The Rudolf Steiner Archive

10. The Relationship Between Anthroposophy and Philosophy

[ 1 ] Time and again, one rightly hears it said that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science will only find an audience among qualified scholars when it is capable of engaging with philosophical issues. As long as it does not do so, it will strike philosophers as amateurish, and as long as that is the case, people will also say that the followers of this spiritual science are followers only because they lack a thorough philosophical education.

[ 2 ] It would be entirely futile, for example, to wait until a sufficiently large number of people with a philosophical background came to realize that spiritual science is, even for the most philosophical of people, something that elevates them far beyond mere philosophy. But since one cannot wait for the spiritual science movement to develop, and since spiritual science must be presented to the public in a way that the public is capable of receiving and understanding it—even without the individual members of that public having received any special philosophical training—if, therefore, one is generally compelled to do so, it must nevertheless be strongly emphasized that there is nothing in the field of anthroposophy that cannot, in the strictest sense, engage with what is necessary and correct in the realm of philosophy. And even though the general direction of the Theosophical Movement does not allow me to present philosophical reflections, I would nevertheless like to use this short hour to draw the attention of those who have engaged with philosophical matters to a few philosophical perspectives. And I ask that you regard this as something that falls entirely outside the scope of the other anthroposophical reflections—as something intended purely as a single philosophical consideration. You may find some of the topics that need to be discussed here difficult. But do not let that bother you if you have to listen to a brief hour of difficult and not particularly heartwarming reflections here. In any case, you can be certain that this will be extraordinarily useful to you in laying the foundation for the truths of spiritual science. You will find time and again, as you take in a genuine philosophical way of thinking, that this philosophical approach will greatly facilitate your understanding not only of spiritual science in general but also of what is called “esoteric development.” So today’s purely philosophical reflection is intended to be entirely outside the scope of our usual reflections.

[ 3 ] You need not regard philosophy at all as something you are absolutely free to accept. Philosophy is something that only came into being in the course of human development, and we can, so to speak, very easily pinpoint the birth of philosophy, for this moment is, in fact, more or less accurately recorded in every history of philosophy. In recent times, some have objected to the fact that every history of philosophy begins with Thales—that is, with the first dawn of philosophy in Greece—and have argued that philosophy can be traced back even further than that. This is not correct. What is rightly called “philosophy” actually begins with Greek philosophy. Eastern wisdom and Eastern knowledge are not what should be designated as “philosophy” in the strict sense. If we set aside the great philosophical intuitions—as they appear in Heraclitus, in Thales, and later in Socrates in a different way—and turn directly to philosophy as it presents itself to us in a coherent worldview, in a coherent system of thought, then Pythagoras is not the first philosopher. For Pythagoras is, in a certain sense, still an intuitive seer who, although he often expresses what he has to say in philosophical terms, does not—in the strict sense—have a philosophical system; nor does the Pythagorean system, any more than the Platonic one. A philosophical system in the true sense of the word is only the great system—as a philosophical system—that Aristotle established in the 4th century B.C. One must first get a grasp of these things.

[ 4 ] If Aristotle is called the first philosopher and Plato is still regarded as only a half-seer, it is because Aristotle is the first to draw solely from the source of philosophy—namely, the source of thinking in concepts. Of course, all of this had been in the making for a long time; it was not as if he now had to create all the concepts himself from scratch; his predecessors had done a considerable amount of groundwork for him in this regard. But in truth, Aristotle, in a certain sense, presents for the first time precisely what was, for example, the subject matter of the mysteries—not in the old prophetic form, but rather he presents everything he offers in conceptual form. And so anyone who wishes to find their bearings in philosophy will have to go back to Aristotle. In him, they will find all the concepts that were derived from other sources of knowledge in earlier times, but they will find them processed and refined into a conceptual system. Above all, it is in Aristotle that we must seek the starting point of what we might call “science”—a science that, in this form, did not exist earlier in human development and could not have arisen. Anyone who can trace the development of humanity in this way using the methods of spiritual science knows that before Aristotle—of course, all this must be understood with a grain of salt—an Aristotelian logic was not conceivable in this form, because it was Aristotle who first created a corresponding technique of thought, a logic. As long as higher wisdom was imparted directly in the mysteries, there was no need for logic. Aristotle is, in a certain sense, also the unrivaled master of logic. Essentially, despite all the efforts of the 19th century, logic has not made much progress in any essential respects beyond what Aristotle had already provided.

[ 5 ] It would take us too far afield today to explain the reasons why philosophy could only emerge among humanity during this particular era, the time of Aristotle. Through anthroposophy, it will gradually become clear to many why a very specific era was necessary for the founding of philosophy.

[ 6 ] We then see how Aristotle was the dominant philosopher for long periods of time and, with brief interruptions—which to people today seem more like interruptions than they actually were—remains so to this day. All those active in other fields—say, Gnosticism, Platonism, or the ecclesiastical teachings of early Christianity—incorporated Aristotelian thought. And in a marvelous way, what Aristotle gave to humanity as the formal element of thought also spread throughout the West, where what the Church has to say is more or less clothed in the forms that Aristotle provided in his method of thought. Even though Aristotle’s philosophy was still disseminated in a very incomplete form in the West during the first centuries of Christianity’s spread, this was essentially because Aristotle’s writings were not available in the original language. But people thought in accordance with the technique of thinking developed by Aristotle.

[ 7 ] Aristotle spread throughout the East in a different way, only to return to the West via the Arabs. Thus, Aristotle became established in the West in two ways: first, through the Christian tradition, and second, through the tradition that gradually found its way into Western culture via the Arabs.

[ 8 ] It was during this period that Aristotelian thought flourished, marking the true high point of medieval philosophy—namely, the earliest form of what is called “Scholasticism,” specifically “Early Scholasticism.” Scholasticism existed essentially to be a philosophy of Christianity. It was compelled to incorporate Aristotle for two reasons: First, because of ancient traditions—people were simply accustomed to Aristotle; even the Platonists and Neoplatonists were, in terms of content, primarily Platonists, but in their method of reasoning they were often Aristotelians. But there was also another reason why Scholasticism had to rely on Aristotle, namely because Scholasticism was compelled to counter the influences of Arabism and, thereby, Eastern mysticism; thus, in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, Scholasticism took on the task of philosophically justifying Christianity in the face of the Arab intellectual tradition. The Arab scholars arrived with their wonderfully refined Aristotelian knowledge and attempted to attack Christianity from a wide variety of positions. If one wished to defend Christianity, one had to show that the Arabs were using the tools at their disposal in an incorrect manner. The issue was that the Arabs gave the impression that they alone possessed the correct Aristotelian way of thinking and therefore directed their attacks against Christianity based on this correct Aristotelian way of thinking. In the Arabs’ interpretation, it appeared as though anyone who stood on Aristotelian ground must necessarily be an opponent of Christianity.

[ 9 ] The philosophy of Thomas Aquinas arose in opposition to this endeavor. His aim was to show that, if Aristotle is understood correctly, it is precisely through Aristotelian thought that Christianity can be justified. Thus, on the one hand, there was the tradition of employing Aristotelian methods of thought; on the other hand, there was the necessity of correctly applying precisely these Aristotelian methods to counter the onslaught of Arab thought—a necessity that found expression in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas.

[ 10 ] Thus, we find a unique synthesis of Aristotelian thought in what initially constituted the essence of scholastic philosophy—a philosophy that has been much maligned but is scarcely understood today. Very soon, however, the time came when scholastic philosophy was no longer understood. And then came all manner of degenerations of Scholasticism—for example, the one commonly referred to as the intellectual movement of “nominalism,” whereas early Scholasticism was “realism.” It is due to this nominalism that Scholasticism soon became obsolete and fell into disrepute and oblivion. In a certain sense, nominalism is the father of all modern skepticism.

[ 11 ] It is a curious tangle of philosophical currents that we see emerging as we approach our modern era, all of which are essentially directed against Scholasticism. We still see a few thinkers who are firmly and competently grounded in the Aristotelian method of thought, but who are no longer entirely protected against the onslaught of modernity. Among them is Nicholas of Cusa.

[ 12 ] We then see, however, how Descartes salvages the last remnant that can be saved from this philosophical-methodological foundation. And on the other hand, we see how all the positive elements of Arabism—that type of philosophy which combined a more West-Eastern perspective with Aristotelianism—have become intertwined with that mode of thought we call “Kabbalistic.” Among the representatives of this school is Spinoza, who cannot be understood otherwise than by linking him, on the one hand, to Western-Eastern thought and, on the other, to Kabbalah. Any other discussion of Spinoza is a discussion in which one has no solid ground beneath one’s feet.

[ 13 ] But then “empiricism” took hold with great force, especially under the influence of Locke and Hume. And then we see how philosophy finds itself increasingly pitted against purely external, material research—the natural sciences—and how it gradually gives way to this kind of inquiry. We then see how philosophy becomes entangled in a web from which it is almost unable to extricate itself. This is a crucial point where modern philosophy becomes entangled—namely, with Kant! And in the post-Kantian era, we see great philosophers emerge—such as Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel—appearing like meteors, yet they are least understood by their own people. And we see how a brief, strange struggle takes place in thought to break free from the web into which Kantianism has ensnared the philosophers, how impossible it is for philosophy to to break free from it, and how German thought in particular suffers from a Kantianism that manifests itself in the most diverse forms—how even all the beautiful and grand attempts that are made are afflicted by Kantianism. Thus, we see a deficiency emerging throughout modern philosophy that has two sources: One is evident in the fact that in our philosophy departments—which believe they have more or less freed themselves from Kantianism—people are still struggling in Kant’s snares; the other is evident in the fact that philosophy suffers from a certain impossibility of asserting its position—which it ought to defend as philosophy—against the very short-sighted natural sciences.

[ 14 ] Not until our philosophy has freed itself from the snares of Kantianism and from everything that causes philosophy to falter in the face of the onslaught of the natural sciences—not until our more enlightened thinkers recognize how they can overcome these two obstacles standing in their way—can any salvation be expected in the field of philosophy. That is why the philosophical landscape, particularly within Germany, presents a truly dismal picture, and it is most lamentable to see, for example, how psychology is gradually retreating, how, for instance, people who are actually incapable of doing anything other than processing elementary matters in a somewhat philosophical manner—yet cannot rise above certain trivialities—enjoy such immense prestige, as is the case with Wundt. On the other hand, one must also recognize that minds such as Fechner—who could be inspiring if people were capable of judging him—are regarded by those who are mere dilettantes as a new Messiah. This was bound to happen and is not meant as a criticism.

[ 15 ] I would now like to begin with a concept that is closely connected to the web in which philosophy has become entangled since Kant—a concept that represents the fundamental flaw of the philosophical mind, a flaw that can be characterized by the following words: Philosophy has completely succumbed to subjectivism!

[ 16 ] If we want to understand Kant, we must first understand him historically. Kant’s philosophy is, in fact, entirely rooted in the history of the development of human imagination. Anyone familiar with Kant knows that the Kant of the 1850s—and even the 1860s—was entirely absorbed in what was then the most prevalent philosophy in Germany, what was called Wolf’s Enlightenment philosophy. In its outward form, it was often a tangled mass of empty ideas, but its spirit was still partly borrowed from old Leibnizianism. Here, however, we shall focus more on a brief characterization of Wolffianism. We can say that, for Wolffianism, the worldview breaks down into two kinds of truths: first, that of external perception and what human beings can derive from it; second, that which human beings can attain through pure thought: “a priori.” Thus, there was indeed a physics—an astronomy, a cosmology—derived from the observation of facts, and a rational physics—a rational astronomy—derived through pure thought. Wolff was well aware that human thought, without taking experience into account in any way, could construct—purely rationally, from within itself—knowledge about the nature of the world. This was knowledge derived from pure reason, “a priori,” whereas “a posteriori” was the knowledge derived from the sensible world, from mere understanding, and from experience. Similarly, for Wolff there were two psychologies: one in which the soul observed itself, and, in contrast, the other—rational psychology. And likewise, Wolff distinguished between a natural theology, which is based on revelation—on what has been handed down to us as revealed truth and is present as the supersensible in religious creeds—; from which he distinguished rational theology, which could be derived from pure reason—a priori—and which, for example, draws proofs of God’s existence from pure reason.

[ 17 ] Thus, all knowledge of that time was divided into that derived from pure reason and that derived from pure experience. Those who held this view were studying at all the universities at the time. Kant was also among them, even though he had already gone beyond it, as shown by one of his writings titled: “On the Concept of Introducing the Negative Quantity into the World.” He then became acquainted with the English skeptic Hume and thus learned about that form of skepticism which has a shattering effect on all rational cognition, especially on the notion of universal a priori validity—the law of causality. Hume says: There is nothing that can be gained through any a priori form of thought. It is simply a human habit to think that every fact must be understood as the effect of a cause. And so the entire rational framework is something to which one has become accustomed. Consequently, for Kant—who found something compelling in Hume—the ground was pulled out from under Wolffian rationalism, so that he concluded that knowledge is possible only through experience.

[ 18 ] This put Kant in a very peculiar predicament. His entire sensibility and intuition rebelled against the notion that there was, in fact, nothing absolutely certain. If one were to stand entirely on Hume’s ground, one would have to say: Certainly, we have seen that the sun rises in the morning and warms the stones, and from all the instances in which the sun rose in the morning and warmed the stones, we have concluded that there is a certain causal connection; but there is no necessity whatsoever that this conclusion be an absolute truth. - That is the Humean view. Kant, however, did not want to abandon absolute truth. It was also clear to him that no a priori statement is possible without experience. He therefore turned this last statement on its head and said: Certainly, it is true that without experience, humans can arrive at nothing; but does knowledge really stem from experience? — No, said Kant, there are mathematical judgments that are entirely independent of experience. If mathematical judgments were derived from experience, we could only say: they have held true so far, but whether they are correct, we do not know. - Kant then went on to say: The fact that we can make judgments such as mathematical ones depends on the organization of the subject at the very moment we make these judgments; we cannot think otherwise than in accordance with the laws of mathematics, and therefore all experience must conform to the realm of mathematical regularity. We thus have a world around us that we create according to the categories of our thought and our experiences. We begin with experience, but all of this has to do solely with our organization. We spread out the net of our organization, capture the material of experience according to the categories of intuition and understanding of our subjective organization, and ultimately see a worldview that we ourselves have woven in its form. [Gap in the postscript.]

[ 19 ] Since Kant, philosophy has become entangled in this subjectivism—except, to a certain extent, in the case of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel—this subjectivism which holds that human beings have a relationship with things only insofar as they make an impression on them. People have attributed more and more to Kantianism. Even Schopenhauer, who in his The World as Will and Representation truly goes somewhat beyond Kant, but also others to an even greater extent, have interpreted this Kantianism solely to mean that the “thing-in-itself” is completely inaccessible to human cognition, whereas, in contrast, everything that occurs in human beings—from the first sensory impression to the processing of impressions as knowledge—is merely an effect on the subject.

[ 20 ] You see that human beings are then, in essence, cut off from everything objective and are merely entangled in their own subjectivity. “Our world is not a world of things, but only a world of ideas,” says Schopenhauer. The thing is something that lies beyond the subject. The moment we know something, what we have before us is already our idea. The thing lies beyond the subject, in the trans-subjective. The world is my idea, and I move only within my ideas. This is the web in which philosophy has become entangled, and you will find it spread throughout the entire thought of the nineteenth century. And in the field of psychology, too, this way of thinking could lead to nothing other than conceiving what is given to us as something subjective. This is evident even in the individual sciences. Consider Helmholtz’s teachings. Helmholtz says: What is given to us is no longer merely an image, but only a sign of the real image; man must never claim that what he perceives bears any resemblance to reality.

[ 21 ] The entire history of subjectivism in the nineteenth century is an example of how people can lose their objectivity once they become entangled in a particular line of thought. Eduard von Hartmann’s “Transcendental Realism” is an example of this. It was impossible to talk to Eduard von Hartmann about the possibility that the world might not, after all, be merely “my idea.” He had become so entangled in this theory that it was virtually impossible to discuss any epistemological question with him objectively. He was completely unable to move beyond this definition: “The world is my idea.”

[ 22 ] Anyone who is fair-minded cannot deny that this subjectivism, which lies in the statement “The world is my representation,” has something immensely alluring about it. If you approach the matter from the perspective of the subject, you will say that if we wish to know, we must always be active. From the very first sensation to the final formation of the point in our field of vision that signifies “red,” we must be active. Were it not for the organization of our eye, “red” could never appear in our eye. So that, when you survey the field of experience, you find the activity of the subject within those experiences, and that therefore everything that falls within your cognition—viewed from the subject’s perspective—is produced by yourself. This is, in a certain sense, very significant: that a person must be active, right down to the very last little point, if they wish to know. [Gap in the postscript.] Human subjectivity comes into contact with the “thing-in-itself” there; wherever it comes into contact, it experiences an affect; you always experience only a modification of your own powers. Thus you become entangled; you do not go beyond the surface of the “thing-in-itself” at all. All you could ever achieve is to say: My own activity always comes into contact with the surface of the “thing-in-itself,” and everywhere I perceive only my own activity.

[ 23 ] I would like to present you with an image. This is an image that none of the subjectivist philosophers has really thought through yet. For if they did, they would find in this image the possibility of moving beyond subjectivity.

[ 24 ] You have a sheet of paper; you drip liquid sealing wax onto it and then press a seal into the wax. Now I ask you: What has happened here? There should be a name on the seal—let’s say “Müller.” Once you’ve stamped it, what’s on the seal is absolutely identical to what’s in the sealing wax. If you were to examine the entire sealing wax, you wouldn’t find even the slightest atom that had passed from the seal into the sealing wax. The two come into contact, and the name “Müller” appears. Imagine that the sealing wax were a sentient being and said: “I am sealing wax through and through; that is my essence—to be sealing wax. Out there, the seal is a ‘thing-in-itself’; not even the slightest bit of that ‘thing-in-itself’ can enter into me.” The substance of the brass remains entirely outside; and yet, when you remove the seal, the name “Müller”—which is what matters—is absolutely correct on the sealing wax. However, you cannot say that the sealing wax produced the name “Müller.” The name “Müller” would never have come into being if there had not been contact.

[ 25 ] What if the sealing wax could speak and say, “This impression is merely subjective!”? — This is essentially how all Kantians reason; they just do so through twists of thought that make it impossible for the ordinary person to recognize that the error in reasoning lies in something so simple.

[ 26 ] However, the seal impression matches the name engraved on the seal completely—that is, the essential element at issue here—apart from the fact that it is a mirror image, which is irrelevant in this context. Therefore, the impression and the imprint can be regarded as identical, at least with regard to the essential element—the name “Müller.” The same is true of the impressions we receive from the outside world; they are identical to the way things exist out there, that is, with regard to the essential element in both.

[ 27 ] The point is that the sealing wax could still say, “I do not recognize brass.” But that would mean that whatever contains the name “Müller” would also be recognized by its material nature. Yet that is not the point. You must distinguish between the refutation of Kantianism—Kantianism is, if this example is thought through to its conclusion, absolutely refuted—and the task of moving entirely beyond subjectivism altogether. And this raises the question: Can we now also find the Other—which is neither in the nature of the sealing wax nor in that of the brass, which transcends both, and will be a synthesis between objectivism and subjectivism? For the mere refutation of Kantianism is not enough.

[ 28 ] To answer this question, one must delve a little deeper into the issues. The reason modern philosophy has been unable to make any headway in this area is that it has lost its connection to a genuine technique of thought. Our question is now this: Is there anything in human beings that experience can demonstrate is not merely subjective? Or does only that which cannot transcend subjectivity exist within human beings?

[ 29 ] Had humanity been able to follow the straight path starting with Aristotle, it would never have become entangled in the web of Kantianism. The straight path—without the break in the Middle Ages—would have led to the realization that there is something supersubjective above the subjective. Humanity did not, however, proceed in a straight line from Aristotle; rather, it veered off onto a side track, and this deviation began as early as late Scholasticism as a result of the emergence of nominalism. It then continued to roll further and further down this wrong path until it finally found itself entangled in a veritable web with Kant. To extricate ourselves from this impasse, we must return to Aristotle and ask ourselves: Is there nothing that goes beyond the merely subjective, something that is, as it were, both subjective and objective?

[ 30 ] Let us consider how Aristotle approaches cognition. He distinguishes between cognition through the “senses” and cognition through the “intellect.” Cognition through the senses is directed toward the individual sensible object, while cognition through the intellect is directed toward distinguishing between “matter” and “form.” And Aristotle understands “form” to mean a great deal. Aristotle’s concept of form would first have to be properly brought back into human consciousness. An old friend of mine in Vienna always illustrated this to his students using an example. Matter is, in essence, not at all the essential aspect of a thing; rather, what constitutes the essential aspect of a thing for our intellect is “form.”

[ 31 ] “Let’s take a wolf,” said Vincenz Knauer—that was his name—“a wolf that always eats lambs. This wolf is essentially made of the same matter as the lambs. But no matter how many lambs it eats, it will never become a lamb. What makes the wolf a wolf is its ‘form.’ It cannot escape this form, even if its physical body is composed of lamb meat.”—The form is, in a certain sense, identical with the genus—but not with the mere conceptual designation of the genus. Modern man no longer distinguishes between these two things; but Aristotle still distinguished between them. If we take all wolves, the genus “wolf” underlies them all. This is what exists behind everything the senses perceive—as something real, active, and substantial. The—one might say—transcendental genus “wolf” is actually what transforms matter into existing wolves. Now let us suppose that the senses perceive a wolf. Behind what exists materially lies the world of forms, including the form “wolf,” which gives shape to the genus “wolf.” Human cognition perceives the genus and transforms it into the generic concept. For Aristotle, the generic concept is something that, by its very nature, exists only as an abstraction, as a subjective construct in the soul. But this generic concept is grounded in a reality, and that is the genus.

[ 32 ] If we are to make this distinction correctly in the Aristotelian sense, then we must say: All wolves are grounded in the genus from which they were “sprung,” the one that transformed the matter into wolves. And the human soul represents wolves in the concept, so that for Aristotle, the generic concept in the human soul is that which represents, in a spiritual way, what the genus is. How a person recognizes the genus in the generic concept depends entirely on the person, but not the reality of the genus.

[ 33 ] Thus we have a union between what exists only in the soul—the concept—and what exists in the realm of the transsubjective or the genus. This is absolute realism, without falling into the error committed by Plato, who subjectivizes genera and regards them as a kind of transsubjective power. He conceives the generic concept once again as the essence existing in itself, whereas it is merely the mental expression of the transcendental reality “genus.”

[ 34 ] From here, we then turn to the task of early Scholasticism, which, after all, had the very specific task of justifying Christianity. Here, however, we wish only to touch briefly on the epistemological foundation of early Scholasticism. It is based entirely on the premise that human beings know nothing other than their own concepts. It is true that we perceive through concepts, but what we conceive is not “the concept” itself, but rather the object of the concept. The “concept” is an imprint within the subject, and need not be anything more than that. The point here is that you correctly understand the relationship between subject and object in the early Scholastic sense. Everything that is known depends entirely on the form of the human mind. Nothing can enter the soul or leave it that does not originate from the very organization of the soul itself. But what originally underlies the soul’s activity arises through the soul’s contact with the object. And it is through the subject’s contact with the object that the formation of the idea is made possible. Therefore, early scholasticism held that a person does not “conceive” his representations, but rather that his representations “represent” the thing to him. If you wish to arrive at the content of the representation, you must seek the content of the representation in the thing itself.

[ 35 ] However, as you can see from this example: To grasp scholastic concepts requires acuity and subtle distinction—qualities that are usually lacking in those who simply condemn scholasticism out of hand. One must certainly engage with statements such as: “I conceive” or “My concepts represent a content, and that content originates from the object.” Modern people want to dismiss all concepts out of hand, just as they arise for them from everyday life. That is why the scholastics all appear to them as academic tricksters. In a certain sense, they are just that, for they were precisely concerned with ensuring that people first learned something: a discipline of thought. The scholastics’ technique of thought is one of the strictest that has ever appeared in human history.

[ 36 ] Thus, in everything that a person perceives, we find a web of concepts that the soul derives from objects. There is a subtle scholastic definition: In everything that a person holds in this way as ideas and concepts within their soul, the object represented by them exists in the manner of the soul. “In what is known, the objective exists in the manner of the soul.” Down to the very last detail, everything is the work of the soul. Although the soul has everything represented within itself according to its own nature, at the same time the object is [connected] to it.

[ 37 ] Now the question is this: How do we move beyond subjectivism today? Had we followed the direct path laid out by Aristotle, we would have moved beyond subjectivism. However, for deeper reasons, this direct path could not be taken. The early days of Christianity could not immediately produce the highest form of cognition through thought. In the first centuries, something else lived in people’s souls, which is precisely why Scholasticism was unable [gap in the postscript] to transcend the subjective.

[ 38 ] We can easily understand how to move beyond subjectivism if, following the example of the Scholastics, we clarify the difference between a concept and a representation. What is this difference? We can understand it most easily by considering a circle. We can form the representation of a circle by sailing out to sea in a boat until we reach a point where we see the vault of the sky resting on the horizon all around us. There we have formed the representation of a circle. We can also form the representation of a circle by tying a stone to a string and swinging it around. Or, more crudely, we can form this representation using a wagon wheel. Now you have derived the circle from your imagination in all these ways. There is, however, another way to arrive at the circle—the way in which you derive the circle through purely internal construction, by saying: The circle is a curved line in which every point is equidistant from a center. —You have constructed this concept yourself, though in doing so you have not described yourself.

[ 39 ] You can acquire the representation through experience; you arrive at the concept through inner construction. The representation still has to do with subject and object. At the moment when a person constructs something internally, the distinction between subject and object is irrelevant to what has been constructed internally. Whether you actually construct a circle is absolutely irrelevant to the nature of the circle. The nature of the circle, insofar as we arrive at it through internal construction, is transcendent of subject and object.

[ 40 ] However, modern man does not have much that he can construct in this way. Goethe attempted to form such [inner constructions even for higher realms of natural existence. In doing so, he arrived at his “archetypes” and his “archephenomena”].

[ 41 ] In such an inner process of construction, the subject rises above itself; it transcends subjectivity. To return to that image, it penetrates—like sealing wax, as it were—into the substance of the seal.

[ 42 ] It is only in such pure thinking, free from sensuality, that the subject merges with its object. This high level could not be attained immediately. Human beings first had to pass through an intermediate stage. Up to a certain point, human beings worked directly from the spiritual world; they did not think for themselves, but received everything from the mysteries. Thought only emerges at a certain point in time. For this reason, logic, too, is only developed at a certain point in time. The ability to develop pure, senseless thinking was only attained at a certain stage of development. This form was—in principle—already attained in the nineteenth century by thinkers such as Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. And we must continue to develop it in the more intimate realms through spiritual science. Spiritual research must once again be grounded in pure, senseless thinking, as it was, for example, lived and expressed in the Rosicrucian schools. In earlier periods of human development, people were introduced to the deeper mysteries of existence by initiates. Now they must train themselves to gradually work out these things on their own. In the meantime, the task was to maintain the connection with the divine world. So that Christianity could mature undisturbed, knowledge of the supersensible had to be withdrawn from human inquiry for a certain time. People were to learn to believe, even without knowing. Therefore, Christianity relied for a time on faith alone. People were to allow the idea to mature undisturbed. This is why you find the union of faith and knowledge in Scholasticism. In Scholasticism, the concept is intended solely as a firm foundation for what, with regard to the supersensible, was to be left for a certain time to what had been bestowed upon it through revelation. This is the standpoint of Scholasticism: to remove matters of revelation from the realm of criticism until human thinking has matured. The foster father who provided thought with its methodology was, of course, Aristotle. But this thinking was first to be trained on firm foundations of external reality.

[ 43 ] Today, the issue is understanding the spirit of Scholasticism in contrast to what dogma is. This spirit can only be recognized in the fact that what was beyond the reach of judgment remained the object of supernatural revelation, whereas the consequence of rational cognition was that human beings themselves were to arrive at productive concepts [from the world of sensory experience]—at that which is imperishable within it. This method of constructing concepts was meant to endure—and it is precisely this method that modern philosophy has completely lost. Nominalism has taken hold of modern philosophy by asserting: The concepts formed according to the nature of the soul are mere names. The connection to the real had been completely lost because the instrument of those who no longer properly understood Scholasticism had become dulled. Early Scholasticism sought to sharpen thought along the thread of experience [for the supersensible-real]. But then others came along who clung to the data of experience, even though reason was meant only to be trained by them. And then came the movement that declared: “The supersensible must forever be removed from all human rational knowledge!”—And according to Luther’s statement, reason is “the blind, deaf, and mad fool.”

[ 44 ] Here we see the starting point of that great dichotomy between what one can know and what one can believe; and Kantianism arose, in a mysterious way, from this entirely one-sided, nominalistic school of thought. For, when it comes down to it, what Kant wanted was nothing other than to show that reason, when left to itself, is indeed “the blind, deaf, and mad fool.” If this reason dares to cross the boundaries that it itself has first laid down in [... gap in the postscript], then it is the “blind fool.” In the one-sided development of [nominalist] thought, we see the web taking shape into which Kantianism has entangled itself. Knowledge is bound to external experience, to which even its own limits are now prescribed. And faith [gap in the postscript].

[ 45 ] Bringing philosophy back on the right track is a task that only the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science will be able to accomplish.