The Rudolf Steiner Archive

3. Anthroposophy and Philosophy

[ 1 ] Ladies and gentlemen! It is always difficult, when guided by a serious scholarly conscience, to translate the traditional term “Logos” into any of the modern languages. Indeed, when we translate “Logos,” we usually say “Word,” as is customary in the Bible. But when we think, for example, of “logic,” we do not think so much of the “word” as we do of the “thought,” as it operates within human individuals and has its own laws. Yet when we speak of “philology,” we are again aware that we are developing a science that relates to the word. I would like to say: Especially today, what is contained in the word “Logos” according to modern usage is, in essence, present in everything philosophical. And when we speak of “philosophy,” we can indeed sense—in what we experience rather than define—how a reflection of this indefinable experience of the Logos is contained in everything we associate with “philosophy.”

[ 2 ] Philosophy, according to the literal meaning of the word—though this undoubtedly meant more than just the literal meaning back when philosophy first emerged—points to a very specific inner experience of human beings; the word “philosophy” indicates that human beings have a certain—one might say, if not a personal, then at least a universally human—interest in that which is related to the Logos, “Sophia.” The word “philosophy” points less directly to the possession of scientific knowledge than to an inner attitude of human beings toward the wisdom-filled content of that knowledge. Since our attitude toward philosophy today is no longer as certain as it was in times when, on the one hand, philosophy almost coincided—I will not say with science, but with scientific endeavor—and, on the other hand, was something that pointed to an inner human attitude, we today have an extraordinarily vague experience when we speak of philosophy or engage in it. However, this vague experience is extremely difficult to bring to the surface from the depths of consciousness if one attempts to do so in a merely dialectical or externally defining manner, without seeking to engage with what human experience has been in relation to philosophy in the course of historical development. The present moment, in fact, calls for such a consideration in a particularly urgent way.

[ 3 ] If we, as Central Europeans, look back a few decades, immersing oneself in philosophy—for those who sought such immersion—was, particularly in Central Europe, actually quite different from what it is today in the second decade of the 20th century, when we have, in essence, experienced—not only physically but especially intellectually—as much as was experienced in centuries past—and one can safely say so. And when one looks back on the experiences that a—if I may use this pedantic, philistine expression—“philosophy enthusiast” could have had as a Central European in the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s, and perhaps even later, they are essentially these: One looked back on the heyday of German philosophical development; one looked back on the great age of philosophers—Fichte, Schelling, Hegel; one was surrounded by a cultured and learned world that regarded this age of philosophy as something thoroughly outdated and that saw in the emerging scientific worldview the very thing that was to take the place of earlier philosophical reflections. One admired the grandeur of the elevation of thought as it emerged in Schelling; one admired the energy and power of Fichte’s development of thought; one perhaps also had a sense for the purely comprehensive and incisive nature of Hegel’s thought, but one regarded this classical age of German philosophy, more or less, as something that had been overcome.

[ 4 ] And alongside this, there was an effort to develop, from the natural sciences, something that would become a general worldview—ranging from the endeavors of the “force-and-matter people” to those who, more cautiously, sought to arrive at a philosophical worldview based on scientific concepts, yet who rejected the former idealist philosophy. There were all shades of thought and research in this field.

[ 5 ] And then there was a third type of thinker in this field who could not go along with a worldview based solely on scientific reasoning, but who, on the other hand, could not immerse themselves in the realm of pure thought, as is the case with Hegel, for example. For them, the great question arose: How can human beings, through their thinking—which they develop as something that lies solely within themselves—establish a relationship to objectivity, to the external world? — These were epistemologists of various shades who agreed on the call “back to Kant,” but who took this path to Kant in a wide variety of ways; there were astute thinkers such as Liebmann, Volkelt, and others, who, however, essentially remained within the realm of epistemology and did not move beyond the question: How is a human being to build a bridge, with what he carries within himself in thought and imagination, to a transsubjective reality existing outside of himself?

[ 6 ] What I am describing here as a situation that the earnest student of philosophy encountered, say, in the last third of the 19th century, has not led to any kind of solution. It was, in a sense, the middle of a drama or some work of art unfolding over time, for which no ending has been found. These endeavors more or less petered out into the indefinite. They gave rise to a great number of questions, and everywhere, fundamentally, there was a lack of courage to even attempt to find solutions to these questions.

[ 7 ] Today, the situation throughout the philosophical world is such that, if one wishes to capture reality, it can no longer be described in the way I have just portrayed the situation of the last third of the 19th century. Today, philosophical perspectives have emerged before our eyes which, I would say, have risen from entirely different foundations, and which make it necessary for us to characterize the philosophical situation in a completely different way today. Today, when we seek to characterize the philosophical situation, what stands out sharply before our inner eye is precisely what our gaze was able to focus on so keenly in the second decade of the 20th century: namely, the philosophical worldviews of the West, Central Europe, and Eastern Europe, which differ so greatly from one another. Today, in a different way than even a short time ago, our emotional experience of philosophy is shaped by what can be expressed, for example, by the three names: Herbert Spencer—Hegel—Vladimir Solovyov. By placing these three figures before us, we have in them the representatives of what can characterize the philosophical situation today. In a sense, this has always been the case—or at least for a long time—but it is only today that the philosophical situation presents itself so characteristically before the eye of our soul.

[ 8 ] Let us take a look at the West: Herbert Spencer. Of course, if I wanted to be thorough, I would have to describe the entire course of philosophical development, from Bacon and Locke through Mill to Spencer; but that cannot be my task today. In Herbert Spencer, we encounter a figure who seeks to establish philosophy, but to do so purely on the basis of conceptual systems derived from the natural sciences. In Spencer, we find a figure who wholeheartedly affirms the natural sciences and who draws the following conclusion from this affirmation: All philosophical thinking about the world must therefore be derived from the natural sciences. Thus, we see how Spencer seeks to conceptualize certain processes in the natural sciences—for example, how a continuous contraction and expansion of matter takes place, a process of differentiation and consolidation. He observes this, for example, in the plant, which expands in its leaves and contracts in its seed, and he attempts to cast such concepts into clear scientific terms and thereby construct a worldview. And he even attempts to conceive of human society itself—the social organism—in such a way that this conception offers an analogy to the natural organism. But here he immediately runs into a dead end. The natural organism of the human being is bound to the convergence of everything through which this organism enters into a relationship with the external world—through perceptions, through ideas, and so on. The individual natural organism is bound to what can develop under the influence of the sensorium. In the social organism, Herbert Spencer finds no such sensorium—no nervous system that converges centrally in any way. Nevertheless, he constructs such a social organism and finds in it, so to speak, the crowning achievement of his philosophical edifice, which is built entirely upon natural science.

[ 9 ] What, then, is actually the case in the West? The fact is that it is precisely there that scientific thought has developed in its full, justified one-sidedness. The fact is that, stemming from the peoples’ original dispositions, the finest powers of observation and talent for experimentation have developed. What is evident is that there is an interest in observing the world of external, sensory reality down to the smallest details, without becoming impatient in the process or seeking to ascend to any kind of summarizing concepts. But there is also a tendency to remain, through science, within this external, sensory world of facts. There is what I would like to call a kind of fear of rising, in any way, from the sensory world to a more comprehensive level. But since human beings cannot help but live in something that also transcends the sensory world—something that is not simply given to them through the senses—the phenomenon emerges here in the West that the entire spiritual world should be entirely left to the individual’s personal faith, and that this faith should develop free from all scientific influence. People do not want the content of religion to be touched by what they explore scientifically. Thus we see that in the case of Herbert Spencer, who in his own way consistently extends the scientific mode of thinking all the way into sociology, there is a strict [separation] between, on the one hand, science—which is to proceed entirely along scientific lines—and, on the other hand, a spiritual content for human beings with which science is not to concern itself.

[ 10 ] Let us now move from Herbert Spencer to what we encounter in Hegel. It matters little that Hegel, who belonged to the first third of the 19th century, was considered more or less a thing of the past for Central European philosophy by the second third of the century, for what is characteristic of Central Europe has, after all, come to the fore most significantly precisely in Hegel. Let us look at Hegel: Even in his—I would say—emotional disposition lies a certain aversion to this universalist, natural-scientific approach to the worldview, as it is developed in the West by Herbert Spencer, though it was, of course, prepared by Spencer’s predecessors, both natural scientists and philosophers. We see in Hegel, for example, how he cannot stand Newton, how unsympathetic to him is the particular way of conceiving the universe solely in mechanistic terms, and how he rejects Newton not merely with regard to the theory of colors, but also as an interpreter of the cosmos. Hegel makes an effort to return to Kepler’s formulas on planetary motion; he analyzes Kepler’s formulas on planetary motion and concludes for himself that Newton actually added nothing at all, but that the entire law of gravitation is already contained within Kepler’s formulas. And he adopts this view because he sees in what stems more from spiritual experience in Kepler the emergence of a scientific mode of thinking that is comprehensive and that attempts to make the external natural sciences comprehensible from the perspective of the spirit. For Hegel, Kepler is simply the figure capable of penetrating the spirit through thought and of building a bridge between what is scientifically known and what, in the West’s view, is merely to be believed—that is, he is capable of elevating science into the realm that the West regards as the realm of faith.

[ 11 ] For this reason, Hegel—in complete harmony with Goethe—strictly rejects Newton’s theory of color. Throughout Hegel’s work, we see a kind of antipathy toward what is entirely natural in Newton’s work, given his own inclinations. In contrast, Hegel possesses a distinct talent for living entirely within the realm of thought itself. For Hegel, what Goethe said to Schiller—“I see my ideas with my eyes”—was simply self-evident. This may seem like naivety, yet such naiveties often, when properly considered, reveal themselves to be the deepest philosophical wisdom. Hegel simply would not have understood how one could claim that the idea of a triangle is incomprehensible, for Hegel’s life actually unfolded entirely—if I may put it that way—on the plane of thought. For him, a higher world of revelation, a world of higher spirituality, existed precisely because it casts, as it were, its shadows onto a surface filled with thought. From above, the spiritual world casts its shadows onto the surface of the human soul, upon which human thought develops. Thus, for Hegel, the concept of the higher spiritual arises from the fact that it is reflected on the surface of the soul as thought. Hegel is predisposed to experience these thoughts fully as spiritual realities, and he does not experience natural events in their elementary presence either, but rather sees them in the mental images that they have cast upon the surface of the soul.

[ 12 ] Thus, in Hegel’s philosophy, it becomes impossible to separate knowledge and faith from one another in that external way that is so natural to the West. For Hegel, the task of a lifetime is to unite the spiritual world—which the West, simply by its very nature, seeks to relegate to the realm of mere faith—with the sensory-physical world, into a world that can be known. Here, there is no longer knowledge on one side and faith on the other; here, the human soul is faced with the great, momentous problem: How does one find, within one’s own inner experience, the bridge between faith and knowledge, between spirit and nature? But it was, in a sense, the tragedy of Hegel that what he knew how to pose so magnificently as a problem, he actually saw only—so to speak—in relation to the surface of thought; that while he was able to experience the inner power and inner vitality of thought, he could grasp nothing living in the content of thought itself. Take Hegel’s Logic: Once again, he wants to return to the ancient concept of the Logos! He senses: If we are to have any real concept of the Logos at all, then the Logos must be something that pervades and animates the world—not merely as a thought, but as a real, active force. For him, the Logos is not merely abstract logical content; rather, it becomes real, worldly content. Let us look at his “Logic,” one of the three parts of Hegel’s philosophy: It contains only abstract concepts! And so—so profoundly moving for those who know how to engage with Hegel’s philosophy with their whole being—there stands, on the one hand, Hegel’s fundamentally correct intuition: Through what can be grasped in the Logos, one must penetrate the creative principle of the world. The Logos must be his “God before the creation of the world”—a Hegelian expression!

[ 13 ] That is one side of the matter. And how, on the other hand, does Hegel himself develop this Logos? He begins with “Being,” moves on to “Nothingness,” to “Becoming,” and to “Existence.” He arrives at causality, purpose, and teleology. Consider all these concepts in Hegel’s logic and ask yourself: Is this what could have existed “before the beginning of creation as the content of the Divine”? It is abstract logic, the demand of the creative, the Logos as a postulate—but as a purely human intellectual postulate! Feel the tragedy that lies within this! And then feel further the tragedy that lies in the fact that Hegel’s philosophy was considered to have been overcome! Yet it contains elements from which new life can indeed spring forth. It contains seeds. Hegel saw his salvation in this: Being — Nothing — Becoming — Existence. But when people today are introduced to Hegel, they say: “That’s an old tome; we don’t need to get involved with it.” — But if one undertakes, through an inner process of the soul, to engage with it and to experience the concept inwardly, as Hegel sought to experience it, then all notions of empiricism and rationalism fade away; then the thought is experienced, and what is experienced is immediately thought. There, thought becomes experience, and experience becomes pure thought. Anyone who engages in this feels the striving to redeem thought from abstraction, and perceives Hegel’s logic as the seed through which thought can become something entirely different when it develops into a living reality. Hegel’s logic often strikes me as the seed of a plant—one from which one can scarcely discern what it might become, yet which carries within itself the most manifold potentials. And it seems to me that when this seed grows—when human beings lovingly nurture it and plant it in the soil of the soul through anthroposophical research—then precisely this comes about: that the thought is not merely thought, but can be experienced as reality. Therein lies the Central European perspective.

[ 14 ] If we now turn to the East, we find in Vladimir Soloviev a man who, more than any other philosopher, is destined to increasingly become an integral part of our own philosophical endeavor—a man who must become so important to us as we allow his unique character to take hold of us. In Soloviev, we see at the same time the representative of what constitutes a European-Eastern way of thinking—which is not, however, the Oriental-Asian one. Soloviev has, after all, absorbed everything European; he has merely developed it in his own distinctive Eastern manner. But what do we see developing there with regard to human scientific endeavor? There we see how, in fact, precisely that mode of thinking to which the West attaches the greatest importance in Herbert Spencer is something that Soloviev, in essence, looks down upon—using it, at most, to illustrate, so to speak, the truths and insights he seeks. In contrast, what he explores is a full experience within spirituality itself. It does not emerge in him with full consciousness; it emerges more atavistically, unconsciously, but it is an experience within spirituality itself. It is the more or less dreamlike attempt to consciously experience what the West—again quite consciously—places within the realm of faith. And so we find in the East an engagement with what can be experienced in an indeterminate way, what appears, for example, as a one-sided experience of that to which Hegel, from natural existence, sought to build a bridge as the spirituality of the world.

[ 15 ] When someone today who has been shaped by a Central European intellectual tradition delves into Solovyov, he initially experiences an extraordinarily uncomfortable feeling. They sense something that reminds them of certain nebulous mystical elements, of an overheated aspect of the human soul that does not lend itself to concepts that can be fully substantiated by any external evidence, but can only be experienced inwardly. They sense the complete indeterminacy of mystical experience, but they also find that Soloviev does indeed make use of the very forms of concept and means of expression that we are familiar with—those of Hegel, Hume, Mill, and even those of Spencer—though only by way of illustration. Thus, one can certainly say that he does not remain in the realm of the nebulous, but that, through the way he treats the religious as a science—how he seeks it in everything and develops it as a philosophy—he can certainly be measured against and critiqued in light of the philosophical conceptual developments of the West.

[ 16 ] This is the situation we face today: In the West, there is the endeavor to derive a worldview from the natural sciences, to place the natural sciences on one side and the spiritual on the other, and to grapple in the middle with the problem of bridging the gap between the two—all in the vague terms Hegel used: “Nature is the Spirit in its otherness,” “The Spirit is the Concept when it has returned to itself.” In all these stammering expressions lies the tragedy that Hegel could only experience what he was actually striving for through the cultivation of abstract thought. And then, in the East, with Soloviev, we see, for example, the manner still preserved in which the Church Fathers may well have spoken about philosophy before the Council of Nicaea. He transports us completely back to the first three post-Christian centuries of the West. Thus, in the East, we find an experience of the spiritual world that cannot yet rise to its own conceptual formulations, that uses Western formulations and Western concepts to express itself, and for which these formulations therefore remain something vague, even something imposed and foreign.

[ 17 ] Thus, we see how the philosophical worldview has unfolded in three distinct ways. And as we trace how this threefold form of a philosophical worldview emerges from the characters and dispositions of humanity in the West, the Center, and the East, we can see that it is our duty today—since science, as a unified entity, must spread throughout all of humanity— to find something that can rise above these various philosophical aspects, which, when all is said and done, still stem from those elements where philosophy was still a humanly personal matter. We see today that the West, Central Europe, and the East each love wisdom in their own way. We understand that in earlier times, philosophy could still exist as an inner state of mind. But now, in more recent times, when people have become so diverse, this way of loving wisdom finds expression in manifold ways. And perhaps it is precisely in this that we can recognize what we ourselves must do—especially what we must do in the center, where the problem is posed most tragically and intensely, even if it does not yet present itself in the same way to all philosophical minds.

[ 18 ] If I were to summarize what I have said in figurative terms, I would say: In Soloviev, philosophically speaking, the old priest speaks—the priest who lived in higher worlds and had to develop a kind of inner capacity to live in those higher worlds; one senses priestly language throughout Soloviev’s work, only translated into philosophical terms. In the West, in Herbert Spencer, it is the man of the world who speaks—one who wants to immerse himself in the practical realities of life, who—as can indeed be inferred from Darwinian theory—wishes to shape science in such a way that it can provide the practical foundation for life. In the middle, we have neither the man of the world nor the priest; Fichte, Schelling, Hegel—they are not priestly natures like Soloviev, for example. In the middle, we have the teacher, the educator of the people, and this is true even where German philosophy emerged, for instance, from religious contemplation; there, the pastor has once again become a teacher. A didactic character is also inherent in Hegel’s philosophy. And we see in recent times—for example, in the work of Oswald Külpe—how things have come to this: that philosophy, which had in fact already been lost, is now nothing more than a summary of what the individual sciences provide. In inorganic natural science, one asks: What concepts emerge there? In organic natural science, one asks: What concepts emerge there? The same applies to history, the study of religion, and so on. These concepts are collected and used to form an abstract, external unity. I would like to say that what is the subject matter of instruction in the individual sciences should form a comprehensive doctrine. This is what science, in essence, was destined to achieve in the middle ground, given the entire disposition of human beings.

[ 19 ] If we look back at what has come of this, we see: in Herbert Spencer, an unconditional faith in the natural sciences—the belief that one must hold fast to what observation, experiment, and the reflective mind, which engages with observation and experiment, can experience; and people fail to recognize the contradiction inherent in attempting to apply the concepts thus derived to the social organism—and—even though the social organism lacks the most important characteristic of the natural organism, the sensorium—nevertheless seeking to grasp it with the same concepts that arise in natural existence. We see the inclination toward the natural sciences as so strong that it has given rise to personalities who—like Newton—cling one-sidedly to mechanistic views while satisfying their spiritual needs apart from them. As is well known, Newton attempted to explain the Apocalypse in a wholly one-sidedly mystical manner; thus, alongside his scientific worldview, he had his own mystical needs.

[ 20 ] Let us consider, for example, what emerged as natural science and was gradually and unconsciously adopted in Central Europe over the course of the 19th century; for in Central Europe, science was simply developed according to the model of Western scientific thought. People didn’t realize it, but they nevertheless shaped all worldview thinking according to the Western model. How furious people became whenever anyone tried to defend Goethe’s way of thinking in physics against Newton’s! — And how did things develop in biology? Goethe founded a system of organic science that requires a mathematical grasp of concepts. The time is pressing to develop a biology that is more suited to modern thinking than what has come down from ancient times. But further progress in the 19th century—at least in Central Europe—did not adopt Goethean biology, but rather that of Darwinism, which is permeated by concepts that stand in as stark a contrast to Goethe’s as the concepts of the 16th century do to those of the 18th. It was solely in Central Europe that these concepts had once evolved further; in the West, people remained with those concepts that were sufficient for understanding nature. Thus it comes to pass that certain concepts simply do not exist in the West and that, when Western thought was adopted in Central Europe, they were simply lost. For example, the idea—the living idea—the concept of grasping a reality distinct from the empirical, as it emerged in Hegel, simply does not exist in Central Europe today; it was lost because Central European thought was overwhelmed by Western thought.

[ 21 ] Thus, in Central Europe, we have the task of examining what scientific thinking can be. Anthroposophists are criticized when they cultivate this scientific way of thinking with the same passion as the natural scientist himself. I have nothing—absolutely nothing—against the scientific way of thinking; it is simply a misunderstanding to believe otherwise. But I must view the scientific way of thinking in its purity and then also attempt to characterize it in its purity. And for those who approach scientific thinking with an open mind, the things that scientific thinking itself presents—as, for example, Western researchers have presented them, as Haeckel did in such a brilliant way—these results of the Western research tradition, when left as they are and not reinterpreted philosophically, do not present themselves as solutions or answers, but rather as questions in every instance. For the unbiased observer, the entire field of natural science gradually ceases to be an answer to questions; rather, it becomes the great question of the universe itself. Everywhere one senses: Whatever is currently being explored in the most beautiful way through this natural science—for my part, even down to atomic theory, which I do not deny but merely wish to place in its proper context—all of this becomes a series of questions, and a great set of questions speaks to us from the West. Where does this set of questions come from?

[ 22 ] When we turn our gaze toward the external world and focus solely on the perception of what is given, we do not find full reality there. We are born into the world as human beings; we are constituted as we already are; we take a part of reality into our own inner being for our perception, then look at the external world, at what is given to the senses—and in our perception we lack that part of reality that lives within us, which we can connect only through human struggle to the other half of reality that confronts us from without. If we look toward the West, we see that half of reality being explored there with particular devotion; but it yields only a series of questions, because it is half of reality. Thus, on the one hand, we are confronted with one half of reality, the given; if we look at it correctly, it becomes a question. In Central Europe, people sensed the questioning nature that Western thought can engender, and they sought to penetrate to the very essence of thought. This is Hegelian philosophy.

[ 23 ] In the East, people sensed that which exists above thought, that which works down into thought; but they did not succeed in bringing it to life to such an extent that, so to speak, the flesh also acquired a skeletal system. Soloviev was able to develop flesh, muscles, and even blood in his philosophy—but the skeletal framework is missing. And so he took Hegel’s concepts, Hume’s, and others, and used them to impose a foreign skeletal framework on what he had to say. Only when one is no longer dependent on a foreign skeletal framework does what can be experienced in the spiritual realm transform. But as it appears, for example, in Solovyov, it leads a shadowy existence because it cannot develop into a skeletal framework and thereby become vivid. If one does not wish to stop at merely developing an external skeletal framework, but instead lives in the spiritual realm and prepares oneself through intensive spiritual work, then one develops the inner skeletal framework for the spiritual experience itself; one develops the concepts needed for it. The exercises provided, for example, in my writings *Esoteric Science*, *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?*, and others, are intended for this purpose. Through them, one develops what can truly become an inner conceptual organism. This is then the other side of reality, and this side of reality has its roots in Soloviev’s Eastern philosophy.

[ 24 ] In Central Europe, there has always been one major problem: building a bridge between nature and the spirit. At the same time, it has become a significant historical problem for us: building a bridge between West and East, and this task must now face us in philosophy. But this task also leads us into anthroposophy. If anthroposophy becomes inwardly capable of giving itself living form in the experience of thought, then it may also, on the other hand, experience natural reality in a thoroughly materialistic way, as it is experienced in the West; for then the bridge between mere belief and knowledge, between cognition and subjective certainty, is built not through abstract concepts but in the living struggle of science. Then a true anthroposophy will develop out of philosophy, and philosophy can be enriched by this living science at any time. Hegelian philosophy will only be able to come back to life when it is infused with the lifeblood of a spiritual nature through the anthroposophical experience. Then we will no longer have a logic that is so abstract that it cannot be the “spirit beyond nature,” as Hegel intended, but rather one that can truly be so, in that philosophy will then grasp not the abstract spirit but the living spirit.

[ 25 ] This initially set anthroposophy the task of investigating: From our present standpoint—which in turn lies decades beyond Hegel—how must we bridge the gap between what we call truth on the one hand, which must encompass the full reality, and what we call science on the other hand, which must now also encompass the full reality? In short, the problem had to be posed—and this is the most important philosophical problem arising from anthroposophy: What is the relationship between truth and science?

[ 26 ] In today's introduction, I would like to place this issue at the forefront of the discussion that I believe will now follow.