The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Second Lecture

[ 1 ] In today’s lecture, allow me to present, as a sort of foundation for the following reflections, some insights into how the roots of anthroposophical knowledge were historically discovered. I may be compelled to draw on some rather remote areas and to include some personal reflections in my discussion; in particular, the former—the digression into somewhat more remote, seemingly philosophical areas—should be avoided as much as possible in the coming days. But so that no one might think that anthroposophy is based on some amateurish notions, I must say a few words about this foundation today.

[ 2 ] What has become a genuine influence of agnosticism on the whole of human life was particularly evident during the period when I discovered the path to the roots of what I now call anthroposophy. My initial search for these roots dates back to the 1880s, and anyone wishing to trace that search will find clues to it in my writings—which I composed as introductions to Goethe’s scientific works—in my essay “Goethe’s Theory of Knowledge,” in my short treatise “Truth and Science,” and then in *The Philosophy of Freedom*, published in the early 1890s.

[ 3 ] At the time these writings were composed, people were completely opposed to an attitude toward knowledge and science that stemmed directly from agnosticism. Everywhere—even where one encountered a serious pursuit of knowledge and a serious striving to put into practice what human beings can attain as knowledge— everywhere one encountered people who could not move beyond agnosticism—people who, because of everything that agnosticism had instilled in them, were bound to be thoroughly opposed to anything that might lead to anthroposophy. Everything one experienced in such people led one to raise two questions, arising from a sense of the times, that seem to be of eminent, purely human significance. For someone who, on the one hand, has come to love scientific inquiry, but who, on the other hand, also recognizes the profound influence that the scientific spirit in particular has gained over all aspects of human life in recent times, the following crucial question arose: Can science, where it seeks to develop to its fullest potential, provide—as a philosophy—what human beings, from the depths of their innermost being, must have as the true answers to life’s fundamental questions? And this question, in light of the contemporary consciousness of that time, split into two others: Does contemporary science provide what human beings must seek out of their innermost urge? And what is it that human beings must seek, especially in our time, in accordance with this innermost urge?

[ 4 ] These two burning questions weighed heavily on my mind in the 1880s, and with these two questions in my heart, I contemplated what the various sciences—which, in becoming philosophical, had drawn their sustenance from the spirit of agnosticism—could offer humanity. I asked: What can the philosophy that emerged at the end of the 19th century offer to human yearning? And from what I felt compelled to acknowledge in the face of these two questions, what I wrote down in 1885 for my “Outlines of an Epistemology of Goethe’s Worldview” took shape. Then the words burst forth from me: “Thus we have a science that no one seeks, and a scientific need that no one satisfies.” For that is how it seemed to me: what had emerged at that time as philosophy from agnosticism. This philosophy dealt with questions of such a remote, such an abstract nature that it had nothing to do with what was alive in the soul, seeking a solution to the actual riddles of existence.

[ 5 ] It was out of this spirit that what I have called the “epistemology of Goethe’s worldview” emerged. For, of all that contemporary philosophy had to offer at the time, one could only gain a certain perspective by attempting to grapple with a spirit that, in its very essence, was essentially dead by the last third of the 19th century—a spirit about which much was said in terms of all sorts of externalities, but into which one did not truly wish to penetrate in spirit: I mean Goethe. And what was striking about Goethe was that even when he was engaged in a narrower field of scientific research—for example, plants, animals, or colors—there was always an underlying tendency to rise from individual human sciences to a comprehensive science of the mysteries of the world.

[ 6 ] Goethe certainly did not tread all the various paths that can lead from the lowlands up to the heights. Despite his greatness, he was, in a certain sense, extraordinarily humble at heart; but that was not the point. What mattered was whether one could see in Goethe, throughout his work, a tendency to rise from the lowlands of scholarly endeavor to the summits of existence. And this tendency was clearly evident. Yet one could perceive something in Goethe that could initially serve as a guide. I recall a remark Goethe made during his Italian journey in the 1780s, which can be found in his published work *Italian Journey*. I recall that Goethe used this Italian journey not only to penetrate, in his own way, into the essence of artistic creation, but also to gain a scientific worldview through his observation of the mineral and geological phenomena he encountered, as well as of the plant and animal kingdoms. And after he had already spent many months on this journey, after he had already elaborated all sorts of scientific principles—that is, those he regarded as such—he wrote these significant words: “Based on what I have seen here in terms of plants and fish, I would like to… undertake a journey to India, not to discover anything new, but to view what has been discovered in my own way.”

[ 7 ] For anyone who immerses themselves fully in what was alive in Goethe’s soul when he made such a statement, it can serve as a very special guide; for if one starts from the meaning of such a statement, it will gradually become clear how Goethe’s perception of the external world differed entirely from that of many other people. And especially in the 1880s, in the face of the fruits of agnosticism, it was particularly important to look to the nature of Goethe’s cognition, for it differs from everything that emerged through the great scientific achievements of the 19th century as a culmination of knowledge at the end of that century and the beginning of the 20th; and this provided ample reason to examine more deeply the distinctive nature of the psychological attitude present in Goethe’s cognitive processes.

[ 8 ] Goethe viewed things differently; Goethe thought about the world differently than those who, in a certain sense, believed they had achieved a kind of philosophical conclusion at the end of the 19th century. And this can be seen particularly clearly in Goethe when one considers how, upon returning from his trip to Italy, he wrote the classic little treatise *An Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants*, and how the ideas in this treatise emerged—as if as a natural product of the soul—from this particular kind of quest for knowledge. If one delves into what is presented here, one will find that Goethe’s mode of cognition was particularly suited to gaining an intuitive insight into the life of the plant world. At the end of the 19th century, however, there was a particular emphasis on developing those processes of knowledge that penetrate the fabric of inorganic, lifeless nature. Some individuals sought, in their own thinking, to mount a kind of reaction against this orientation of the entire process of knowledge toward lifeless nature. One could say that Goethe’s thinking and his imagination existed in a different relationship to external perception—to the external sensory world—than the kind of thinking that is particularly suited to penetrating the inanimate world. What Goethe thought was, in a sense, inclined to become intimately intertwined with what his eyes saw and what his senses perceived. What the senses perceive is much further removed from the thought processes that specifically engage with inanimate nature than perception and thought were in Goethe’s case. Goethe’s thinking was such that it could remain flexible, following the entire growth process of the plant and observing how one plant form is a modification of another. Goethe’s thinking was not rigid or rigidly defined; it was such that his concepts were constantly undergoing metamorphosis, and through this they became—I might say—intimately attuned to the course that plant nature itself is currently undergoing.

[ 9 ] It is therefore understandable that Goethe was particularly drawn to it when, after decades, he found a description of this unique way of thinking of his own in the work of the psychologist Heinroth. Heinroth called Goethe’s thinking “objective thinking.” And this phrase, “objective thinking,” appealed to Goethe in a very special way, for he felt that his thinking, in a certain sense, immerses itself in what it observes, that it connects intimately with what is observed, that it, so to speak, slips out of subjectivity and slips into the object, that the objects of perception are fully encompassed by the concepts and the concepts, in turn, are fully immersed in the objects of perception. “Object-oriented thinking,” as Heinroth put it, and Goethe truly found in this a characterization of what was alive in his process of cognition.

[ 10 ] One can now elaborate further on what I have hinted at here as Goethe’s unique process of cognition. This has been done in the aforementioned introductions to Goethe’s scientific writings and also in my little book *The Epistemology of Goethe’s Worldview*. But one thing stands out here: Goethe described the metamorphosis of plants in an extraordinarily illuminating way through his thinking. He became a classic morphologist of the plant world. Yet although Goethe did not initially begin his scientific studies of the organic world with plants, but rather with the animal and human realms, he nevertheless did not achieve the same level of perfection in his examination of the animal and human realms as he did in his exploration of the mysteries of the plant world. It is perhaps well known—and can be read about in my writings—how Goethe rebelled against the divide that certain anatomists and physiologists sought to establish between animals and humans by denying that humans possess an intermediate jawbone in the upper jaw, whereas such a bone is present in all animals. When Goethe became acquainted with this matter, he was not inclined to accept that the difference between animality and humanity should be seen in such a minor detail. Goethe sought what elevated humans above animality in something entirely different from such a detail. Consequently, he set out to demonstrate that humans, like other animals, possess an intermaxillary bone in the upper jaw. He accomplished this in his characteristic classical manner by making use of every scientific method available at the time to substantiate his claim. And when Goethe then moved from the study of the animal-human realm to the study of the plant realm—and, I might say, allowed this to flow into the aforementioned extraordinarily significant treatise of 1790—it also occurred to him to extend this view of metamorphosis to the animal realm, that is, to that which not only lives like a plant but is also animated like an animal.

[ 11 ] If one now takes the time to first examine how Goethe approached this task, one will notice that he made many attempts, including writing a sort of metamorphosis of animal organs. He undertook an immeasurable number of studies in order to write such a *Metamorphosis of Animals*; but one will not find that any of these studies even remotely approaches what he achieved with his *Metamorphosis of Plants*. And one also sees how Goethe repeatedly set out, at least in the field of osteology, to develop the theory of metamorphosis. But time and again he stopped making further progress. All these things remained fragments. He could not reach the point where his thinking, as an inner life of the soul, would have become so enlivened that it could have immersed itself in the animal realm as well as in the plant realm and their transformations. And so, it was precisely through the study of Goethe that the great question arose concerning the nature and paths of human cognition in general, and here lies—historically, at least for me—one of the roots of anthroposophy.

[ 12 ] Thus, in light of the effects of late-19th-century agnosticism, one was compelled to ask the fundamental question: What actually happens within a person when he perceives? — This perception is evidently an activity that he carries out internally; but it is not merely an indifferent activity. It is an activity intended to bring him into contact with the essence of worldly phenomena, an activity through which he is to orient himself as to how he stands, with his own being, within the facts of the world. Is cognition something with which one, I might say, merely stands beside the external world like a fifth wheel on a wagon, and is there to be found in one’s concepts—which constitute the cognitive process—nothing more than a reflection of external reality? Or is the cognitive process not merely a formal exercise through which one withdraws into a corner, while the world’s process unfolds outside, through which one allows this world process to be reflected within oneself, so that it would be utterly indifferent to that process whether the person stands there in the corner and, apart from everything else that happens, also finds that through his thinking he forms all sorts of concepts and ideas about this world process? In other words: Is cognition merely a formal activity, something a person does for themselves, or is cognition something real? Does a person, through cognition as something real—as a real process—stand within the whole of the world? When we cognize, do we experience anything that happens in the world and through the world—and which, solely because of the world’s particular organization, takes place not outside but within us, so that we ourselves become the stage for important worldly events that unfold on this stage? If the latter is the case, then human beings, through their cognition—as a real process—are part of the context of the world. Then he is not a bystander of existence; then, in a sense, the world process is calculated to include him; then his organization is such that the world would not be complete if what takes place within him—within his skin, so to speak—did not also occur and constitute the very pinnacle of events in the world.

[ 13 ] That, in essence, is the question that emerged in the soul from the experience of agnosticism. And then, by drawing upon everything that is active in the human cognitive process—that is, what this activity, whether merely formal or real, actually entails—the answer became clear. If one now attempts to identify a characteristic contrast within this activity, one finds what then leads one forward—what opens up the possibility of answering the question of what knowledge was for Goethe and what, therefore, was not yet perfect knowledge, because he had to stop short between the plant world and the animal world. This question can only be answered by clearly visualizing the contrast between thinking on the one hand and perception on the other. In human inner experience, there is actually no greater contrast than that between thinking and perception.

[ 14 ] In thinking, we live in such a way that we are entirely devoted to an inner activity. In true thinking, everything within us is activity. No thought can take hold in our consciousness without us participating, through our very own activity, in the emergence and further development of that thought. For when a dream or a memory image arises in our imagination, that is not thinking; we sense that, with regard to the dream, the memory image, or other contents of consciousness, we have not yet penetrated to what true thinking is. True thinking is present only when we are fully engaged in that thinking with our own activity. We can develop thinking in its purest and clearest form when we completely turn away from the external world and surrender ourselves to the thought process unfolding of its own accord. There we perceive how one thought can develop from another, and we also perceive how this peculiar emergence of thought from thought constitutes an inner psychological experience.

[ 15 ] In contrast to this is what we experience as a spiritual experience in perception when we encounter the external world through our eyes, our ears, and our other senses. Perception, in its most fundamental characteristic, stands in complete opposition to thinking. A perception in which we were already present with our activity would not be a pure perception; thinking would already have become mixed into it. A pure perception is solely that which we experience entirely passively.

[ 16 ] These two opposites of human soul experience could present themselves to one’s soul precisely from the perspective of agnosticism. But then one had to ask oneself the question: How does the human soul behave as it continually injects thinking into perception, continually permeates whatever emerges in passive perception with the activity of thinking during the process of cognition, and then stands alive within this continual permeation of passive perception by active thinking?

[ 17 ] It was precisely the era of agnosticism—I would say the culmination of agnosticism—that led one to place perception itself, that is, that which is experienced in complete passivity, before the soul in all its purity. I remember how a work published in 1884 by the same author who later wrote the comprehensive book *The Whole of Philosophy and Its End* made a powerful impression on me; it was *Brain and Consciousness* by Richard Wähle. At the time, I saw the particular merit of this work in the fact that Richard Wahle sharply characterized what a human being actually perceives—that which remains when one filters out from the soul’s content everything that has been introduced through the activity of thought. It was precisely through this work that one could grapple with an important point: namely, that in ordinary human soul experience, there is by no means a strict separation between what is perceived and what is already intermingled with thinking.

[ 18 ] For ordinary consciousness, it is indeed the case that from the morning, when a person wakes up, until the evening, when they fall asleep, they are actually always living within mental contents that perception has already intermingled with thinking. Only a truly thorough analysis can separate what is passive perception from what has been introduced by thinking. Then one comes to understand what our perceptual image actually looks like. One can trace this perceptual image simply by—let me say—refraining from summarizing thoughts for just five minutes and merely registering what one perceives in sequence. Thinkers such as Richard Wahle and Johannes Volkelt have done this; they have recorded how, say, a mail carrier enters, hands over a letter, what then happens with that letter, and how one perceptual image after another chaotically follows one another in relation to organizing thought. Through this, however, one gains a true insight into the activity constantly taking place within the human soul—an activity of which only a very small part is conscious—which consists in continually blending perception with thinking, that is, the passively observed with what is actively produced within.

[ 19 ] At that time, however, among the fruits that sprang from agnosticism regarding the process of cognition, nothing else stood before the soul except what had emerged in the form of Kantianism and what had further manifested itself in the form of what had been the maxim of physiological imagination in the 19th century since Johannes Müller. The prevailing view at the time was that what is truly real is to be investigated in the external world, and that the task of thought is merely to represent this external reality; one would arrive at correct thinking, it was thought, not by introducing anything from within the human mind into perception, but by using thought solely and passively to create images of reality. This reality, however, it was thought, already existed somewhere, quite apart from the thought process or the inner psychological process. Such thinking then leads one to arrive at imaginary concepts, such as that of the well-known or unknown “thing-in-itself.” Speaking of this “thing-in-itself” makes sense only if one believes that reality must exist somewhere in and of itself, apart from human cognition, and that one need only use certain procedures to gain knowledge of this reality. In that case, the process of cognition would not be a real experience; it would merely be something formal, standing in a corner apart from actual events and real things. In contrast, it became clear to me that cognition is, in fact, something real; for by examining the actual content of perception—that is, what we are immersed in when we passively allow the external world to act upon us through our senses—it became clear that this external world does not in fact contain reality, but rather that human beings are born into the world in such a way that, when they look into this external world solely through their senses, he experiences only half of this reality—only one side of reality—through his senses.

[ 20 ] Throughout my writings, up to and including the book *The Riddles of Philosophy*, you can find numerous attempts to demonstrate that what is sensually present to perception is not, in fact, reality; that is to say, when a person is born into the world, reality is not simply handed over to them through their perception, and that this reality only comes before the human soul when the person generates the activity of thinking from within and contrasts the incomplete reality—one side of reality—with its counterpart, that which belongs to this reality: that which is initially given to the person in the spirit as thinking. The fact is that reality only becomes a soul experience when a person connects his perception with his thinking, which arises within his spirit. Reality is something that comes into being through cognition. Reality is not something we must seek. Reality is something we create, in which we take an active part; and the mystery of the human being lies in the fact that, upon being born, he is surrounded by a world that is not full reality, and that he is born to add to what presents itself to him in external sensory appearance something that arises only within him. Only in this context—in this coexistence of what arises within him with what he perceives externally—does he live his way into reality.

[ 21 ] As long as we merely look out with our senses at what we can perceive outside ourselves, we have no reality before us. When we strive to connect everything that is perceptible with what we bring into this existence from a completely different perspective—from the roots of the worlds—when we grapple with what first arises in our thinking, and when we unite these two aspects of reality through our own active process of cognition, we add to our external perception that which is still missing from reality; we only then shape it into reality. The process of cognition is that to which human beings must rise so that reality may be contained within their world. There would be no reality in their world if they merely perceived; if they were unable to strive to unite what is perceived with that which perception cannot provide—that which they bring to perception from an entirely different corner of the world and which is first revealed in their thinking.

[ 22 ] Because human beings engage with reality through their process of cognition in such a way that this process of cognition itself is a reality—that is, reality is first generated and emerges within the very process that leads to knowledge— that is why I was able to call the little book in which I sought to depict precisely this kind of human cognition *Truth and Science*. In a sense, in that little book at the time, I presented—according to my view—a kind of attempt at a dialogue between human consciousness and itself. Human consciousness, in a sense, asks itself the question: What is your relationship to reality? Are you the fifth wheel on the wagon, or the cornerstone that, through its knowledge, accomplishes something that has nothing to do with reality? Is reality out there, perhaps merely concealed, and do you simply have to seek it through your knowledge? Or is the process of cognition something that participates in the coming into being of full reality? — This question could be answered only in the latter sense. However, if one wishes to grasp the truth of this answer—which at first appears to the agnostic as a paradox—it is necessary, on the one hand, to truly comprehend the very special nature of thought as a reality, and on the other hand, to truly grasp how perception everywhere reveals itself to us as something that is, in itself, dark and obscure. One must bring to mind the sensation of this contrast between thought and perception in such a way as to clearly see how, in thought, we have something in which we are fully awake.

[ 23 ] The process of waking has its stages, its degrees. If we wish to grasp it in its most essential form for our ordinary consciousness, we can do so only by experiencing ourselves with the full activity of the soul in thought. And then we will experience how we are actually present in perception. If we have managed—in the sense described by Richard Wahle or Johannes Volkelt, for example—to place perception in its true form before our soul, and if we then examine how the soul lives by living solely in perception, we will find no difference between this experience of the soul and the perception that is still entirely unpermeated by thought in the actual state of sleep. And just as our daily life alternates between waking and sleeping, so does the weaving, undulating life of the soul continually alternate—as it enters into interaction with the external world—between that in which it can actually only sleep, namely perception, and that in which it is fully awake, namely active thinking.

[ 24 ] Whatever else takes place during the time when we pierce the darkness of sleep with the brightness of wakefulness actually takes place in another realm at every moment, as we penetrate the darkness of perception with the light that lives within us, as we are present in active thinking. We are constantly illuminating dark perception. This is the living process that unfolds between what lies dormant in the impression that perception makes upon us, and that which awakens within this dormant life as we penetrate it with the activity of thinking. It truly seems to the soul as if there were a kind of alternation between waking and sleeping during the ordinary waking state, when we immerse ourselves fully and vividly in this relationship between thinking — that is, the activity experienced in the mind — and perception, that is, that which continually takes the mind out of itself, which continually causes the mind to be such that it can grasp it only in its unconsciousness, just as it can grasp the processes during sleep only in its unconsciousness. By following such a path of knowledge, one gains a true insight into what this process of knowledge actually is, how it is truly a real process, how it works within reality—not off to the side as a merely formal one.

[ 25 ] Nevertheless, it is extraordinarily difficult to arrive, purely philosophically, at an understanding of the activity of thought through this approach, and I can fully understand that minds like Richard Wahle’s—who once clearly recognized how perception actually presents only chaos to our soul—and how such thinkers, who truly have before them only what Johannes Volkelt rightly called the individual, juxtaposed fragments of external perception that thinking must first organize —I can understand how such thinkers, because they immerse themselves entirely in perception, fail to immerse themselves in the active essence of thinking; they cannot rise to the level of acknowledging that, in experiencing the activity of thinking, we are fully immersed in an act, and because we are fully immersed in it, we can connect it completely with our consciousness. I can well imagine how incomprehensible it is to such thinkers when, from the full experience of this activity of thinking, one responds to them with the words: “In thinking, we have grasped world events themselves by the very edge!”—as I expressed it in my *Philosophy of Freedom*.

[ 26 ] That this is indeed the case—that we truly grasp world events in thought at a single point—could initially be demonstrated only through the kind of thinking that underlies human action, the kind of thinking that develops when we shape the moral world in our actions out of our pure thought. For then we are compelled, first of all, to develop pure thinking within the soul—that is, to possess thinking, so to speak, in its purest form—and then to shape our intuition in accordance with it. Here the facts themselves compel us to separate intuition, perception, and thinking from one another in order to unite them in action, in the moral act. How the true nature of thinking activity becomes clear to us precisely in the pursuit of ethical and social life—a point I have developed in my *Philosophy of Freedom*—is what I intend to discuss tomorrow.

[ 27 ] From what I have presented today, I hope it becomes clear to you how, precisely through the experience of 19th-century agnosticism, a problem arises in the soul that goes something like this: Is the external world that we perceive through our senses a self-contained, definitive reality, the meaning of which we must seek only passively—or is this external reality merely one aspect of true reality? As living human beings, must we ourselves also help to create this reality in the process of cognition?

[ 28 ] Everything I have said today—albeit only in passing—will make it clear to you that I had to write, even in my *Theory of Knowledge in Goethe’s Worldview*, that the most important question of our age is whether the nature of our external experience already presents us with a reality. For if external experience already presents us with a complete reality, then our knowledge would be nothing more than a repetition of this external reality. But if external reality presents us with only half, only a part of the total, true reality, then the following must be said—which you will find in my 1886 work *Grundlinien einer Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung*: “The situation would be quite different if, in this form of reality”—which is mediated by the external senses—“we were dealing not with the essence of reality, but only with its entirely insignificant outer aspect; if we had before us only a shell of the true essence of the world, which conceals the essence of the world from us and urges us to continue our search for it. We would then have to strive to penetrate this shell. We would have to start from the world’s primary form in order to grasp its true (essential) properties. We would have to transcend the phenomenon as perceived by the senses in order to develop a higher form of appearance from it.”

[ 29 ] I posed this question at the time, and given the premises I have characterized today—to some extent, but only in general terms—the only possible answer was that there exists within science itself something real and factual, something that participates in the processes of the world; and that even in art—which, as I showed yesterday, has likewise been influenced to a certain extent by the agnostic way of thinking—there must live on that which is experienced by human beings in living spirituality beyond external reality. And if I were to seek a guiding principle today—a motto for what I must characterize for you from spiritual science, from anthroposophy, as its true meaning—then I would have to propose the following motto for anthroposophy as a whole and, in particular, for these lectures:

[ 30 ] “The goal of art and science is the transcendence of sensuality through the spirit. Science transcends sensuality by dissolving it entirely into the spirit, while art—namely—transcends it by implanting the spirit into it—that is, into sensuality.”

[ 31 ] Well, there are people who say that I was trained in anthroposophy after I had broken with other scientific schools of thought. What I would like to set forth today as a prelude to what I have to say to you in the coming days is nothing other than this:

[ 32 ] “Overcoming sensibility through the spirit is the goal of art and science. Science overcomes sensibility by dissolving it entirely into the spirit; art overcomes sensibility by imbuing it with the spirit.”

[ 33 ] But—and let this be said to all those who speak of alleged contradictions in my intellectual development—I did not write this today, nor yesterday, nor ten years ago, nor twenty years ago; rather, it appears in my *Theory of Knowledge in Goethe’s Worldview*, published in 1886.