The Rudolf Steiner Archive

2. Philosophy

[ 1 ] This week’s lectures are to be organized so that each day is devoted to a different subject, thereby revealing the way in which the science of the spirit is intended to enrich the individual academic disciplines and branches of practical life. Today we shall begin with the academic discipline that, in a certain sense, is closest to the science of the spirit as understood here: the discipline of philosophy. What I myself have to say here is intended to serve as a kind of introduction to the questions that will be addressed in the course of today’s session.

[ 2 ] I would like to begin with one of the most interesting and even most significant phenomena in recent philosophical development. It is certainly true that the phenomena that are recorded shortly thereafter in standard historical works are not always the most significant and interesting ones. And so I would like to begin with a phenomenon that has received very little historical attention: the full significance of a philosophical work published in 1888 by Ludwig Haller, a government councilor and public prosecutor, entitled Alles in Allen: Metalogik, Metaphysik, Metapsychik (Everything in All: Metalogic, Metaphysics, Metapsychology). I am all the more justified in taking this phenomenon in philosophical life as my starting point because anyone who has followed my own career as a writer can see that I myself have remained entirely unaffected by it; for what defines my stance toward philosophy is already fully contained in my writings published prior to this Metalogik, Metaphysik, Metapsychics, and what I have said subsequently is merely a proper and consistent elaboration of what was contained in my earlier writings.

[ 3 ] Above all, in the public prosecutor and state councilor Ludwig Haller—who has written nothing else but the aforementioned work—we encounter a person for whom what is called philosophy is not merely an academic discipline—although in a certain sense he is certainly capable of engaging with this academic discipline—but rather, for whom what he presents springs from an immediate, personal philosophical experience. We are dealing with a personality for whom the philosophical quest has become the most intimate personal experience. And if we are to address immediately the most significant aspect of Ludwig Haller, we must note that he is, in fact, at odds with the entire mode of modern philosophical thought. He has evidently delved deeply into all manner of philosophy and also into those literary works in which “philosophy of life” abounds. He has familiarized himself with the philosophical thought of his time and has found—as I said, this is his opinion—that with this philosophical thought one is actually spinning in a kind of unreal circle, that with this philosophical thought one never finds oneself in a position to immerse oneself in reality itself.

[ 4 ] Through his philosophical reflections, Ludwig Haller seeks to penetrate the spiritual reality which—having evidently outgrown, as a result of his upbringing, more religious notions—he calls “the Divine” or perhaps even “God.” In this “Divine” or in “God,” he seeks the source of all that lives as the true essence within the human soul as well—and of which the human soul must also become aware. But he comes to the conclusion that this soul, by processing the conceptual frameworks common in his time, cannot penetrate into this center of its being, where it is one with the divine-spiritual essence of the world.

[ 5 ] Since this web of philosophical thought in the late 1880s—when the aforementioned work was published—was in many ways still entirely influenced by Kant, and thus Kantian ideas lived on within this web, Ludwig Haller felt compelled, above all else, to engage with Kantianism and everything that stems from it. But it was precisely in all those ideas into which something Kantian flows, however indirectly, that he saw the unreal—that which can never be immersed in the reality of the world. And he was actually unhappy that, precisely because he wanted to speak philosophically in his own time, he had to grapple with this way of thinking—which was thoroughly infected by Kantianism—and that he had to return time and again to engage with Kantianism. He found quite sharp words, first to characterize Kantianism itself, and then also for the necessity of grappling with Kantianism—a task he found so distasteful. I would like to share with you two examples from this critique of Kantianism here, so that you may see what a person, for whom philosophy is a deeply personal matter, is struggling with in our times.

[ 6 ] At one point, Ludwig Haller speaks of Kantianism in such a way that he says of it: the “pseudo-dialectical, half-true, and at its core dishonest character of this misosophy, which attempts to steal the weapons from the arsenal of light in order to use them in the service of darkness.” On another occasion, he becomes—I would say—literarily furious that he finds himself compelled, time and again, to engage with Kantian thought simply because he must grapple with his contemporaries, and he says: “I, who could and would like to speak of God and His glory, find myself condemned time and again to speak of Kant and his wretchedness—I, a dandy among dandies.”

[ 7 ] I wanted to point out this phenomenon because it reflects the struggles that a truly philosophical mindset had to endure at the end of the 19th century. Today, philosophical discourse and writing are often treated in such a way as to make them, as far as possible, a matter that hovers, so to speak, above people’s heads—one in which one is not personally involved at all. Consequently, the inner, tragic phenomena of philosophical life in our time are given far too little recognition. And I believe that this phenomenon—which ranks among the most tragic of the inner philosophical experiences of our age—has actually become quite little known in wider circles.

[ 8 ] Anyone who truly understands the spiritual life of this era knows how deeply such moods have permeated the lives of people in our time. And in fact, if one wishes to describe the nature of philosophical thought in our time, one must speak precisely of these phenomena—which, although ignored by professional philosophers, are all the more important for actual human experience.

[ 9 ] Building on this phenomenon, I would now like to characterize another one that is, in essence, also merely a—so to speak—subjective, personal philosophical experience. The philosopher Eduard von Hartmann—who became better known as Ludwig Haller—engaged in a critical examination of Ludwig Haller. In this examination, one point is of particular significance. Ludwig Haller, who makes a great fuss of himself—as you saw, he calls himself “a dandy’s dandy” because of this tendency to make a fuss of himself— as he immerses himself in the Kantian-influenced web of thought of his time, of our age—for as he moves from concept to concept in his thinking, as he surrenders himself to philosophical thought—which shines through very clearly throughout his book—he senses that the concepts he is now following with his mind take on a strange inner life. It is as if the concepts were beginning to lead an independent life within his mind. He emphasizes this in various places throughout his Metalogic, Metaphysics, Metapsychics.

[ 10 ] If we wish to examine this interesting phenomenon from a psychological perspective, we cannot help but say the following: Ludwig Haller throws himself wholeheartedly into the unique nature of contemporary philosophical thought. But his inner human experience actually yearns for something else; he cannot attain this other thing because, after all, there were no traces of a truly modern spiritual science in the 1880s. What is missing within him is that which could fill this human inner life with true spiritual science. But it lives there, I would say, in a strangely instinctive, unconscious way. He knows nothing of it, but he senses it in this peculiar phenomenon: that the world of concepts comes alive within him, leading a life of its own.

[ 11 ] Anyone who can conduct research in the spirit of the spiritual science advocated here is very familiar with this independent life of concepts. But they can also master it. They can master it in the same way that one can master the transition from one mathematical concept to another in ordinary mathematical reasoning. But this mastery must be achieved through inner practice. It goes without saying that one enters a realm of existence far removed from ordinary consciousness when one suddenly realizes—just as food in our organism leads its own life in digestion without our intervention—that the concepts we have taken in begin to lead a life of their own within us. It is not incomprehensible, but very, very comprehensible, that a philosopher like Eduard von Hartmann—who was certainly spirited, who achieved quite profound results in some fields, but who had thoroughly outgrown the philosophical thinking of his age—could make no headway with Ludwig Haller’s experience. And as Eduard von Hartmann writes his critique of Ludwig Haller, one senses that, on the one hand, he becomes quite uneasy. What on earth is this supposed to lead to—so the truly contemporary philosopher asks himself—if the concepts to which I devote myself suddenly begin to dance inside me like goblins, throwing their arms around one another or the like? That is, after all, a dreadful thing; one cannot expose oneself to it! — And accordingly, as a true, contemporary philosopher, he voices this critique in a rather significant way by saying that he has never noticed anything of this mischievous, goblin-like antics of concepts that have come to life of their own accord.

[ 12 ] One can certainly believe Eduard von Hartmann when he says that he felt this inner unease while reading Ludwig Haller’s Metalogik, Metaphysik, Metapsychik. As his critique shows, however, this did not stop him from reading through the entire book; in a certain sense, he even found it quite significant. I believe that many others who were professionally engaged in philosophy in the era following 1888 hardly got past the first few pages of this book—if they even ever saw the title page at all!

[ 13 ] What I am pointing out to you here is a thoroughly significant phenomenon. And we can only understand it if we trace the philosophical development of the West as I attempted to do in my book The Riddles of Philosophy. If one considers what I have explained there in greater detail and at length, drawing on the history of philosophy—and which I can only hint at here—one sees that in the age of Greek philosophy, the entire human psychological disposition was different from what it later became and from what it is, in particular, in our time. We see how, in Greek philosophy, what we call “thinking” and what we call “imagination” is linked in a similar way to the conditions of the external world—insofar as it presents itself to human beings—as are, for us, only the qualities of sensory perception. When we perceive, we attribute—at least in naive consciousness—sensory qualities to what we perceive. Certainly, epistemological discussions since Locke and others take a different view, but they need not concern us at this moment; for the fact at hand, I wish only to refer to naive consciousness. In this naive consciousness, one attributes the sensory qualities—red, blue, white, warm, cold, lukewarm, sweet, bitter, and so on—to things, and it is now clear that what one thinks and imagines about sensory objects is, in the act of becoming conscious, separated from the objective, that it is experienced subjectively. The Greeks, however, still attributed their thoughts and ideas to the object in the same way that we attribute red, blue, sweet, bitter, and so on to the object; what they experienced in cognition was, so to speak, to an even greater extent embedded within perception than it is for us. They were fully aware that, along with red, green, and so on, they were simultaneously perceiving the conceptual content.

[ 14 ] And what, I would say, emerged in the most logical way in Greek thought—right up through the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries, into the age of Galileo and Copernicus—was, in essence, a distinctive feature of the general inquiring consciousness. Anyone who delves into what came to light in scientific achievements—which, after all, were still one and the same as philosophical inquiry during that time— and delves into the relevant literature, to the extent that it exists, will say that these earlier researchers and thinkers, in speaking of things, still describe as objective in the things themselves that which today’s researchers conceive as entirely separate from the things and attribute to the subject.

[ 15 ] One can trace—and this process is extraordinarily interesting—how, during the Scholastic era, philosophical thought took a turn toward clarifying how what we call “thinking in concepts” can still be conceived as connected to the objective world. Before the Scholastic era, the connection between what is experienced as a concept or idea regarding things and those things themselves was taken for granted. This connection only became a question, a puzzle, when, in human experience, the conceptual and the imaginative became detached from what is called objective perception. And out of this philosophical experience arose, within Scholasticism, the problem that should be studied today much more thoroughly than it is—the problem of “realism” and “nominalism.” Today, we even associate entirely different ideas with the terms “realism” and “nominalism” than was the case in the age of Scholasticism. In the age of Scholasticism, a realist—such as Thomas Aquinas, for example—was one who attributed an objective reality to concepts and ideas, so that he said: Concepts and ideas possess something that is objectively real in their content, something that does not belong solely to the subject, something that is not merely thought. A nominalist was someone who sought reality only in what lies outside the realm of concepts, who saw in concepts only a means by which humans summarize what is given to them as perception, so that, for the nominalist, concepts were merely names.

[ 16 ] Such a problem always arises in the course of human development when something is being worked through internally. In the Middle Ages, human beings had to work through precisely this internally: they became increasingly attuned within themselves to conceptual life, to the point where they saw what is called the “outer world” only in terms of what is perceptible. Consequently, a question arose for them: How is one justified in relating to these external perceptions something that, in essence, exists internally only as a name—something one grasps only by associating it with those external perceptions? A significant skepticism arises from nominalism.

[ 17 ] And, essentially, what then emerged in Kantian philosophy is nothing other than—I would say—the ultimate consequence of this scholastic problem. However, Kant arrived at his own formulation of the scholastic problem in a peculiar way: in the era when Kant was a young man pursuing his philosophical studies, a somewhat watered-down form of Leibnizianism prevailed within the very circles in which Kant was conducting his studies. Leibnizianism—which is, in its own way, something great, albeit something extraordinarily abstract, and which still has a definite connection to the spirit of reality—was philosophically sublimated and diluted in Wolffianism, which constituted Kant’s formative years. At that time, people were already fully engaged with the demands of mathematized science—the demands of a science composed precisely of the results of external observation of the world. But out of the old habit that human beings should still have a say when matters concerning the world are decided, the broad doctrine of reason had been established alongside this empirical science, alongside this science of experience. It had been established that, regarding all that is transitory, uncertain judgments can be arrived at through experience, through empiricism; but these judgments are directed solely at the transitory and are uncertain. One cannot know whether what one recognizes about any fact of the transitory world through observation and intellectual insight must actually, as a necessity for all time, be the case. One cannot even know that the sun must rise every morning, for one has only the single empirical proof that it has risen every morning up to now. From this one can conclude that it will also rise in the future; but it is, after all, only an empirical conclusion. Beyond this empirical science, Wolffianism sought—and Kant, in his youth, sought as well, entirely in harmony with Wolffianism—a science of reason. It is characteristic that one of Wolff’s books is titled: “Rational Thoughts on God, the World, and the Human Soul, as well as on All Things in General.”

[ 18 ] So, on the one hand, the aim was to gain empirical knowledge of the world as far as it is accessible to experience, and on the other hand, to attain a rational knowledge that encompasses everything, which, in a sense, is to be derived from reason alone. And alongside, shall we say, revealed theology, a rational theology was established; alongside empirical psychology, a rational psychology; alongside the knowledge of the world gained through experience, a rational geology; and so on. This search for a distinct science of reason was habitually grounded in the assumption that there is no certainty for scientific inquiry in the external world. But if one wishes to have such certainty, one can attain it only by deriving it from reason itself.

[ 19 ] However, all research into Wolffianism is still based on the premise that a reality has first been imbued—in some transcendent way—into this reason, from which human beings then derive their “truths of reason.”

[ 20 ] Two distinct aspects emerged in Kant’s work, and anyone who studies Kant with a completely open mind will be keenly aware of the two sides that appear in his thought: On the one hand, he had become accustomed to searching for “certain judgments.” For example, he had told himself: In mathematics, we have judgments that are necessarily always true—judgments that cannot, therefore, derive from experience, because experience does not yield such judgments. We also have, in certain areas of scientific thought, judgments that are universally valid—judgments that can truly be derived only from within human reason itself. There must be certainty in philosophy. — That was one aspect of what Kant wanted. And anyone who fails to recognize how firmly Kant stood on the ground—that there must be certainty, also in the sense of Wolffian philosophy—simply does not understand Kant, because they cannot come to terms with Kant’s insistence on the certainty of certain judgments.

[ 21 ] But as for Wolffianism—in terms of its content—Kant had been led astray by his study of Hume, the English philosopher who sought to be a purely empirical philosopher. And he told himself, precisely under Hume’s influence: There is no such thing as spinning something like reality out of reason; there is really only experience. — That was the second aspect.

[ 22 ] There must be certainty on the one hand; but everything that occurs in experience—which is the sole foundation for true knowledge—provides no certainty. How does one escape this dilemma? And this entirely inevitable search for a way out of this dilemma is, in essence, the main driving force behind Kantian thought. I have presented this in detail in my work Truth and Science and have further examined it in my Philosophy of Freedom, showing how Kant’s quest was not actually aimed at recognizing anything essential, but rather at asking: How does one arrive at absolute certainty?

[ 23 ] The Kantian problem is not a problem of truth, nor is it a problem of knowledge; rather, it is a problem of certainty. And if one does not conceive of it as a problem of certainty, one cannot truly understand it. Kant seeks the solution by stating: The human mind is indeed not suited to deriving judgments about reality from reason alone, yet these judgments do arise; they are applied to external experience, as one sees, for example, in mathematics. We do not merely look at such figures (a drawing is made), but we look at them mathematically and say: “These are two triangles,” or, if drawn differently, “this is a hexagon.”—We combine what we derive internally from reason with what comes to us through external experience. We superimpose what is known a priori internally upon what is known a posteriori, derived from external experience.

[ 24 ] This is what led Kant to say: Knowledge of the truth cannot, however, be derived from reason alone. But human reason is applied to experience. It imposes its judgment upon external experience. It forms its own judgment about external experience. Because Kant said: There must be certainty in philosophy; one must be able to find certainty, but one does not find it if one seeks it in the Wolffian manner—if one believes that one can attain reality through reason while letting experience run alongside it—because Kant could not reconcile these two, he said: “Man simply spins out of his reason that which experience then takes in; man himself creates knowledge; the things of experience are therefore certain and certain insofar as we make them certain out of our own mind.”

[ 25 ] You see, this actually dethrones the very essence of knowledge. It actually eliminates knowledge. And it does so in such a subtle way—so subtle, in fact, that Kantian thinkers still cling to this subtlety to this day without realizing what it actually entails. Then, when someone like Ludwig Haller comes along—who senses how Kantian thought has actually strayed entirely from reality, how it grasps at certainty in the unreal—he finds precisely the words I have shared with you. He finds that human acumen is being applied to an impossible problem—a problem that does not illuminate human understanding but rather shrouds it in fog. That is why Ludwig Haller expresses his feelings as follows: “This misosophy attempts to steal its weapons from the arsenal of light and uses them in the service of darkness.”

[ 26 ] But on the other hand, one must also recognize how this entire development of modern times was, in essence, necessary. The progression of human thought and human inquiry since the time of the Greeks was not a single line of development that can be traced only as I have just done, but one that can also be traced from another perspective. I have also alluded to this in my Mysteries of Philosophy. Today we are faced with an understanding of nature that seeks to grasp natural phenomena in their pure form.

[ 27 ] One can say, however: It is precisely that branch of natural science which today constantly prides itself on grasping natural phenomena in their pure form that hardly succeeds in grasping natural phenomena in their pure form—that is, in no longer, not at all, permeating them with the fabric of thought that is formed solely in the concept, inwardly and subjectively. — After all, all sorts of hypotheses are still being put forward about the course of external phenomena—not only justified ones, but also unjustified ones.

[ 28 ] But one person in modern times did, in fact, emphasize strongly—and relatively early on—that modern times, with regard to the observation of external natural processes, must strive toward the pure phenomenon, toward pure phenomenology. And that was Kant’s antithesis, Goethe. He demanded that phenomena, that appearances, speak purely for themselves. He sharply emphasized that what takes place in the development of the intellect must remain entirely separate from what is presented as a description of the phenomena and the phenomenal process itself. And in the sharpest, most admirable way, Goethe repeatedly calls for this pure phenomenalism.

[ 29 ] But the more one strives toward this pure phenomenalism, the more one must strive for a particular characteristic of the conceptual world. And this characteristic of the conceptual world has also been achieved to a high degree. This characteristic is entirely justified for a certain era of human development. Anyone who does not limit themselves merely to studying philosophy since the age of Descartes, but who also has the capacity to appreciate its positive aspects

[ 30 ] scholastic philosophy, medieval philosophy—and anyone who does not view Aristotle and Plato through the lens of modern historians of philosophy, but can instead present them to their soul in their original form, knows that the way in which the world of concepts and ideas lives within the human soul is entirely different today than it was in Greek antiquity and even in the scholastic Middle Ages. In the Scholastic Middle Ages, the soul still sensed that, in experiencing a concept, there was something of substantiality within that concept, just as there is still something of substantiality in the red or the blue that one perceives. It is only in the most recent times that the concept has become a mere reflection. It is only in the most recent times that the concept has been completely emptied of its content. It is only in the most recent times that what I called “pure thinking” in my Philosophy of Freedom has become possible in human development and in philosophy.

[ 31 ] When one seeks to explore the problem of freedom, as I attempted to do in my Philosophy of Freedom, one simultaneously comes to understand this modern character of thought. One comes to know that mode of thinking which, at its core, is devoid of all content drawn from external experience; though shaped by this external content, it nevertheless exists solely as a subjective fact.

[ 32 ] One might just as well say of this pure thinking—and I have made this clear in the new edition of my Philosophy of Freedom—that it takes place in the realm of volition. But it is volition that has been transformed into thinking, so to speak. It is the result of that thinking which has shed all external experience. This pure thinking is nothing but an image, and is entirely an image. And if one wishes to arrive at a philosophical understanding in our age at all, one must reach the ground on which this pure thinking exists.

[ 33 ] Goethe sensed what lies in this pure thinking. Others can only try to understand it from his perspective. That is why they always misquote a saying of Goethe’s, which goes something like this: the benevolent God had spared him from “thinking about thinking.” As Goethe meant it, it is indeed correct. Goethe never “thought about thinking,” because one cannot, in fact, attain this pure thinking through the kind of thinking to which one has become accustomed. One must view it as an image. So that one can say: Thinking itself—which one seeks to recognize, that is, pure thinking—becomes a contemplation of this pure thinking. Pure thinking is to be attained not dialectically, but intuitively. One arrives at this point in philosophical development through the problem of freedom, which is why freedom—true freedom—is not at all possible without attaining this pure thinking, which is merely an image.

[ 34 ] As long as a reality within us motivates our actions, our actions cannot be free. Therefore, no instinctive action, no traditional action, and no action based on habit is truly free; only an action that can follow the images woven in pure thought is truly free. As soon as one follows a reality, one is jolted. If one wants to be free, one must incorporate the unreal into one’s will. If you bump into something, you feel that the object has an effect on you. If you perform an action driven by an instinct or a impulse, you must feel that something is pushing you, that there is no freedom there. But when you step in front of a mirror and see the image in the mirror, you will realize that the reflection can never slap you, that the reflection can never push you. The image cannot do anything of its own accord. It is the one who stands before this image who must act. But since the image does nothing, the action then becomes a free action. Thus, only a mode of thought that is not rooted in reality—but is a pure image—can motivate free action. That is why, in the problem of freedom, one discerns the problem of modern thought, of pure thought. But within this mode of thought, one stands in a world of images.

[ 35 ] Modern philosophy—everything in this modern philosophy that lives on through Kant and the Kantians—instinctively draws near to this pure thinking, even though it mostly fails to grasp it. When one begins to think in the modern era and trains one’s thinking according to the natural sciences—which claim all authority for themselves and which would not be true natural sciences, true sciences of reality, if they instilled in us anything other than mere images—one must, when moving one’s thinking in this direction, first approach something unreal. In the thinking—through whose peculiarities we are making our way in our modern philosophical and scientific development—we have no reality; we have merely an image of reality. And as we look at this way of thinking, we arrive, on the one hand, at the problem that preoccupies the more recent epistemologists. They wish to build a bridge from what is experienced internally to what exists externally in being. They do not realize that they are not, at first, building a bridge from one reality to another, but from something that lives in images to something that is supposed to be reality.

[ 36 ] And on the other hand, we come to the point where conscientious natural philosophers admit to themselves: with this unreal thinking, with this thinking that is absorbed in imagery, we cannot truly immerse ourselves in reality. The point “where matter haunts” cannot thus be reached. For one weaves in images. Modern philosophy weaves in images, is unaware of it, and seeks reality within these images. Hence Ludwig Haller’s sense of “misosophy,” hence the feeling that one cannot enter into reality when moving within this mode of thought.

[ 37 ] This is the problem with recent philosophical developments: that the history of humanity was inevitably driven toward a purely conceptual grasp of unreal, imagery-based thought. For the sake of the development of freedom, modern humanity had to rise to this level of unreal, imagery-based thought. But one cannot remain within it if one is a fully realized human being, if one feels reality in every human being. For one must feel the contradiction between what urges, lives, and weaves within the human being, and what stands before consciousness as a mere array of unreal images. We are not merely dealing with a formal logical problem; we are dealing with a real problem—a real problem that has arisen because human beings have gradually withdrawn their thinking and their imagination from external reality.

[ 38 ] All that remains to him in the external world is the dark, murky matter that he cannot comprehend. But his thinking has not become a reality; it has become an image. And he must continue within this image. Thinking, which today is merely an image, was still the content of perception for the Greeks. This thinking has moved in the direction from the outside to the inside. It proceeds in such a way that human beings first immerse themselves in the external world through thinking. Now, in his philosophizing, he has reached the point where he weaves within the thinking that has been stripped away from the external world. He must continue in this direction. He must seek reality once again. From ancient times to the present day, matter has provided humanity with the foundation for thought by making thought real to them. But because thought had to become the foundation for the development of human freedom, it has taken on a symbolic character. Thus, it hovers between external experience and inner experience. It must immerse itself in this inner experience. It must regain its reality. Human beings must immerse themselves with full consciousness in the realms where Eduard von Hartmann—and with him all modern philosophers—find the atmosphere so stifling, because their thoughts seem to them to begin dancing like goblins.

[ 39 ] When a person steps out of the realm of images with his thinking—where, admittedly, it need not become so stifling for him as long as he weaves and lives within it, since they are merely images— when he steps out and enters his own reality, then he must indeed, through the exercises of spiritual science, incorporate into his inner capacities the ability to navigate this inner life of the conceptual world, just as he does in mathematical thinking. He must acquire the ability to grasp reality independently within this inner life. Just as one does not feel stifled when things out there in space do not stand still—so that our cognition is not disturbed—but rather when they move and flow, so too must human beings, in their ascent toward spiritual understanding and spiritual revelation, become capable of giving content to their conceptual images once again.

[ 40 ] If one grasps at this point the true, the urgent philosophical life of the present, then one moves beyond all the talk that the philosopher cannot understand what the spiritual researcher says. He can understand it as soon as he has grasped the pictorial nature of his thinking, but also as soon as he has realized that thinking has acquired this pictorial nature because, in the course of world history, it moves from the outside toward the inside—from the direction of the spirit in matter toward the contemplation of the pure spiritual world.

[ 41 ] Philosophy must be carried forward in this way, by being received by spiritual science and spiritual research, by immersing thought in what spiritual science and spiritual research have to say. That is what I wanted to outline for you, albeit only in broad strokes: the manner in which philosophy is to be enriched by spiritual science. In the coming days, we will then discuss how other branches of human thought and “action” are to be enriched by this spiritual science.

[ 42 ] Concluding Remarks on the Debate on Philosophy

[ 43 ] During the discussion, questions arose that, from a scholarly standpoint, naturally called for a broad debate. Since we cannot discuss everything in a single evening, I would like to offer a few methodological suggestions that seem necessary to me regarding the questions that arose—questions that, at least to me, were not formulated entirely clearly—in order to point the way toward where certain solutions to such questions must be sought.

[ 44 ] In light of questions such as that of the “subjectivity of perception,” recent philosophical developments have been marked by a proliferation of confusing ideas and an accumulation of concepts that tend to obscure and entangle the problems rather than clarify them and lead to some sort of solution.

[ 45 ] For when one seeks to raise questions concerning the relationship between object and subject in perception—both in terms of representation and cognition—the task is always to determine, through the most meticulous analysis of the facts of the matter, how the questions must actually be posed. For often the questions themselves are formulated incorrectly due to mistaken preconceptions. And this is frequently the case with questions concerning the “subjectivity of perception.”

[ 46 ] Here, reference was made to the difficulty posed by the person with partial color blindness, who is assumed to see, say, a green landscape differently than the so-called person with normal vision. This conception of the partially color-blind person raises the following difficulty: to what extent must one attribute subjectivity to what the so-called person with normal vision—and I say this quite explicitly: the so-called person with normal vision—sees?

[ 47 ] Well, the point is that one can first visualize the entire problem in such a way that it appears correct. “Correct” means that the way in which the elements that must be brought together to form the problem—that is, the manner in which they are brought together—is done in the right way. Just suppose, for example, that someone says: “Yes, the external world—which appears to me, let’s say, as a green landscape with a green tint—prompts me to consider whether the quality ‘green’ is objective, whether I may attribute it to the world of objectivity, or whether it must be regarded as subjective.” — Then, in order to even get to the heart of the problem, one must consider things such as this: “Well, what happens when I look at something that is, for my part, white or yellow, through green glasses? Then we see it tinged with green. Is this to be attributed to the sphere of objectivity, or must we speak of subjectivity here?” One will very quickly realize that one certainly cannot attribute this green—which I see through green glasses—to what is out there. One cannot speak of objectivity with regard to the external environment. But one certainly cannot say either that this green tint, which I have perceived through green glasses, is based on anything subjective. It is entirely objectively determined by the laws of nature, even though what I describe here as green is not actually green.

[ 48 ] You see, by forming an idea—I would say—I cast the problem in a particular light, in which I must regard that which most certainly does not belong to the external world as having nevertheless come into being objectively, in an objective manner; for the glasses do not belong to me and therefore most certainly cannot be included in the sphere of subjectivity. Such things might even seem sophistical. And yet such sophisms are very often precisely what leads one to bring together the elements intended to guide one in asking the questions in the appropriate way. For when one sees through such apparent sophisms in the right way, one will see through the entire flimsiness of the everyday concepts of “subject” and “object,” which have gradually been introduced into modern philosophical thought. And once one arrives at the correct way of posing the question, one will, I believe, be led more and more along the path I have taken in my works Truth and Science and The Philosophy of Freedom, where one does not take the concepts of “subject” and “object,” but rather seeks, independently of these concepts, something that must lie beyond the sphere of subjectivity and objectivity: that is the function of thought.

[ 49 ] The function of thought! If one examines the matter independently, thought actually appears to extend far beyond the subjective and the objective. And with that, one has gained a starting point from which one can then be guided, in an appropriate manner, to address the problem of “subjectivity” and “objectivity,” which presents such difficulties. For one is then led—and you will find that I have consistently followed this path in my two books—not to ask: How does an external “objective” world affect any “subjective” world, for which, say, the eye serves as the mediator? — but one is led to something entirely different. One is led, in fact, to ask: What is the nature of the senses themselves? What essential character do the senses reveal to us? For example, the constitution of the eye?

[ 50 ] One will then find that, in the problem posed in this way, something comes to light which I now—since I must be brief (though it could, of course, be adequately captured by a concept in an explanation lasting several hours)—wish to clarify through a comparison: I can look through a pair of glasses and still see the environment as naive consciousness perceives it to be real, with its color tints and all its sensory qualities. I simply have to look through colorless, transparent glasses; I must not look through glasses that alter the external world itself for me. And I must now grasp the difference between glasses that alter external coloration and colorless, transparent glasses that avoid any external coloration. Based on this comparison—as I said, lengthy reflections could be substituted for the comparison—I will find that when I consider the structure of the so-called normal eye, I have a structure that proves to be precisely transparent, comparable to transparent, colorless glass. I find nothing in the normal eye that indicates that the external world is qualitatively altered in any way. But I must conduct this investigation not with the ordinary concepts I have in my everyday consciousness, but with the imaginative consciousness that can truly penetrate the mechanisms of the eye.

[ 51 ] For the imaginative consciousness, a so-called normal eye is a transparent organ. An eye that is partially color-blind appears to the imaginative consciousness as, in a certain sense, comparable to a pair of colored glasses—as something that, however, brings about a change in the “subject.”

[ 52 ] Thus—by conceiving of subjectivity in a higher sense—one arrives precisely at the view that the sensory organs, in the broadest sense, are comparable to something transparent, which is arranged in such a way that it subsumes within itself the very production of sensory qualities. One learns to recognize as pure fantasy the notion that in this ideally transparent—which is precisely arranged in such a way that it abolishes any production of sensory qualities within itself—in this ideally transparent sensory apparatus, anything could occur that would first evoke sensory qualities, that would be there for any purpose other than to allow the sensory qualities to pass through.

[ 53 ] As I said, I merely wish to point in the right direction. And at the same time, I wish to point out that ordinary philosophical thinking should focus on saying: When I examine the facts of the world without prejudice, they reveal themselves in such a way that they yield results which are simply irreducible to ordinary rational consciousness; the facts themselves show me that I must go beyond this ordinary rational consciousness. — It is not honest to infer, from, say, the fact of partial color blindness, the subjectivity of color qualities. For every such inference contains some logical error that can always be demonstrated in some way. It would be honest to say: One simply cannot reach a conclusion through ordinary philosophical reasoning if one wishes to resolve the difficulty that arises from comparing partial color blindness with the vision of the so-called normal eye. — Ordinary consciousness has precisely this task: to point out the difficulties and say, “There they are.” — And if one were to truly become aware of the scope of logic—of real-logical thinking within consciousness—one would, I might say, lay out the problems everywhere and say: ‘Here is yet another one, insoluble for ordinary consciousness—the second, the third’—and one would see that ordinary philosophy, in many respects, is nothing more than a pointing to problems and the creation of a mood of waiting for these problems to be solved from a higher level of consciousness. It is only the urge to come to terms with ordinary consciousness that casts a veil over the problems and refuses to admit that, with ordinary consciousness, one can only raise the problems and must point out that the human soul must now undergo a process of development and training in order to solve them. The law of specific sensory energies is by no means something that can be dealt with within ordinary consciousness.

[ 54 ] As I said, I merely wanted to draw attention to the main point of the discussions—the topic of colors—and to point out that, above all, philosophy, as well as philosophical physiology, philology, and so on, currently require a very conscientious delineation of what they actually convey to ordinary consciousness through their thinking.

[ 55 ] That is the one point I would like to bring to your attention—as I said, in a very inadequate way. For it was intended only to point in a certain direction; but more cannot be done in such a brief discussion.

[ 56 ] The second point I would like to raise—again, purely from a methodological perspective—is the problem of categories raised here. One could, of course, speak for many hours about the categorical nature of human thought, but for now I would like to point out just one thing: “Subjectivity” and “objectivity” do not appear at all within the actual table of categories. And the fact that “subject” and “object” do not appear at all within the actual table of categories—the actual, the primordial table of categories—constitutes in itself a kind of proof regarding the nature of categorical thinking: If one takes the categories not as deriving from any proof, but simply—I would say—extracted from logic, then, by their very formulation, they must be applicable to that which transcends “subjective” and “objective.” That to which the categories are initially applicable must be something supra-subjective and supra-objective. But the very fact that the categories are applied by human beings themselves provides clear proof that categorical thinking does not involve the subjective, but rather the subjective-objective.

[ 57 ] This is the problem that Goethe, too, pondered so deeply. And the nature of his thinking—which led him to always seek out the point where subjectivity and objectivity disappear for human beings in human experience, where they are transcended—this very endeavor actually made him Kant’s polar opposite.

[ 58 ] It is, of course, entirely correct that, as has been said, one could also work from Kant in a positive sense; but one can work something positive out of everything in the world, even out of the greatest error! For there is nothing in the world from which one cannot also extract something positive. Among the basic exercises—I need only remind you that this is discussed in the second part of my Outline of Esoteric Science—we have cited precisely this positivity, this seeking out of the positive, for those who wish to attain higher knowledge. Of course, this must not blind one to the recognition of errors. And finally, when we consider history, we can say: a great deal of positive insight has been drawn from Kant. After all, there are not only the critical Kant scholars, not only the Neo-Kantians of the ilk of Liebmann, Volkelts, and so on, but there is also the Marburg School—Cohen, Cassirer, Dilthey, and so on—which was particularly active in this regard and sought, in a certain sense, to draw out the positive aspects of Kant’s thought.

[ 59 ] Well, I have shown how little can lead to a realistic understanding of this “positive elaboration from Kantianism”: in my Riddles of Philosophy, where I also briefly discussed these efforts of the Marburg School. Thus, even with regard to the problem of the categories, the task is to present it correctly in all its inner essence before the mind, in order to see how, precisely through the problem of the categories, the question of the “subjective” in contrast to the “objective” cannot be posed in the way that modern philosophy, under the influence of Kantianism, has done. This epistemological entanglement in subjectivity is something that has introduced countless unjustified notions into our modern philosophy and caused us to lose notions that were already there—notions that, had they been developed in a straightforward manner, could have led to something quite fruitful.

[ 60 ] I must draw attention to this again and again—as I have done on numerous occasions—namely, how an extraordinarily gifted 19th-century philosopher, Franz Brentano, published the first volume of his Psychology in 1874. It is, in essence, a brilliant book. This volume of Brentano’s Psychology was published in the spring of 1874. He promised the second volume for the fall of that same year. The three subsequent volumes were then to be published shortly thereafter. Brentano had initially planned this Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint to consist of five volumes. The first volume was merely a prelude. Yet it contains a most remarkable passage that hints at how Franz Brentano was in fact aiming at the most significant psychological problems. He says there: If all modern thought were truly intended only to investigate how ideas arise and subside, how they associate with one another, how memory is formed, and the like, and if this could lead only to uncertainty regarding the actual psychological questions posed by Plato and Aristotle— for example, whether the soul survives when its external physical body decays, then modern scientific inquiry would truly have gained little for human needs! — Well, one can already see from everything else that Brentano hints at in the first volume of his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint how, throughout his five volumes, he intended to bring the problem down to these fundamental questions of Plato and Aristotle.

[ 61 ] The strange thing is that the second volume did not appear in the fall. Nor did it appear the following year. And in the 1890s, Brentano promised once again that he would now set about creating at least a kind of surrogate in the form of descriptive psychology. So the second volume of Psychology was supposed to appear as early as 1874. Nothing appeared until the 1890s; then a second promise was made, but it was not fulfilled! Franz Brentano died in Zurich a few years ago. The promise has still not been fulfilled to this day. It has remained at the first volume of Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. Why? Because Brentano had stated in his private lecturer’s thesis: “Philosophy must follow the same methods that are applied in the natural sciences,” and because Brentano wanted to remain faithful to this methodological principle, which he had established at that time—and which ultimately prevented him from making further progress. Brentano was far too honest a man to have wanted to make progress by any means other than those of the external scientific method. That is why he simply remained silent about anything beyond the first volume.

[ 62 ] I stated this in my book On the Riddles of the Soul. Kraus, a student of Brentano’s, has, however, claimed that there were all sorts of other reasons why Brentano did not publish the later volumes; yet one must say that if the reasons Kraus pointed to had been the only ones, then Brentano would have had to be a true philistine. And he certainly was not. He was, after all, a personality who followed the impulses of his inner self—and them alone! But there was nevertheless something in Brentano that at least gave him hope that one could penetrate the workings of the world. And, when all is said and done, every philosopher of this sort—and there are, after all, few who have had this hope in a well-founded way in modern times—has turned against Kant, including, of course, Franz Brentano.

[ 63 ] There was something within him that gave rise to this hope. And I find this in a concept that, I would say, emerges from time to time in Brentano’s philosophy, and which he borrowed in the spirit of an older philosophy—of the kind that still drew from reality, as I indicated this morning—: it is the concept of intentional inner being, which he applies to the concepts of cognition and perception.

[ 64 ] This concept needs to be formulated. Then, starting from there, one will arrive at an approximation of what I just hinted at: to investigate to what extent the human sensory organ is a self-annihilating entity, to which one must therefore not at all attribute the capacity to be the producer of sensory qualities. And this concept—not that of the real inner being of any process, but of intentional inner being—contains within itself the life of pointing, which then becomes observable for imaginative representation. And this life of pointing, which is inherent in the concept of intentional inner being, then offers the possibility of grasping what, since Johannes Müller—the physiologist from the first half of the 19th century—people have sought to grasp in such an inadequate way through the doctrine of “specific sensory energies.” So one might say that the comparison with transparent, colorless glass is not entirely accurate for the reason one need not imagine an inanimate, colorless entity—one that thereby negates itself—but rather a living entity that, precisely through its liveliness, negates itself and thereby stands within a corresponding process, allowing one to experience the objective not by taking it in, but by grasping from within itself the process of pointing through and in the act of pointing to this objective.

[ 65 ] I have found what constitutes a renewal of this concept of intentional inner being—in the sense of a modern worldview—only in a few recent American philosophers who—probably without even being familiar with the term I just mentioned—attempt to grasp the continuity of human consciousness. Let us say, for example: at the age of twenty-nine, a person looks back in memory on what he or she went through, say, at the age of eighteen. Then what confronts the person at the age of twenty-nine—when grasped inwardly—is something similar to what one might call an “intentional inner being.” And with regard to this process, this concept reappears in the work of some recent American epistemologists.

[ 66 ] It is precisely in such phenomena that one sees how conceptual work is alive in contemporary philosophical endeavor. But this work must become honest in the way I described earlier, by coming to clearly demonstrate: Problems exist; but ordinary consciousness, ordinary intellectual activity, can only raise these problems; and now one must proceed further toward solving them. If scientific integrity were developed in this way, it would form the foundation for the ascent to the imaginative and the other levels of knowledge.

[ 67 ] These are meant to be only very brief methodological notes.