The
Significance of Thomism in the Present
Dornach, 24 May 1920
Yesterday at the end of the considerations
about High Scholasticism, I attempted to point out that the
most essential of a current of thought are problems that made
themselves known in a particular way in the human being. They
culminated in a certain yearning to understand: how does the
human being attain that knowledge which is necessary for life,
and how does this knowledge fit into that which controlled the
minds in those days in social respect, how the knowledge does
fit into the religious contents of the western
church?
The scholastics were concerned with the
human individuality at first who was no longer able to carry up
the intellectual life to concrete spiritual contents, as it
still shone from that which had remained from Neo-Platonism,
from the Areopagite and Scotus Eriugena. I have also already
pointed to the fact that the impulses of High Scholasticism
lived on in a way. However, they lived on in such a way that
one may say, the problems themselves are big and immense, and
the way in which one put them had a lasting effect. These
should be just the contents of the today's consideration
— the
biggest problem, the relationship of the human being to the
sensory and the spiritual realities, still continues to have an
effect even if in quite changed methodical form and even if one
does not note it, even if it has apparently taken on a quite
different form. All that is still in the intellectual
activities of the present, but substantially transformed by
that which significant personalities have contributed to the
European development in the philosophical area in the
meantime.
We also realise if we consider the
Franciscan Monk Duns Scotus (~1266-1308) who taught in the beginning of
the fourteenth century in Paris, later in Cologne, that as it
were the problem becomes too big even for the excellent
intellectual technique of scholasticism.
Duns Scotus feels confronted with the
question: how does the human soul live in the human-body?
Thomas Aquinas still imagined that the soul worked on the
totality of the bodily. So that the human being is only
equipped indeed, if he enters into the physical-sensory
existence, by the physical-bodily heredity with the vegetative
forces, with the mineral forces and with the forces of sensory
perceptivity that, however, without pre-existence the real
intellect integrates into the human being which Aristotle
called nous poietikos. This nous poietikos now soaks up as it
were the whole mental —
the vegetative mental, the animal
mental — and intersperses the corporeality only to transform it
in its sense in order to live on then immortal with that which
it has obtained —
after it had entered into the human body
from eternal heights but without pre-existence
— from
this human body.
Duns Scotus cannot imagine that the active
intellect soaks up the entire human system of forces. He can
only imagine that the human corporeality is something finished
that in a certain independent way the vegetative and animal
principles remain the entire life through, then it is taken off
at death and that only the actually spiritual principle,
the intellectus
agens, goes over to immortality.
Scotus cannot imagine like Thomas Aquinas that the whole body
is interspersed with soul and spirit because to him the human
mind had become something abstract, something that did no
longer represent the spiritual world to him but that seemed to
him to be gained only from consideration, from sense
perception. He could no longer imagine that only in the
universals, in the ideas that would be given which would prove
reality. He became addicted to nominalism — as later his
follower Ockham (William of O.,
~1288-1347) did
— to the
view that ideas, as general concepts in the human being are
only conceived from the sensory environment that it is,
actually, only something that lives as names, as words in the
human mind, I would like to say, for the sake of comfortable
subsumption of existence. Briefly, he returned to
nominalism.
This is a significant fact, because one
realises that nominalism, as it appeared, for example, with
Roscelin of Compiègne — to whom even the
Trinity disintegrated because of his nominalism-, is only
interrupted by the intensive work of thought of Albert the
Great and Thomas Aquinas and some others. Then the European
humanity falls again back into nominalism which is incapable to
grasp that which it has as ideas as spiritual reality, as
something that lives in the human being and in a way in the
things. The ideas become from realities straight away again
names, mere empty abstractions.
One realises which difficulties the
European thinking had more and more if it put the question of
knowledge. Since we human beings have to get knowledge from
ideas — at least in the beginning of cognition. The big
question has to arise repeatedly: how do the ideas provide
reality? However, there is no possibility of an answer if the
ideas appear only as names without reality. The ideas that were
the last manifestations of a real spiritual world coming down
from above to the ancient initiated Greeks became more and more
abstract. We realise this process of abstracting, of equating
the ideas with words increasing more and more if we pursue the
development of western thinking.
Single personalities outstand later, as for
example Leibniz (Gottfried Wilhelm L., 1646-1716) who does not
get involved in the question, how does one recognise by ideas,
because he is quite traditionally still in the possession of a
certain spiritual view and leads everything back to individual
monads which are actually spiritual. Leibniz towers above the
others, while he still has the courage to imagine the world as
spiritual. Yes, the world is spiritual to him; it consists of
nothing but spiritual beings. However, I would like to say what
was to former times differentiated spiritual individualities
are to Leibniz more or less gradually differentiated spiritual
points, monads. The spiritual individuality is confirmed, but
it is confirmed only in the form of the monad, in the form of a
spiritual punctiform being.
If we disregard Leibniz, we see, indeed, a
strong struggle for certainty of the primal grounds of
existence, but the incapacity everywhere at the same time to
solve the nominalism problem. This becomes obvious with the
thinker who is put rightly at the starting point of modern
philosophy, Descartes (1596-1650) who lived in the beginning or
in the first half of the seventeenth century. Everywhere in the
history of philosophy one gets to know the real cornerstone of
his philosophy with the proposition: cogito ergo sum, I think,
therefore, I am. —
One can note something of Augustine's
pursuit in this proposition. Since Augustine struggles from
that doubt of which I have spoken in the first talk, while he
says to himself, I can doubt everything, but, the fact
of doubting exists, and, nevertheless, I live, while I doubt. I
can doubt that sensory things are round me, I can doubt that
God exists that clouds are there that stars are there, but if I
doubt, the doubt is there. I cannot doubt that which goes
forward in my own soul. One can grasp a sure starting point
there. — Descartes resumes this thought, I think,
therefore, I am.
Of course, with such things you expose
yourself to serious misunderstandings if you are compelled to
put something simple against something historically respected.
It is still necessary. Descartes and many of his successors
have in mind: if I have mental contents in my consciousness if
I think, then one cannot deny the fact that I think; therefore,
I am, therefore, my being is confirmed with my thinking. I am
rooted as it were in the world being, while I have confirmed my
being with my thinking.
The modern philosophy begins with it as
intellectualism, as rationalism that completely wants to work
from the thinking and is in this respect only the echo of
scholasticism. One realises two things with Descartes. First,
one has to make a simple objection to him: do I understand my
being because I think? Every night sleep proves the
opposite. —
This is just that simple objection which
one has to make: we know every morning when we wake, we have
existed from the evening up to the morning, but we have not
thought. Thus, the proposition, I think, therefore, I am, is
simply disproved. One has to make this simple objection, which
is like the egg of Columbus, to a respected proposition that
has found many supporters.
However, the second question is, at
which does Descartes aim philosophically? He aims no longer at
vision, he aims no longer at receiving a world secret for the
consciousness, and he is oriented in intellectualistic way. He
asks, how do I attain certainty? How do I come out of doubt?
How do I find out that things exist and that I myself exist?
— It is no longer a material question, a question of the
content-related result of world observation; it is a question
of confirming knowledge.
This question arises from the nominalism of
the scholastics, which only Albert and Thomas had overcome for
some time, which reappears after them straight away. Thus, that
presents itself to the people which they have in their souls
and to which they can attribute a name only to find a point
somewhere in the soul from which they can get no worldview but
the certainty that not everything is illusion, that they look
at the world and look at something real, that they look into
the soul and look at reality.
In all that one can clearly perceive that
to which I have pointed yesterday at the end, namely that the
human individuality got to intellectualism, but did not yet
feel the Christ problem in intellectualism. The Christ problem
possibly appears to Augustine, while he still looks at the
whole humanity. Christ dawns, I would like to say, in the
Christian mystics of the Middle Ages; but He does not dawn with
those who wanted to find Him with thinking only which is so
necessary to the developing individuality, or with that which
would arise to this thinking. This thinking appears in its
original state in such a way that it emerges from the human
soul that it rejects that which should just be the Christian or
the core of the human being. It rejects the inner
metamorphosis; it refuses to position itself to the cognitive
life so that one would say to himself, yes, I think, I think
about the world and myself at first. However, this thinking is
not yet developed. This is the thinking after the Fall of Man.
It has to tower above itself. It has to change; it has to raise
itself into a higher sphere.
Actually, this necessity appeared only once
clearly in a thinker, in Spinoza (Benedictus Baruch S.,
1632-1677), the successor of Descartes. With good reason,
Spinoza made a deep impression on persons like Herder and
Goethe. Since Spinoza understands this intellectualism in such
a way that the human being gets finally to truth
— which
exists for Spinoza in a kind of intuition, while he changes the
intellectual, does not stop at that which is there in the
everyday life and in the usual scientific life. Spinoza just
says to himself, by the development of thinking this thinking
fills up again with spiritual contents. — We got to know in
Plotinism, the spiritual world arises again to the thinking as
it were if this thinking strives for the spirit. The spirit
fulfils as intuition our thinking again.
It is very interesting that just Spinoza
says, we survey the world existence as it advances in spirit in
its highest substance while we take up this spirit in the soul,
while we rise with our thinking to intuition, while we are so
intellectualistic on one side that we prove as one proves
mathematically, but develop in proving at the same time and
rise, so that the spirit can meet us. —
If we rise in such a way, we also
understand from this viewpoint the historical development of
that what is contained in the development of humanity. It is
strange to find the following sentence with a Jew, Spinoza, the highest
revelation of the divine substance is given in Christ.
— In
Christ the intuition has become theophany, the
incarnation of God, hence, Christ's voice is God's voice and
the way of salvation. — The Jew Spinoza thinks that the
human being can develop from his intellectualism in such a way
that the spirit is coming up to meet him. If he can then turn
to the Mystery of Golgotha, the fulfilment with spirit becomes
not only intuition, that is appearance of the spirit by
thinking, but it changes intuition into theophany, into the
appearance of God himself. The human being faces God
spiritually. One would like to say, Spinoza did not withhold
that what he had suddenly realised, because this quotation
proves that. It fulfils like a mood what he found out from the
development of humanity this way; it fulfils his
Ethics.
Again, it devolves upon a receptive person.
Therefore, one can realise that for somebody like Goethe who
could read most certainly between the lines of the
Ethics this book became principal. Nevertheless, these
things do not want to be considered only in the abstract as one
does normally in the history of philosophy; they want to be
considered from the human viewpoint, and one must already look
at that which shines from Spinozism into Goethe's soul.
However, that which shines there only between the lines of
Spinoza is something that did not become time dominating in the
end but the incapacity to get beyond nominalism.
Nominalism develops at first in such a way
that one would like to say, the human being becomes more and
more entangled in the thought: I live in something that cannot
grasp the outside world, in something that is not able to go
out from me to delve into the outside world and to take up
something of the nature of the outside world.
— That is
why this mood that one is so alone in himself that one cannot
get beyond himself and does not receive anything from the
outside world appears already with Locke (John L., 1612-1704)
in the seventeenth century. He says, what we perceive as
colours, as tones in the outside world is no longer anything
that leads us to the reality of the outside world; it is only
the effect of the outside world on our senses, it is something
with which we are entangled also in our own
subjectivity. —
This is one side of the matter.
The other side of the matter is that with
such spirits like Francis Bacon (1561-1626) nominalism becomes
a quite pervasive worldview in the sixteenth, seventeenth
centuries. For he says, one has to do away with the
superstition that one considers that as reality which is only a
name. There is reality only if we look out at the sensory
world. The senses only deliver realities in the empiric
knowledge. —
Beside these realities, those realities do
no longer play a scientific role for whose sake Albert and
Thomas had designed their epistemology. The spiritual world had
vanished to Bacon and changed into something that cannot emerge
with scientific certainty from the inside of the human being.
Only religious contents become that what is a spiritual world,
which one should not touch with knowledge. Against it, one
should attain knowledge only from outer observation and
experiments.
That continues this way up to Hume (David
H., 1711-1776) in the eighteenth century to whom even the
coherence of cause and effect is something that exists only in
the human subjectivity that the human being adds only to the
things habitually. One realises that nominalism, the heritage
of scholasticism, presses like a nightmare on the human
beings.
The most important sign of this development
is that scholasticism with its astuteness stands there that it
originates in a time when that which is accessible to the
intellect should be separated from the truths of a spiritual
world. The scholastic had the task on one side to look at the
truths of a spiritual world, which the religious contents
deliver of course, the revelation contents of the church. On
the other side, he had to look at that which can arise by own
strength from human knowledge. The viewpoint of the scholastics
missed changing that border which the time evolution would
simply have necessitated. When Thomas and Albert had to develop
their philosophy, there was still no scientific worldview.
Galilei, Giordano Bruno, Copernicus, and Kepler had not yet
worked; the intellectual view of the human being at the outer
nature did not yet exist. There one did not have to deal with
that which the human intellect can find from the depths of his
soul, and which one gains from the outer sensory world. There
one had to deal with that only which one has to find with the
intellect from the depths of the soul in relation to the
spiritual truths that the church had delivered, as they faced
the human beings who could no longer rise by inner spiritual
development to the real wisdoms who, however, realised them in
the figure that the church had delivered, just simply as
tradition, as contents of the scriptures and so on.
Does there not arise the question: how do
the intellectual contents relate — that which Albert
and Thomas had developed as epistemology — to the contents of
the scientific worldview? One would like to say, this is an
unconscious struggle up to the nineteenth century. There we
realise something very strange. We look back at the thirteenth
century and see Albert and Thomas teaching humanity about the
borders of intellectual knowledge compared with faith, with the
contents of revelation. They show one by one: the contents of
revelation are there, but they arise only up to a certain part
of the human intellectual knowledge, they remain beyond this
intellectual knowledge, there remains a world riddle to this
knowledge. —
We can enumerate these world riddles: the
incarnation, the existence of the spirit in the sacrament of
the altar and so on —
they are beyond the border of human
cognition. For Albert and Thomas it is in such a way that the
human being is on the one side, the border of knowledge
surrounds him as it were and he cannot behold into the
spiritual world. This arises to the thirteenth
century.
Now we look at the nineteenth century.
There we see a strange fact, too: during the seventies, at a
famous meeting of naturalists in Leipzig, Emil Du Bois-Reymond
(1818-1896) holds his impressive speech On the Borders of the Knowledge of Nature
and shortly after about the
Seven World
Riddles. What has become there
the question? (Steiner
draws.) There is the human
being, there is the border of knowledge; however, the
material world is beyond this border, there are the atoms,
there is that about which Du Bois-Reymond says, one does not
know that which haunts as matter in space. — On this side
of the border is that which develops in the human soul.
Even if — compared to the
imposing work of scholasticism — it is a trifle which
faces us there, nevertheless, it is the true counterpart: there
the question of the riddles of the spiritual world, here the
question of the riddles of the material world; here the border
between the human being and the atoms, there the border between
the human being and the angels and God. We have to look into
this period if we want to recognise what scholasticism
entailed. There Kant's philosophy emerges, influenced by Hume,
which influences the philosophers even today. After Kant's
philosophy had taken a backseat, the German philosophers took
the slogan in the sixties, back to Kant! Since that time an
incalculable Kant literature was published, also numerous
independent Kantian thinkers like Johannes Volkelt (1848-1930)
and Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) appeared.
Of course, we can characterise Kant only
sketchily today. We want only to point to the essentials. I
believe that someone who studies Kant really can understand him
in such a way, as I tried to understand him in my
booklet Truth and
Science. Kant faces no question
of the contents of the worldview with might and main in the end
of the sixties and in the beginning of the seventies years of
the eighteenth century, not anything that would have appeared
in certain figures, pictures, concepts, ideas of the things
with him, but he faces the formal question of knowledge: how do
we get certainty of something in the outside world, of any
existence in the outside world? — The question of
certainty of knowledge torments Kant more than any contents of
knowledge. I mean, one should even feel this if one deals with
Kant's Critique
that these are not the contents of
knowledge, but that Kant strives for a principle of the
certainty of knowledge. Nevertheless, read the
Critique of Pure
Reason, the Critique of Practical Reason, and realise —
after the classical chapter about space and
time — how he deals with the categories, one would like to say
how he enumerates them purely pedantically in order to get a
certain completeness. Really, the Critique of Pure Reason does not proceed in such a way, as with somebody who
writes from sentence to sentence with lifeblood.
To Kant the question is more important how
the concepts relate to an outer reality than the contents of
knowledge themselves. He pieces the contents together, so to
speak, from everything that is delivered to him
philosophically. He schematises, he systematises. However,
everywhere the question appears, how does one get to such
certainty, as it exists in mathematics? He gets to such
certainty in a way which is strictly
speaking nothing but a transformed and on top of that
exceptionally concealed and disguised nominalism, which he
expands also to the sensory forms, to space and time except the
ideas, the universals. He says, that which we develop in our
soul as contents of knowledge does not deal at all with
something that we get out of the things. We put it on the
things. We get out the whole form of our knowledge from
ourselves. If we say, A is connected with B after the principle
of causation, this principle of causation is only in us. We put
it on A and B, on both contents of experience. We bring the
causality into the things.
With other words, as paradox this sounds,
nevertheless, one has to say of these paradoxes, Kant searches
a principle of certainty while he generally denies that we take
the contents of our knowledge from the things, and states that
we take them from ourselves and put them into the things. That
is in other words, and this is just the paradox: we have truth
because we ourselves make it; we have truth in the subject
because we ourselves produce it. We bring truth only into the
things.
There you have the last consequence of
nominalism. Scholasticism struggled with the universals, with
the question: how does that live outdoors in the world what we
take up in the ideas? It could not really solve the problem
that would have become provisionally completely satisfactory.
Kant says, well, the ideas are mere names, nomina. We form them
only in ourselves, but we put them as names on the things;
thereby they become reality. They may not be reality for long,
but while I confront the things, I put the nomina into
experience and make them realities, because experience must be
in such a way as I dictate it with the nomina.
Kantianism is in a way the extreme point of
nominalism, in a way the extreme decline of western philosophy,
the complete bankruptcy of the human being concerning his
pursuit of truth, the desperation of getting truth anyhow from
the things. Hence, the dictates: truth can only exist if we
bring it into the things. Kant destroyed any objectivity, any
possibility of the human being to submerge in the reality of
the things. Kant destroyed any possible knowledge, any possible
pursuit of truth, because truth cannot exist if it is created
only in the subject.
This is a consequence of scholasticism
because it could not come into the other side where the other
border arose which it had to overcome. Because the scientific
age emerged and scholasticism did not carry out the volte-face
to natural sciences, Kantianism appeared which took
subjectivity as starting point and gave rise to the so-called
postulates freedom, immortality, and the idea of God. We shall
do the good, fulfil the categorical imperative, and then we
must be able to do it. That is we must be free, but we are not
able to do it, while we live here in the physical body. We
reach perfection only, so that we can completely carry out the
categorical imperative if we are beyond the body. That is why
immortality must exist. However, we cannot yet realise that as
human beings. A deity has to integrate that which is the
contents of our action in the world — if we take pains of
that what we have to do. That is why a deity must
exist.
Three religious postulates about which one
cannot know how they are rooted in reality are that which Kant
saved after his own remark: I had to remove knowledge to get
place for faith. —
Kant does not get place for religious
contents in the sense of Thomas Aquinas, for traditional
religious contents, but for abstract religious contents that
just originate in the individual human being who dictates
truth, that is appearance.
With it, Kant becomes the executor of
nominalism. He becomes the philosopher who denies the human
being everything that this human being could have to submerge
in any reality. Hence, Fichte, Schelling, and then Hegel
immediately reacted against Kant. Thus, Fichte wanted to get
everything that Kant had determined as an illusory world or as
a world of appearances from the real creative ego that he
imagined, however, to be rooted in the being of the world.
Fichte was urged to strive for a more intensive, to a more and
more mystic experience of the soul to get beyond Kantianism. He
could not believe at all that Kant meant that which is included
in his Critiques. In the
beginning, with a certain philosophical naivety he believed
that he drew the last consequence of Kant's philosophy. If one
did not draw these last consequences, Fichte thought, one would
have to believe that the strangest chance would have pieced
this philosophy together but not a humanely thinking
head.
All that is beyond that which approaches
with the emerging natural sciences that appear like a reaction
just in the middle of the nineteenth century that strictly
speaking understand nothing of philosophy, which degenerated,
hence, with many thinkers into crass materialism. Thus, we
realise how philosophy develops in the last third of the
nineteenth century. We see this philosophical pursuit
completely arriving at nullity, and then we realise how
— from
everything possible that one attaches to Kantianism and the
like — one attempts to understand the essentials of the world.
The Goethean worldview which would have been so significant if
one had grasped it, got completely lost, actually, as a
worldview of the nineteenth century, with the exception of
those spirits who followed Schelling, Hegel and Fichte. Since
in this Goethean worldview the beginning of that is contained
which must originate from Thomism, only with the volte-face to
natural sciences.
Thomas could state only in the abstract
that the mental-spiritual really works into the last activities
of the human organs. In abstract form, Thomas Aquinas expressed
that everything that lives in the human body is directed by the
mental and must be recognised by the mental. Goethe started
with the volte-face and made the first ground with his
Theory of Colours, which people do not at all understand, and with his
“morphology.” However, the complete
fulfilment of Goetheanism is given only if one has spiritual
science that clarifies the scientific facts by its own
efforts.
Some weeks ago, I tried here to explain how
our spiritual science could be a corrective of natural
sciences, we say, concerning the function of the heart. The
mechanical-materialist view considers the heart as a pump that
pushes the blood through the human body. However, it is quite
the contrary. The blood circulation is something living
— embryology can prove that precisely -, and it is set in
motion by the internally moved blood. The heart takes the blood
activity into the entire human individuality. The activity of
the heart is a result of the blood activity, not vice versa.
Thus, one can show concerning the single organs of the body how
the comprehension of the human being as a spiritual being only
explains his material existence. One can do something real in a
way that Thomism had in mind in abstract form that said there,
the spiritual-mental penetrates everything bodily. This becomes
concrete knowledge. The Thomistic philosophy lives on as
spiritual science in our present.
I would like to insert a personal
experience here. When I spoke in the Viennese Goethe
Association about the topic Goethe as Father of a New
Aesthetics, there was a very
sophisticated Cistercian among the listeners. I explained how
one has to imagine Goethe's idea of art, and this Cistercian,
Father Wilhelm Neumann (1837-1919), professor at the
theological faculty of the Vienna University, said something
strange, you can find the origins of your talk already with
Thomas Aquinas. —
Nevertheless, it was interesting to me to
hear from him who was well versed in Thomism that he felt that
in Thomism is a kind of origin of that which I had said about
the consequence of the Goethean worldview concerning
aesthetics.
One has already to say, the things,
considered according to truth, appear absolutely different than
they present themselves to the history of philosophy under the
influence of an unconscious nominalistic worldview which goes
back largely to Kant and the modern physiology. Thus, you would
find many a thing if you referred to spiritual science. Read in
my book The Riddles of the
Soul which appeared some years
ago how I tried there to divide the human being on the basis
of thirty-year studies into three
systems; how one system of the human physical body is
associated with sense-perception and thinking, how the
rhythmical system, breathing and heart activity, is associated
with feeling, how metabolism is associated with the will.
Everywhere I attempted to find the spiritual-mental in its
creating in the physical. That is, I took the volte-face to
natural sciences seriously. One tries to penetrate into the
area of natural existence after the age of natural sciences, as
before the age of scholasticism — we have realised it
with the Areopagite and with Plotinus — one penetrated from
the human knowledge into the spiritual area. One takes the
Christ principle seriously as one would have taken the Christ
principle seriously if one had said, the human thinking can
change, so that it can penetrate if it casts off the original
sin of the limits of knowledge and if it rises up by thinking
free of sensuousness to the spiritual world — after the
volte-face. What manifests as nature can be penetrated as the
veil of physical existence. One penetrates beyond the limits of
knowledge which a dualism assumed, as well as the scholastics
drew the line at the other side. One penetrates into this
material world and discovers that it is, actually, the
spiritual one that behind the veil of nature no material atoms
are in truth but spiritual beings.
This shows how one thinks progressively
about a further development of Thomism. Look for the most
important psychological thoughts of Albert and Thomas in their
abstractness. However, they did not penetrate into the
human-bodily, so that they said how the mind or the soul work
on the organs, but they already pointed to the fact that one
has to imagine the whole human body as the result of the
spiritual-mental.
The continuation of this thought is the
work to pursue the spiritual-mental down to the details of the
bodily. Neither philosophy nor natural sciences do this, only
spiritual science will do it, which does not shy away from
applying the great thoughts like those of High Scholasticism to
the views of nature of our time. However, for that an
engagement with Kantianism was inevitable if the thing should
scientifically persist.
I tried this engagement with Kantianism
first in my writings Truth and
Science and Epistemology of Goethe's Worldview
and, in the end, in my Philosophy of Freedom. Only quite briefly, I would like to defer to the
basic idea of these books.
These writings take their starting point
from the fact that one cannot directly find truth in the world
of sense perception. One realises in a way in which nominalism
takes hold in the human soul how it can accept the wrong
consequence of Kantianism, but how Kant did not realise that
which was taken seriously in these books. This is that a
consideration of the world of perception leads
— if one
does it quite objectively and thoroughly — to the conclusion:
the world of perception is not a whole, it is something that we
make a reality.
In what way did the difficulty of
nominalism originate? Where did the whole Kantianism originate?
Because one takes the world of perception, and then the soul
life puts the world of ideas upon it. Now one has the view, as
if this world of ideas should depict the outer perception.
However, the world of ideas is inside. What does this inner
world of ideas deal with that which is there outdoors? Kant
could answer this question only, while he said, so we just put
the world of perception on the world of ideas, so we get
truth.
The thing is not in such a way. The thing
is that — if we look at perception impartially
— it is
not complete, everywhere it is not concluded. I tried to prove
this strictly at first in my book Truth and Science,
then in my book Philosophy of
Freedom. The perception is
everywhere in such a way that it appears as something
incomplete. While we are born in the world, we split the world.
The thing is that we have the world contents here
(Steiner draws). While we place ourselves as human beings in the
world, we separate the world contents into a world of
perception that appears to us from the outside and into the
world of ideas that appears to us inside of our soul. Someone
who regards this separation as an absolute one who simply says,
there is the world, there I am cannot get over with his world
of ideas to the world of perception. However, the case is this:
I look at the world of perception; everywhere it is not
complete in itself, something is absent everywhere. However, I
myself have come with my whole being from the world to which
also the world of perception belongs. There I look into myself:
what I see by myself is just that which the world of perception
does not have. I have to unite that which separated in two
parts by my own existence. I create reality.
Because I am born, appearance comes into
being while that which is one separates into perception and the
world of ideas. Because I live, I bring together two currents
of reality. In my cognitive experience, I work the way up into
reality. I would never have got to a consciousness if I had not
split off the world of ideas from the world of perception while
entering into the world. However, I would never find the bridge
to the world if I did not combine the world of ideas that I
have split off again with that which is not reality without the
world of ideas.
Kant searches reality only in the outer
perception and does not guess that the other half of reality is
just in that which we carry in ourselves. We have taken that
which we carry as world of ideas in ourselves only from the
outer reality. Now we have solved the problem of nominalism,
because we do not put space, time, and ideas, which would be
mere names, upon the outer perception, but now we give back the
perception what we had taken from it when we entered into the
sensory existence.
Thus, we have the relationship of the human
being to the spiritual world at first in a purely philosophical
form. Someone is just overcoming Kantianism who takes up this
basic idea of my Philosophy of
Freedom, which the title of the
writing Truth and
Science already expresses: the
fact that real science combines perception and the world of
ideas and regards this combining as a real process. However, he
is just coping with the problem which nominalism had produced
which faced the separation into perception and the world of
ideas powerlessly.
One approaches this problem of
individuality in the ethical area. Therefore, my
Philosophy of Freedom
became a philosophy of reality. While
cognition is not only a formal act but also a process of
reality, the moral action presents itself as an outflow of that
which the individual experiences as intuition by moral
imagination. The ethical individualism originates this way as I
have shown in the second part of my Philosophy of Freedom. This individualism is based on the Christ impulse,
even if I have not explicitly said that in my
Philosophy of
Freedom. It is based on that
which the human being gains to himself as freedom while he
changes the usual thinking into that which I have called pure
thinking in my Philosophy of
Freedom which rises to the
spiritual world and gets out the impulses of moral actions
while something that is bound, otherwise, to the human physical
body, the impulse of love, is spiritualised. While the moral
ideals are borrowed from the spiritual world by moral
imagination, they become the force of spiritual
love.
Hence, the Philosophy of Freedom had to counter Kant's philistine principle
— “Duty! You elated name, you do not have anything
of flattery with yourself but strict submission” -, with
the transformed ego which develops up into the sphere of
spirituality and starts there loving virtue, and, therefore,
practises virtue because it loves it out of
individuality.
Thus, that which remained mere religious
contents to Kant made itself out to be real world contents.
Since to Kant knowledge is something formal, something real to
the Philosophy of
Freedom. A real process goes
forward. Hence, the higher morality is also tied together with
it to a reality, which philosophers of values like Windelband
(Wilhelm, 1845-1915) and Rickert (Heinrich R., 1863-1936) do
not at all reach. Since they do not find out for themselves how
that which is morally valuable is rooted in the world. Of
course, those people who do not regard the process of cognition
as a real process do not get to rooting morality in the world
of reality; they generally get to no philosophy of
reality.
From the philosophical development of
western philosophy, spiritual science was got out,
actually. Today I attempted to show that that Cistercian
father heard not quite inaccurately that really the attempt is
taken to put the realistic elements of High Scholasticism with
spiritual science in our scientific age, how one was serious
about the change of the human soul, about the fulfilment of the
human soul with the Christ impulse also in the intellectual
life. Knowledge is made a real factor in world evolution that
takes place only on the scene of the human consciousness as I
have explained in my book Goethe's Worldview. However,
these events in the world further the world and us within the
world at the same time.
There the problem of knowledge takes on
another form. That which we experience changes
spiritual-mentally in ourselves into a real development factor.
There we are that which arises from knowledge. As magnetism
works on the arrangement of filings of iron, that works in us
what is reflected in us as knowledge. At the same time, it
works as our design principle, then we recognise the immortal,
the everlasting in ourselves, and we do no longer raise the
issue of knowledge in only formal way.
The issue of knowledge was always raised
referring to Kant in such a way that one said to himself, how
does the human being get around to regarding the inner world as
an image of the outer world? — However, cognition
is not at all there at first to create images of the outer
world but to develop us, and it is an ancillary process that we
depict the outside world. We let that flow together in the
outside world in an ancillary process, which we have split off
at our birth. It is exactly the same way with the modern issue
of knowledge, as if anybody has wheat and investigates its
nutritional effect if he wants to investigate the growth
principle of wheat. Indeed, one may become a food chemist, but
food chemistry does not recognise that which is working from
the ear through the root, the stalk, and the leaves to the
blossom and fruit. It explains something only that is added to
the normal development of the wheat plant.
Thus, there is a developmental current of
spiritual life in us, which is concerned with our being to some
extent as the plant develops from the root through the stalk
and leaves to the blossom and the fruit, and from there again
to the seed and the root. As that which we eat should not play
any role with the explanation of the plant growth, the question
of the epistemological value of that which lives in us as a
developmental impulse must also not be the basis of a theory of
knowledge, but it has to be clear that knowledge is a side
effect of the work of the ideal in our human nature. There we
get to the real of that which is ideal. It works in us. The
wrong nominalism, Kantianism, originated only because one put
the question of knowledge in such a way as food chemistry would
put the question of the nature of wheat.
Hence, one may say, not before we find out
for ourselves what Thomism can be for the present, we see it
originating in spiritual science in its figure for the
twentieth century, and then it is back again as spiritual
science. Then light is thrown on the question: how does this
appear if now one comes and says, compared with the present
philosophy one has to go back to Thomas Aquinas, and to study
him, at most with some critical explanations and something else
that he wrote in the thirteenth century? — There we realise,
what it means, to project our thoughts in honest and frank way
in the development current that takes High Scholasticism as
starting point, and what it means to carry back our mind to
this thirteenth century surveying the entire European
development since the thirteenth century. This resulted from
the encyclical Aeterni
patris of 1879 that asks the
Catholic clerics to regard the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas as
the official philosophy of the Catholic Church. I do not want
to discuss the question here: where is Thomism? Since one would
have to discuss the question: do I look best at the rose that I
face there if I disregard the blossom and dig into the earth to
look at the roots and check as
to whether something has already
originated from the root.
Now, you yourselves can imagine all that.
We experience what asserts itself among us as a renewal of that
Thomism, as it existed in the thirteenth century, beside that
which wants to take part honestly in the development of the
European West. We may ask on the other hand, where does Thomism
live in the present? You need only to put the question: how did
Thomas Aquinas himself behave to the revelation contents? He
tried to get a relationship to them. We have the necessity to
get a relationship to the contents of physical manifestation.
We cannot stop at dogmatics. One has to overcome the
“dogma of experience” as on the other side one has
to overcome the dogma of revelation. There we have really to
make recourse to the world of ideas that receives the
transforming Christ principle to find again our world of ideas,
the spiritual world with Christ in us. Should the world of
ideas remain separated? Should the world of ideas not
participate in redemption?
In the thirteenth century, one could not
yet find the Christian principle of redemption in the world of
ideas; therefore, one set it against the world of revelation.
This must become the progress of humanity for the future that
not only for the outer world the redemption principle is found,
but also for the human intellect. The unreleased human reason
only could not rise in the spiritual world. The released human
intellect that has the real relationship to Christ penetrates
into the spiritual world.
From this viewpoint, Christianity of the
twentieth century is penetrating into the spiritual world, so
that it deeply penetrates into the thinking, into the soul
life. This is no pantheism, this is Christianity taken
seriously. Perhaps one may learn just from this consideration
of the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas — even if it got lost
in abstract areas —
that spiritual science takes the problems
of the West seriously that it always wants to stand on the
ground of the present.
I know how many false things arise now. I
could also imagine that now again one says, yes, he has often
changed his skin; he turns to Thomism now because the things
become risky. —
Indeed, one called the priests of certain
confessions snakes in ancient times. Snakes slough their skins.
As well as the opponents understand skinning today, it is
indeed a lie. Since I have shown today how you can find the
philosophically conscientious groundwork of spiritual science
in my first writings.
Now I may point to two facts. In 1908, I
held a talk about the philosophical development of the West in
Stuttgart. In this talk, I did not feel compelled to point to
the fact that possibly my discussion of Thomism displeased the
Catholic clerics, because I did justice to Thomism, I
emphasised its merits even with much clearer words than the
Neo-Thomists, Kleutgen or others did. Hence, I did not find out
for myself in those days that my praise of Thomism could be
taken amiss by the Catholic clergy, and I said, if one speaks
of scholasticism disparagingly, one is not branded heretical by
the so-called free spirits. However, if one speaks, objectively
about that, one is easily misunderstood because one often rests
philosophically upon a misunderstood Thomism within the
positive and just the most intolerant church movement. I did
not fear at all to be attacked because of my praise of Thomism
by the Catholic clergy, but by the so-called free spirits. It
happened different, and people will say, we are the first whom
he did a mischief.
During these days, I have also pointed to
my books that I wrote around the turn of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, among them also to a book that I dedicated
to Ernst Haeckel, Worldviews and
Approaches to Life in the Nineteenth
Century. There I pointed to the
fact that the modern thinking is not astute and logical; and
that Neo-Scholasticism tried to rest upon the strictly logical
of Thomism. I wrote: “These thinkers could really move in
the world of ideas without imagining this world in unsubtle
sensory-bodily form.” I spoke about the scholastics this
way, and then I still spoke about the Catholic thinkers who had
taken the study of scholasticism again: “The Catholic
thinkers who try today to renew this art of thinking are
absolutely worth to be considered in this respect. It will
always have validity what one of them, the Jesuit father Joseph
Kleutgen (1811-1889), says in his book An Apology of the Philosophy of the
Past: “Two sentences form
the basis of the different epistemologies which we have just
repeated: the first one, that our reason ...” and so on.
You realise, if the Jesuit Joseph Kleutgen did something
meritorious, I acknowledged it in my book. However, this had
the result that one said in those days that I myself was a
disguised Jesuit. At that time, I was a disguised Jesuit; now
you read in numerous writings, I am a Jew.
I only wanted to mention this at the end.
In any case, I do not believe that anybody can draw the
conclusion from this consideration, that I have belittled
Thomism.
These considerations should show that the
High Scholasticism of the thirteenth century was a climax of
European intellectual development, and that the present time
has reason to go into it. We can learn very much for deepening
our thought life to overcome any nominalism, so that we find
Christianity again by Christianising the ideas that penetrate
into the spiritual being from which the human being must have
originated, because only the consciousness of his spiritual
origin can give him satisfaction.
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