge is merely a particular manifestation of this discontent. We look at a tree twice. Once we see its branches at rest, the other time in motion. We are not satisfied with this observation. Why does the tree appear to us at one moment at rest, at another in motion? So we ask. Every glance at nature generates within us a host of questions. With every phenomenon that meets us, a task is set before us. Every experience becomes a riddle to us. We see a creature emerging from the egg that resembles its mother; we ask for the reason behind this resemblance. We observe growth and development in a living being up to a certain degree of perfection: we seek the conditions of this experience. Nowhere are we satisfied with what nature spreads out before our senses. We search everywhere for what we call an explanation of the facts.

[ 2 ] The excess of what we seek in things over what is immediately given to us in them divides our entire being into two parts; we become aware of our opposition to the world. We stand before the world as an independent being. The universe appears to us in two opposites: I and world.

[ 3 ] We erect this barrier between ourselves and the world the moment consciousness dawns within us. But we never lose the sense that we do indeed belong to the world, that there is a bond connecting us to it, that we are not a being outside but within the universe.

[ 4 ] This feeling gives rise to the quest to bridge the divide. And, ultimately, the entire spiritual quest of humanity consists in bridging this divide. The history of spiritual life is a ceaseless search for unity between ourselves and the world. Religion, art, and science all pursue this goal in equal measure. The religious believer seeks, in the revelation bestowed upon him by God, the solution to the world’s riddles posed by his ego, which is dissatisfied with the mere world of appearances. The artist seeks to imbue the material with the ideas of his ego in order to reconcile what lives within him with the external world. He, too, feels unsatisfied by the mere world of appearances and seeks to shape into it that “something more” which his ego, transcending it, holds within. The thinker seeks the laws of phenomena; through thought, he strives to penetrate what he experiences through observation. Only when we have made the content of the world our content of thought, only then do we rediscover the connection from which we have detached ourselves. We shall see later that this goal is attained only if the task of the scientific researcher is understood much more deeply than is often the case. The entire relationship I have outlined here confronts us in a phenomenon of world history: in the contrast between the unified view of the world, or monism, and the theory of two worlds, or dualism. Dualism focuses solely on the separation between the self and the world effected by human consciousness. Its entire endeavor is a futile struggle to reconcile these opposites, which it calls by various names—sometimes spirit and matter, sometimes subject and object, and sometimes thought and phenomenon. He has a sense that there must be a bridge between the two worlds, but he is unable to find it. Insofar as man experiences himself as “I,” he cannot help but conceive of this “I” as belonging to the side of spirit; and insofar as he sets the world in opposition to this “I,” he must include in the world the perceptual realm given to the senses—the material world. In this way, human beings place themselves in the opposition between spirit and matter. They must do so all the more because their own body belongs to the material world. The “I” thus belongs to the spiritual as a part; the material things and processes perceived by the senses belong to the “world.” All mysteries relating to spirit and matter, man must find reflected in the fundamental mystery of his own being. Monism focuses solely on unity and seeks to deny or blur the once-existing opposites. Neither of the two views can be satisfying, for they do not do justice to the facts. Dualism regards mind (the self) and matter (the world) as two fundamentally different entities, and therefore cannot comprehend how the two can interact. How is the mind to know what is happening in matter if its peculiar nature is entirely foreign to it? Or how is it to act upon it under these circumstances so that its intentions are translated into actions? The most ingenious and the most absurd hypotheses have been put forward to resolve these questions. But even with monism, things are not much better to this day. It has so far sought to help itself in three ways: Either it denies the mind and becomes materialism; or it denies matter in order to seek salvation in spiritualism; or else it asserts that even in the simplest entity in the world, matter and mind are inseparably connected, which is why one need not be at all surprised when these two modes of existence appear in human beings, since they are never separate anywhere.

[ 5 ] Materialism can never provide a satisfactory explanation of the world. For any attempt at an explanation must begin by forming thoughts about the phenomena of the world. Materialism therefore begins with the idea of matter or of material processes. In doing so, it already faces two distinct realms of reality: the material world and the thoughts about it. It seeks to understand the latter by conceiving of them as a purely material process. It believes that thinking in the brain occurs in much the same way as digestion in the animal organs. Just as he attributes mechanical and organic effects to matter, so he also ascribes to it the ability to think under certain conditions. He forgets that he has merely shifted the problem to another location. Instead of attributing the ability to think to himself, he attributes it to matter. And with that, he is back at his starting point. How does matter come to reflect on its own nature? Why is it not simply content with itself and accepts its existence? The materialist has turned his gaze away from the specific subject, from our own self, and has arrived at an indeterminate, nebulous entity. And here he is confronted with the same enigma. The materialist view is unable to solve the problem, but only to postpone it.

[ 6 ] What about the spiritualist view? The pure spiritualist denies the independent existence of matter and regards it solely as a product of the spirit. If he applies this worldview to the unraveling of his own human nature, he finds himself cornered. The “I,” which can be placed on the side of the spirit, is abruptly confronted by the sensory world. A spiritual approach does not seem to open up to this world; it must be perceived and experienced by the “I” through material processes. The “I” does not find such material processes within itself if it wishes to regard itself solely as a spiritual entity. Whatever it achieves spiritually never contains the sensory world. The “I” seems compelled to admit that the world would remain closed to it if it did not relate to it in a non-spiritual way. Likewise, when we set out to act, we must translate our intentions into reality with the aid of material substances and forces. We are therefore dependent on the external world. The most extreme spiritualist—or, if you will, the thinker who, through absolute idealism, presents himself as an extreme spiritualist—is Johann Gottlieb Fichte. He attempted to derive the entire structure of the world from the “I.” What he actually succeeded in creating is a magnificent mental image of the world, devoid of any empirical content. Just as it is impossible for the materialist to do away with the spirit, so too is it impossible for the spiritualist to do away with the material external world.

[ 7 ] Because when a person directs their awareness toward the “I,” they first perceive the activity of this “I” in the conceptual structuring of the world of ideas, a spiritualist worldview, when considering one’s own human nature, may be tempted to recognize only this world of ideas as the spirit. In this way, spiritualism becomes a one-sided form of idealism. It does not proceed to seek a spiritual world through the world of ideas; it sees the world of ideas itself as the spiritual world. Consequently, it is driven to remain, as if spellbound, within the sphere of activity of the “I” itself with its worldview.

[ 8 ] A curious variant of idealism is the view of Friedrich Albert Lange, as he presented it in his widely read *History of Materialism*. He assumes that materialism is entirely correct in explaining all phenomena in the world, including our thinking, as the product of purely material processes; only, conversely, matter and its processes are themselves again a product of our thinking. “The senses give us... effects of things, not true images, or even the things themselves. But these mere effects also include the senses themselves, together with the brain and the molecular movements conceived within it.” That is to say, our thinking is produced by material processes, and these by the thinking of the “I.” Lange’s philosophy is thus nothing other than the story of the brave Münchhausen—translated into concepts—who holds himself aloft in the air by his own hair.

[ 9 ] The third form of monism is the one that sees the two entities, matter and spirit, already united in the simplest entity (the atom). However, this achieves nothing other than shifting the question that actually arises in our consciousness to a different arena. How does the simple entity come to express itself in twofold ways if it is an indivisible unity?

[ 10 ] In response to all these viewpoints, it must be argued that the root cause and fundamental contradiction first confronts us within our own consciousness. It is we ourselves who detach ourselves from the fertile soil of nature and set ourselves, as the “I,” in opposition to the “world.” Goethe expresses this classically in his essay “Nature,” even if his approach may initially seem entirely unscientific: “We live in the midst of it (Nature) and are strangers to it. It speaks to us incessantly and does not reveal its secret to us.” But Goethe also recognizes the flip side: “All people are in it, and it is in all.”

[ 11 ] Just as it is true that we have become estranged from nature, so it is true that we feel: we are within it and belong to it. It can only be nature’s own workings that also live within us.

[ 12 ] We must find our way back to it. A simple line of reasoning can show us this path. Although we have torn ourselves away from nature, we must surely have brought something of it into our own being. We must seek out this natural essence within us, and then we will find the connection again. Dualism fails to recognize this. It regards the human inner being as a spiritual entity entirely alien to nature and seeks to link this to nature. No wonder it cannot find the connecting link. We can only find nature outside ourselves if we first know it in ourselves. Its counterpart within our own inner being will be our guide. Thus, our path is laid out before us. We do not wish to speculate on the interaction between nature and spirit. But we do wish to descend into the depths of our own being to find there those elements that we have saved from nature during our flight from it.

[ 13 ] The exploration of our nature must lead us to the solution of the mystery. We must reach a point where we can say to ourselves: Here we are no longer merely “I”; here lies something that is more than “I”.

[ 14 ] I am prepared for the fact that some who have read this far may not find my remarks in line with “the current state of science.” To this I can only reply that I have not sought to deal with any scientific findings, but rather with the simple description of what everyone experiences in their own consciousness. The fact that a few sentences about the consciousness’s attempts to reconcile itself with the world have found their way in serves only to clarify the actual facts. I have therefore not attached any importance to using individual terms such as “I,” “mind,” “world,” “nature,” and so on, in the precise manner customary in psychology and philosophy. Everyday consciousness does not recognize the sharp distinctions of science, and so far the concern has been solely with the presentation of everyday reality. What matters to me is not how science has interpreted consciousness thus far, but how it manifests itself from moment to moment.