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Rudolf Steiner e.Lib
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The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas
Rudolf Steiner e.Lib Document
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The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas
Schmidt Number: S-4134
On-line since: 31st January, 2017
III
THOMISM
IN THE PRESENT DAY
Yesterday
I endeavoured at
the conclusion of our consideration of Scholasticism to point
out how in a current of thought the most important things are
the problems which presented themselves in a quite
definite way to the human soul, and which, when you think of
it, really all culminated in the desire to know: How does man
attain the knowledge which is essential to his life, and how
does this knowledge join up with that which at the time
governed the dispositions of men in a social aspect? How does
the knowledge which can be won join up with the contents of
faith of the Christian Church in the West? The militant
Scholiasts had to deal first of all with human
individuality which, as we have seen, emerged more and
more, but which was no longer in a position to carry the
experience of knowledge up to the point of real, concrete,
spirit-content, as it still flickered in the course of time
from what survived of Neoplatonism, of the Areopagite, of
Scotus Erigena. I
have also pointed out that the impulses set in motion by
Scholasticism still continued in a certain way. They continued,
so that one can say: The problems themselves are great, and the
manner in which they were propounded (we saw this yesterday)
had great influence for a long time. And, in point of fact
— and this is to be precisely the subject of to-day's
study — the influence of what was then the greatest
problem — the relationship of men to sensory and
spiritual reality — is still felt, even if in quite a
different form, even if it is not always obvious, and even if
it takes to-day a form entirely contrary to Scholasticism. Its
influence still lives. It is still all there to a large extent
in the spiritual activities of to-day, but distinctly altered
by the work of important people in the meantime on the European
trend of human development in the philosophical sphere. We see
at once, if we go from Thomas Aquinas to the Franciscan monk
who originated probably in Ireland and at the beginning of the
fourteenth century taught at Paris and Cologne, Duns Scotus, we
see at once, when we get to him, how the problem has, so to
speak, become too large even for all the wonderful, intensive
thought-technique which survived from the age of the real
master-ship in thought-technique — the age of
Scholasticism. The question that again faced Duns Scotus was as
follows: How does the psychic part of man live in the
physical organism of man? Thomas Aquinas' view was still
— as I explained yesterday — that he considered the
psychic as working itself into the physical. When through
conception and birth man enters upon the physical existence, he
is equipped by means of his physical inheritance only with the
vegetative powers, with all the mineral powers and with those
of physical comprehension; but that without pre-existence the
real intellect, the active intellect, that which Aristotle
called the “nous poieticos” enters into man.
But, as Thomas sees it, this nous poieticos absorbs as
it were all the psychic element, the vegetative-psychic and the
animal-psychic and imposes itself on the corporeality in order
to transpose that in its entirety — and then to combine
living for ever with what it had won, from the human body, into
which it had itself entered, though without pre-existence, from
eternal heights. Duns Scotus cannot believe that such an
absorption of the whole dynamic system of the human being takes
place through the active understanding. He can only imagine
that the human bodily make-up exists as something complete;
that the vegetative and animal principles remain through the
whole of life in a certain independence, and are thrown off
with death, and that really only the spiritual
principle, the intellectus agens, enters into
immortality. Equally little can he imagine the idea which
Thomas Aquinas toyed with: the permeation of the whole body
with the human-psychic-spiritual element*. Scotus can imagine
it as little as his pupil William of Occam, who died at Munich
in the fourteenth century, the chief thing about him being that
he returned to Nominalism. For Scotus the human understanding
had become something abstract, something which no longer
represented the spiritual world, but as being won by
reflection, by observation of the senses. He could no longer
imagine that Reality was the product only of the universals, of
ideas. He fell back again into Nominalism, and returned to the
view that what establishes itself in man as ideas, as general
conceptions, is conceived only out of the physical world around
him, and that it is really only something which lives in the
human spirit — I might say — for the sake of a
convenient comprehension of existence — as Name, as
words. In short, he returned again to Nominalism.
That is really a significant fact, for we see: Nominalism, as
for instance Roscelin expounds it — and in his case the
Trinity itself broke in pieces on account of his Nominalism
— is interrupted only by the intensive thought activity
of Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and others, and then Europe
soon relapses again into the Nominalism which is really the
incapacity of human individuality, ever struggling to rise
higher and higher to comprehend as a spiritual reality
something which is present in its spirit in the form of
ideas; so to comprehend it as something which
lives in man and in a certain way also in things.
Ideas, from being realities, become again Names, merely empty
abstractions.
You
see the difficulties which European thought encountered in
greater and greater degree when it opened up the quest of
knowledge. For in the long run we human beings must
acquire knowledge through ideas — at any rate, in
the first stages of knowledge we are bound to make use of
ideas. The big question must always crop up again: How do
ideas enable us to attain reality? But, substantially, an
answer becomes impossible if ideas appear to us merely as names
without reality. And these ideas, which in Ancient Greece, or,
at any rate, in initiated Greece were the final demonstration,
coming down from above, of a real spirit world, these
ideas became ever more and more abstract for the European
consciousness. And this process of becoming abstract, of ideas
becoming words, we see perpetually increasing as we follow
further the development of Western thought. Individuals stand
out later, and for example Leibnitz, who actually does not
touch upon the question whether ideas lead to knowledge. He is
still in possession of a traditional point of view and ascribes
everything to individual world-monads, which are really
spiritual. Leibnitz towers over the others because he has the
courage to expound the world as spiritual. Yes, the world is
spiritual; it consists of a multitude of spiritual beings. But
I might say that that particular thing which in a former age,
with, it is true, a more distinctive knowledge not yet
illuminated by such a logic as Scholasticism had, that moreover
which meant in such an age differentiated spiritual
individuals, was for Leibnitz a series of graduated
spiritual points, the monads. Individuality is saved,
but only in the form of the monads, in the form, as it were, of
a spiritual, indivisible, elemental point. If we exclude
Leibnitz, we see in the whole West an intensive struggle for
certainty concerning the origins of existence, but at the same
time an incapacity everywhere really to solve the Nominalism
problem.
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This is particularly met with in the thinker who is rightly
placed at the beginning of the new philosophy, in the thinker
Descartes, who lived at the opening or in the first half of the
seventeenth century. We learn everywhere in the history of
philosophy the basis of Cartesian philosophy in the sentence:
Cogito ergo sum; I think, therefore I
am. There is something of Augustine's effort in this
sentence. For Augustine struggles out of that doubt of which I
have spoken in the first lecture, when he says: I can doubt
everything, but the fact of doubt remains and I live all the
same while I doubt. I can doubt the existence of concrete
things round me, I can doubt the existence of God, of clouds
and stars, but not the existence of the doubt in me. I cannot
doubt what goes on in my soul. There is something certain, a
certain starting point to get hold of. Descartes takes up this
thought again — I think, therefore I am. In such things
one is, of course, exposed to grave misunderstandings, if one
has to set something simple against something historically
recognized. But it is necessary. Descartes and many of his
followers — and in this respect he had innumerable
followers — considers the idea: if I have a
thought-content in any consciousness, if I think, I cannot get
over the fact that I do think. Therefore, I am, therefore my
existence is assured through my thinking. My roots are, so to
speak, in the world-existence, as I have assured my existence
through my thought. So modern philosophy really begins as
Intellectualism, as Rationalism, as something which wants to
use thought as its instrument, and to this extent is only the
echo of Scholasticism, which had taken the turning towards
Intellectualism so energetically.
Two
things we observe about Descartes. First, there is necessarily
the simple objection: Is my existence really established by the
fact that I think? All sleep proves the contrary. We know every
morning when we awake that we must have existed from the
evening before to the morning, but we have not been thinking.
So the sentence: I think, therefore I am — cogito ergo
sum — is in this simple way disproved. This simple fact,
which is, I might say, a kind of Columbus' egg, must be set
against this famous sentence which found an uncommon amount of
success. That is one thing to say about Descartes. The other is
the question: What is the real objective of all his philosophic
effort? It is no longer directed towards a view of life, or
receiving a cosmic secret for the consciousness, it is really
turned towards something entirely intellectualistic and
concerned with thought. It is directed to the question: How do
I gain certainty? How do I overcome doubt? How do I find out
that things exist and that I myself exist? It is no longer a
material question, a question concerned with the continual
results of observing the world, it is a question rather that
concerns the certainty of knowledge. This question arises out
of the Nominalism of the Schoolmen, which only Albertus and
Thomas suppressed for a certain time, but which after them
appeared again. And so these people can only give a name to
what is hidden in their souls in order to find somewhere in
them a point from which they can make for themselves, not a
picture or conception of the world, but the certainty that not
everything is deception and untruth; that when one looks out
upon the world one sees a reality and when one looks inward
upon the soul one also sees a reality. In all this is clearly
noticeable what I pointed to yesterday in conclusion, namely,
that human individuality has arrived at intellectualism, but
has not yet felt the Christ-problem. The Christ-problem occurs
for Augustine because he still looks at the whole of humanity.
Christ begins to dawn in the human soul, to dawn, I might say,
on the Christian Mystics of the Middle Ages; but he does not
dawn clearly on those who sought to find him by that thought
which is so necessary to individuality — or by what this
thought would produce. This process of thought as it comes
forth from the human soul in its original condition is such
that it rejects precisely what ought to have been the Christian
idea for the innermost part of man; it rejects the
transformation, the inner metamorphosis; it refuses to take the
attitude towards the life of knowledge in which one would say:
yes, I think and I think first of all concerning myself and the
world. But this kind of thought is still very undeveloped. This
thought is, as it were, the kind that exists after the Fall. It
must rise above itself. It must be transformed and be raised
into a higher sphere. As a matter of fact, this necessity has
only once clearly flashed up in one great thinker, and that is
in Spinoza, follower of Descartes. Spinoza really did make a
deep impression on people like Herder and Goethe with good
reason. For Spinoza, although he is still completely buried
apparently in the intellectualism which survived or had
survived in another form from the Scholiasts, still understands
this intellectualism in such a way that man can finally come to
the truth — which for Spinoza is ultimately a kind of
intuition — by transforming the intellectual, inner,
thinking, soul-life, not by being content with everyday life or
the ordinary scientific life. And so Spinoza reaches the point
of saying to himself: This thought replenishes itself with
spiritual content through the development of thought itself..
The spiritual world, which we learned to know in Plotinism,
yields again, as it were, to thought, if this thought tends to
run counter to the spirit. Spirit replenishes thought as
intuition. And I consider it is very interesting that this
is what Spinoza says: If we survey the existence of the world,
how it continues to develop in its highest substance, in
spirit, how we then receive this spirit in the soul by raising
ourselves by thought to intuition, by being so
intellectualistic that we can prove things as surely as
mathematics, but in the proof develop ourselves at the same
time and continue to rise so that the spirit can come to meet
us, if we can rise to this height, then, from this angle of
vision we can comprehend the historic process of what lies
behind the evolution of mankind. And it is remarkable that the
following sentence stands out from the writings of the Jew
Spinoza: The highest revelation of divine substance is given in
Christ. In Christ intuition has become Theophany, the
incarnation of God, and the voice of Christ is therefore in
truth the voice of God and the path to salvation. In other
words, the Jew Spinoza comes to the conclusion that man can so
develop himself by his intellectualism, that the spirit comes
down to him. If he is then in a position to apply himself to
the mystery of Golgotha, then the filling with the spirit
becomes not only intuition, that is, the appearance of the
spirit through thought, but intuition changes into Theophany,
into the appearance of God Himself. Man is on the spiritual
path to God. One might say that Spinoza was not reticent about
what he suddenly realized, as this expression shows. But it
fills what he had thus discovered from the evolution of
humanity with a kind of tune, a kind of undercurrent of sound,
it completes his Ethics.
And
once more it is taken up by a sensitive human being. We can
realize that for somebody who could also certainly read between
the lines of this Ethics who could sense in his own
heart the heart that lives in this Ethics, in short,
that for Goethe this book of Spinoza's became the standard.
These things should not be looked at so purely abstractly, as
is usually done in the history of philosophy. They should be
viewed from the human standpoint, and we must look at the spark
of Spinozism which entered Goethe's soul. But actually what can
be read between Spinoza's lines did not become a dominating
force. What became important was the incapacity to get away
from Nominalism. And Nominalism next becomes such that one
might say: Man gets ever more and more entangled in the
thought: I live in something which the outer world cannot
comprehend, a something which cannot leave me to sink into the
outer world and take upon itself something of its nature. And
so it is that this feeling, that one is so isolated, that one
cannot get away from oneself and receive something from the
outer world, is already to be found in Locke in the seventeenth
century. Locke's formula was: That which we observe as colours,
as tones in the outer world is no longer something which leads
us to reality; it is only the effect of the outer world on our
senses; it is something in which we ourselves are wrapped also,
in our own subjectivity. That is one side of the question.
The
other side is seen in such minds as that of Francis Bacon in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where Nominalism
becomes such a penetrating philosophy that it leads him to say:
one must do away with man's false belief in a reality which is,
in point of fact, only a name. We have reality only when we
look out upon the world of the senses, which alone supply
realities through empiric knowledge. By the side of these,
those realities on which Albertus and Thomas have built up
their theory of rational knowledge play no longer a really
scientific part. In Bacon the spiritual world has, so to speak,
evaporated into something which can no longer well up from
man's inmost heart with the certainty and safety of a science.
The spiritual world becomes the subject of faith, which is not
to be touched by what is called knowledge and learning. On the
contrary, knowledge is to be won only by external observation
and by experiment, which is, after all, only a more spiritual
kind of external observation.
And
so it goes on till Hume, in the eighteenth century, for whom
the connection between cause and effect becomes something which
lives only in human subjectivity, which men attribute to things
from a sort of external habit. We see that Nominalism, the heir
of Scholasticism, weighs down humanity like a mountain. What is
primarily the most important sign of this development?
The
most important sign is surely this, that Scholasticism stands
there with its hard logic, that it arises at a time when the
sum of reason is to be divided off from the sum of truth
concerning the spiritual world. The Scholiast's problem was, on
the one hand, to examine this sum of truth concerning the
spiritual world, which, of course, was handed down to him
through the faith and revelation of the Church. On the other
hand, he had to examine the possible results of man's own human
knowledge. The point of view of the Scholiasts overlooked at
first the change of front which the course of time and nothing
else had made necessary. When Thomas and Albertus had to
develop their philosophies, there was as yet no scientific view
of the world. There had been no Galileo, Giordano Bruno,
Copernicus or Kepler; the forces of human understanding had not
yet been directed to external nature. At that time there was no
cause for controversy between what the human reason can
discover from the depth of the soul and what can be learned
from the outer empiric sense-world. The question was only
between the results of rational thought and the spiritual
truths as handed down by the Church to men who could no longer
raise themselves through individual development to this wisdom
in its reality, but who saw it in the form handed down by the
Church simply as tradition, as Scripture, etc. Does not the
question now really arise: What is the relation between the
rationalism, as developed by Albertus and Thomas in their
theory of knowledge, and the teaching of the natural scientific
view of the world? We may say that from now on the struggle was
indecisive up to the eighteenth century.
And
here we find something very remarkable. When we look back into
the thirteenth century and see Albertus and Thomas leading
humanity across the frontiers of rational knowledge as
contrasted with faith and revelation, we see how they show step
by step that revelation yields only to a certain part of
rational human knowledge, and remains outside this knowledge,
an eternal riddle. We can count these riddles — the
Incarnation — the filling with the Spirit at the
Sacraments, etc. — which lie on the further side of human
knowledge. As they see it, man stands on one side, surrounded
as it were by the boundaries of knowledge, and unable to look
into the spiritual world. This is the situation in the
thirteenth century. And now let us take a look at the
nineteenth century. We see a remarkable fact: in the seventies,
at a famous conference of Natural Scientists at Leipzig,
Dubois-Raymond gave his impressive address on the boundaries of
Nature-Knowledge and soon afterwards on the seven
world-riddles.
What has the problem now become? There is man, here is the
boundary of knowledge; but beyond the boundary lies the
material world, the atoms, everything of which Dubois-Raymond
says: We do not know what this is that moves in space as
material. And on this side lies that which is evolved in the
human soul. Even if, compared with the imposing work which
shines as Scholasticism from the Middle Ages, this contribution
of Dubois-Raymond, which we find in the seventies is a trifle,
still it is the real antithesis: there the search for the
riddles of the spiritual world, here the search for the riddles
of the material world; here the dividing line between human
beings and atoms, there between human beings and angels and
God. We must examine this gap of time if we want to see all
this that crops up as a consequence, immediate or remote, of
Scholasticism. From this Scholasticism the Kantian philosophy
comes into being, as something important at best for the
history of the period. This philosophy, influenced by Hume,
still has to-day a hold on philosophers, since after its
partial decline, the Germans raised the cry in the sixties,
“Back to Kant!” And from that time an uncountable
number of books on Kant have been published, and independent
Kantians like Volkelt, Cohen, etc. — one could mention a
whole host — have appeared.
To-day we can, of course, give only a sketch of Kant; we need
only point out what is important in him for us. I do not think
that anyone who really studies Kant can find him other than as
I have tried to depict him in my small paper
Truth and Knowledge.
At the end of the sixties and beginning of the
seventies of the eighteenth century Kant's problem is not the
content-problem of world-philosophy in full force, not
something which might have appeared for him in definite forms,
images, concepts, and ideas concerning objects, but rather his
problem is the formal knowledge-question: How do we gain
certainty concerning anything in the outer world,
concerning the existence of anything? Kant is more
worried about certainty of knowledge than about any content of
knowledge. One feels this surely in his Critic. Read his
“Critic of Pure Reason,” his
“Critic of Practical Reason,” and see how,
after the chapter on Space and Time, which is in a sense
classic, you come to the categories, enumerated entirely
pedantically, only, we may say, to give the whole a certain
completeness. In truth the presentation of this
“Critic of Pure Reason” has not the fluency
of someone writing sentence on sentence with his heart's
blood.
For
Kant the question of what is the relation of what we call
concepts, of what is in fact, the whole content of knowledge to
an external reality, is much more important than this content
of knowledge itself. The content he pieces together, as it
were, from everything philosophic which he has inherited. He
makes schemes and systems. But everywhere the question crops
up: How does one get certainty, the kind of certainty which one
gets in mathematics? And he gets such certainty in a manner
which actually is nothing else than Nominalism, changed, it is
true, and unusually concealed and disguised — a
Nominalism which is stretched to include the forms of material
nature, space and time, as well as universal ideas. He says:
that particular thing which we develop in our soul as the
content of knowledge has nothing really to do with anything we
derive from things. We merely make it cover things. We derive
the whole form of our knowledge from ourselves. If we say event
A is related to event B by the principle of causation, this
principle is only in ourselves. We make it cover A and B, the
two experiences.
We
apply causality to things. In other words, paradoxical though
it sounds — though it is paradoxical only historically in
face of the vast following of Kant's philosophy — we
shall have to say: Kant seeks the principle of certainty by
denying that we derive the content of our knowledge from things
and assuming that we derive it from ourselves and then apply it
to things. This means — and here is the paradox —
we have truth, because we make it ourselves, we have subjective
truth, because we produce it ourselves. And it is we who instil
truth into things. There you have the final consequence of
Nominalism. Scholasticism strove with universals, with the
question: What form of existence do the ideas we have in
ourselves, have in the outer world? It could not arrive at a
real solution of the problem which would have been completely
satisfactory. Kant says: All right. Ideas are merely names. We
form them only in ourselves but we see them as names to cover
things; whereby they become reality. They may not be reality by
a long way, but I push the “name” on to the
experience and make it reality, for experience must be such as
I ordain by applying to it a “name.”
Thus Kantianism is in a certain way the expansion of
Nominalism, in a certain way the most extreme point and in a
certain way the extreme collapse of Western philosophy, the
complete bankruptcy of man in regard to his search for truth,
despair that one can in any way learn truth from things. Hence
the saying: Truth can exist only in things if we ourselves
instil it into them. Kant has destroyed all objectivity and all
man's possibility of getting down to the truth in things. He
has destroyed all possible knowledge, all possible search for
truth, for truth cannot exist only subjectively.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is a consequence of Scholasticism,
because it could not acquiesce in the other side, where there
appeared another boundary to be crossed. Just because there
emerged the age of Natural Science, to which Scholasticism did
not adapt itself, Kantianism came on the scene, which ended
really as subjectivity, and then from subjectivity in which it
extinguished all knowledge, sprouted the so-called Postulates
— Freedom, Immortality, and the Idea of
God. We are meant to do the good, to obey the
categoric imperative, and so we must be able to. That
is, we must be free, but as we live here in the physical body,
we cannot be. We do not attain perfection so that we may carry
out the categoric imperative, till we are clear of the body.
Therefore, there must be immortality. But even then we cannot
realize it as human beings. Everything we are concerned with in
the world, if we do what we ought to, can be regulated only by
a Godhead. Therefore, there must be a Godhead. Three postulates
of faith, whose source in Reality it is impossible to know
— such is the extent of Kant's certainty, according to
his own saying: I had to annihilate knowledge in order to make
room for faith. And Kant now does not make room for
faith-content in the sense of Thomas Aquinas, for a traditional
faith-content, but for an abstract one: Freedom, Immortality,
and the Idea of God; for a faith-content brought forth from the
human individual dictating truth, that is, the appearance of
it.
So
Kant becomes the fulfiller of Nominalism. He is the philosopher
who really denies man everything he could have which would
enable him to get down to any kind of Reality. This accounts
for the rapid reaction against Kant which for example, Fichte,
and then Schelling, and then Hegel produced, and other thinkers
of the nineteenth century. You need only look at Fichte and see
how he was necessarily urged on to an experience of the soul
that became more intensive and, one might say, ever more and
more mystical in order to escape from Kantianism. Fichte could
not even believe that Kant could have meant what is contained
in the Kantian Critics. He believed at the beginning,
with a certain philosophic naïveté that he drew only
the final conclusion of the Kantian philosophy. His idea was
that if you did not draw the “final conclusions,”
you would have to believe that this philosophy had been pieced
together by a most amazing chance, certainly not by a
thoughtful human brain. All this is apart from the movement in
Western civilization caused by the growth of Natural Science,
which enters upon the scene as a reaction in the middle of the
nineteenth century. This movement takes no count at all of
Philosophy and therefore degenerated in many thinkers into
gross materialism. And so we see how the philosophic
development goes on, unfolding itself into the last third of
the nineteenth century. We see this philosophic effort coming
completely to nothing and we see then how the attempt came
about, from every possibility which one could find in
Kantianism and similar philosophies, to understand something of
what is actually real in the world. Goethe's general view of
life which would have been so important, had it been
understood, was completely lost for the nineteenth century,
except among those whose leanings were toward Schelling, Hegel
and Fichte. For in this philosophy of Goethe's lay the
beginning of what Thomism must become, if its attitude
towards Natural Science were changed, for he rises to the
heights of modern civilization, and is, indeed, a real force in
the current of development.
Thomas could get no further than the abstract affirmation that
the psychic-spiritual really has its effect on every activity
of the human organism. He expressed it thus: Everything, even
the vegetative activities, which exists in the human body is
directed by the psychic and must be acknowledged by the
psychic. Goethe makes the first step in the change of attitude in his
Theory of Colour,
which in consequence is not in the least understood; in his
Morphology,
in his
Theory of Plants and Animals.
We shall, however, not have a complete fulfilment of Goethe's ideas
till we have a spiritual science which can of itself provide an
explanation of the facts of Natural Science.
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A
few weeks ago I tried here to show how our spiritual science is
seeking to range itself as a corrective side by side with
Natural Science — let us say with regard to the theory of
the heart. The mechanico-materialistic view has likened the
heart to a pump, which drives the blood through the human body.
It is the opposite; the blood circulation is living —
Embryology can prove it, if it wishes — and the heart is
set in action by the movement of the blood. The heart is the
instrument by which the blood-activity ultimately asserts
itself, by which it is absorbed into the whole human individuality.
The activity of the heart is a result of blood-activity, not
vice-versa. And so, as was shown here in detail in a
Course for Doctors
we can show with regard
to each organ of the body, how the realization of man as a
spirit-being really explains his material element. We can in a
way make real the thing that appeared dimly in abstract form to
Thomism, when it said: The spiritual-psychic permeates all the
physical body. That becomes concrete, real knowledge. The
Thomistic philosophy, which in the thirteenth century still had
an abstract form, by rekindling itself from Goethe continues to
live on in our day as Spiritual Science.
Ladies and gentlemen, if I may interpose here a personal
experience, it is as follows: it is meant merely as an
illustration. When at the end of the eighties I spoke in the
“Wiener Goethe-Verein” on the subject “Goethe
as the Father of a New Aesthetic,” there was in the
audience a very learned Cistercian. I can speak about this
address, for it has appeared in a new edition. I explained how
one had to take Goethe's presentation of Art, and then this
Father Wilhelm Neumann, the Cistercian, who was also Professor
of Theology at Vienna University, made this curious remark:
“The germ of this address, which you have given us
to-day, lies already in Thomas Aquinas!” It was an
extraordinarily interesting experience for me to hear from
Father Wilhelm Neumann that he found in Thomas something like a
germ of what was said then concerning Goethe's views on
Aesthetics; he was, of course, highly trained in Thomism,
because it was after the appearance of Neo-Thomism within the
Catholic clergy. One must put it thus: The appearance of things
when seen in accordance with truth is quite different from the
appearance when seen under the influence of a powerless
nominalistic philosophy which to a large extent harks back to
Kant and the modern physiology based on him. And in the same
way you would find several things, if you studied Spiritual
Science. Read in my
Riddles of the Soul
which came out many years ago, how I there attempted as the result of
thirty years' study, to divide human existence into three parts, and
how I tried to show there, how one part of the physical human
body is connected with the thought and sense organization; how
the rhythmic system, all that pertains to the breathing and the
heart activity, is connected with the system of sensation, and
how the chemical changes are connected with the volition
system: the attempt is made, throughout, to recover the
spiritual-psychic as creative force. That is, the change of
front towards Natural Science is seriously made. After
the age of Natural Science, I try to penetrate into the realm
of natural existence, just as before the age of
Scholasticism, of Thomism — we have seen it in the
Areopagite and in Plotinus — human knowledge was used to
penetrate into the spiritual realm. The Christ-principle
is dealt with seriously after the change of front — as it
would have been, had one said: human thought can change, so
that it really can press upwards, if it discards the inherited
limitation of knowledge and develops through pure non-sensory
thought upward to the spiritual world. What we see as Nature
can be penetrated as the veil of natural existence. One presses
on beyond the limit of knowledge, which a dualism believed it
necessary to set up, as the Schoolmen set up the limit on the
other side — one penetrates into this material world and
discovers that this is in fact the spiritual world, that behind
the veil of Nature there are in truth not material atoms, but
spiritual beings. This shows you how progressive thought deals
with a continued development of Thomism in the Middle Ages.
Turn to the most important abstract psychological thoughts of
Albertus and Thomas. There, it is true, they do not go so far
as to say concerning the physical body, how the spirit or the
soul react on the heart, on the spleen, on the liver, etc., but
they point out already that the whole human body must be
considered to have originated from the spiritual-psychic. The
continuation of this thought is the task of really tracing the
spiritual-psychic into each separate part of the physical
organization. Philosophy has not done this, nor Natural
Science: it can only be done by a Spiritual Science, which does
not hesitate to bring into our time thoughts, such as those of
the high Scholiasts which are looked upon as great thoughts in
the evolution of humanity, and apply them to all the
contributions of our time in Natural Science. It necessitates,
it is true, if the matter is to have a scientific basis, a
divorce from Kantianism.
This divorce from Kantianism I have attempted first in my small book
Truth and Science,
years ago, in the eighties, in my
Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung,
and then again in my
The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.
Quite shortly and without consideration for the fact that things,
when they are cursorily presented appear difficult, I should
like to put before you the basic ideas to be found in these
books. They start from the thought that truth cannot directly
be found, at any rate in the observed world which is spread
round about us. We see in a way how Nominalism infects the
human soul, how it can assume the false conclusions of
Kantianism, but how Kant certainly did not see the point with
which these books seriously deal. This is, that a study of the
visible world, if undertaken quite objectively and thoroughly
leads to the knowledge that this world is not a whole. This
world emerges as something which is real only through us. What,
then, caused the difficulty of Nominalism? What gave rise to
the whole of Kantianism? This, the visible world is taken and
observed and then we spread over it the world of ideas through
the soul-life. Now there we have the view, that this idea-world
is to reproduce external observations. But the idea-world is
in us. What has it to do with what is outside? Kant
could answer this question only thus: By spreading the
idea-world over the visible world, we make truth.
But
it is not so. It is like this. If we consider the process of
observation with an unprejudicial mind, it is incomplete, it is
nowhere self-contained. I tried hard to prove this in my book
Truth and Science,
and afterwards in
The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.
As we have been placed in the world,
as we are born into it, we split the world in two. The
fact is that we have the world-content, as it were, here with
us. Since we come into the world as human beings, we divide the
world-content into observation, which appears to us from
outside, and the idea-world which appears to us from the inner
soul. Anyone who regards this division as an absolute one, who
simply says: there is the world, here am I — such a one
cannot cross at all with his idea-world to the external world.
The matter is this: I look at the visible world, it is
everywhere incomplete. Something is wanting everywhere. I
myself have with my whole existence arisen out of the world, to
which the visible world also belongs. Then I look into myself,
and what I see thus is just what is lacking in the visible
world. I have to join together through my own self, since I
have entered the world, what has been separated into two
branches. I gain reality by working for it. Through the fact
that I was born arises the appearance that what is really one
is divided into two branches, outward perception and idea
world. By the fact that I am alive and grow, I unite the two
currents of reality. I work myself to reality by my acquiring
knowledge. I should never have become conscious if I had never,
through my entry into the world, separated the idea-world off
from the outer world of perception. But I should never find the
bridge to the world, if I did not bring the idea-world, which I
have separated off, into unity again with that which, without
it, is no reality.
Kant seeks reality only in outer perception and does not
see that the other half of this reality is in us. The
idea-world which we have in us, we have first torn from
external reality. Nominalism is now at an end, for now we do
not spread Space and Time and ideas, which are only
“Nomina” over our external perception, but we
return to it in our knowledge what we took from it on entering
into our earth existence.
Thus is revealed to us the relation of man to the spiritual
world in a purely philosophical form. And he who reads my
The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity,
which rests entirely on
the basis of this knowledge-theory of the nature of reality, of this
transference of life into reality through human knowledge, he who
takes up this basis, which is expressed already in the title of
Truth and Science,
that real science unites
perceptions and the idea-world and sees in this union not only
an ideal but a real process; he who can see something of a
world-process in this union of the perception and idea-worlds
— is in a position to overthrow Kantianism. He is also in
a position to solve the problem which we saw opening up in the
course of Western civilization, which produced Nominalism and
in the thirteenth century threw out several scholastic lights
but which finally stood powerless before the division into
perception and idea-world.
Now
one approaches this problem of individuality on ethical ground, and hence my
The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity
has become the philosophy of reality. Since the acquisition of knowledge
is not merely a formal act, but a reality-process,
ethical, moral behaviour appears as an effluence of that which
the individual experiences in a real process through moral
fantasy as Intuition; and there results, as set forth in the
second part of my
The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity,
the
Ethical Individualism,
which in fact is built upon the
Christ-impulse in man, though this is not expressed in the
book. It is built upon the spiritual activity man wins for
himself by changing ordinary thinking into what I called
“pure thinking,” which rises to the
spiritual world and there produces the stimulus to moral
behaviour. The reason for this is that the impulse of love,
which is otherwise bound to the physical man, becomes
spiritualized, and because the moral ideals are borrowed from
the spiritual world through the moral phantasy, they express
themselves in all their force and become the force of spiritual
love. Therefore, the Philistine-Principle of Kant had to be
resisted. Duty! thou exalted name, that knowest nothing of
flattery, but demandest strict obedience — against this
Philistine-Principle, against which Schiller had already revolted, the
The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity
had to set the “transformed Ego,” which has
developed up into the spheres of spirituality and up there
begins to love virtue, and therefore practises virtue,
because it loves it of its own individuality.
Thus we have a real world-content instead of something which
remained for Kant merely a faith-content. For Kant the
acquisition of knowledge is something formal, for the
The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity,
it is something real. It is a real process. And therefore the higher
morality is linked to a reality — but a reality to which the
“Wertphilosophen” like Windelband and Rickert do
not attain at all, because they do not see how what is morally
valuable is implanted in the world. Naturally those people who
do not regard the process of knowledge as a real process, also
fail to provide an anchorage for morality in the world, and
arrive, in short, at no kind of Reality-Philosophy. The
philosophical basic principles of what we call here Spiritual
Science have really been drawn from the whole course of Western
philosophical development. I have to-day tried really to show
you how that Cistercian Father was not altogether wrong, and in
what way the attempt lies before us to reconcile the realistic
elements of Scholasticism with this age of Natural Science
through a Spiritual Science, how we laid stress on the
transformation of the human soul and with the real
installation of the Christ-impulse into it, even in the
thought-life. The life of knowledge is made into a real factor
in world-evolution and the scene of its fulfilment is the human
consciousness alone — as I explained in my book,
Goethe's Philosophy.
But this, which is thus fulfilled
is at the same time a world-process, it is an occurrence in the
world, and it is this occurrence that brings the world, and us
within it, forward. So the problem of knowledge takes on quite
another form. Now our experience becomes a factor of
spiritual-psychic development in ourselves. Just as magnetism
functions on the shape of iron filings, so there functions on
us that which is reflected in us as knowledge; it functions at
the same time as our form-principle, and we grow to
realize the immortal, the eternal in ourselves, and the problem
of knowledge ceases to be merely formal. This problem used
always, borrowing from Kantianism, to be put in such a way that
one said: How does man come to see a reproduction of the
external world in this inner world? But knowledge is not in the
least there for the purpose of reproducing the external world,
but to develop us, and such reproduction of the external world
is a secondary process.
In
the external world we suffer a combination in a secondary
process of what we have divided into two by the fact of our
birth, and with the modern problem of knowledge it is exactly
as when a man has wheat or other products of the field and
examines the food value of the wheat in order to study the
nature of the principle of growth. Certainly one can become a
food-analyst, but what function there is in wheat from the ear
to the root, and still further, cannot be known through the
chemistry of food values. That investigates only something
which follows the continuous growth which is inherent in the
plant.
So
there is a similar growth of spiritual life in us, which
strengthens us, and has something to do with our nature, just
like the development of the plant from the root through the
stem, through the leaf to the bloom and the fruit, and thence
again to the seed and the root. And just as the fact that we
eat it must not affect the explanation of the nature of plant
growth, so also the question of the knowledge-value of the
growth-impulse we have in us may not be the basis of a theory
of knowledge; rather it must be clear that what we call in
external life knowledge is a secondary result of the work of
ideas in our human nature. Here we come to the reality of that
which is ideal; it works in us. The false Nominalism and
Kantianism arose only because the problem of knowledge was put
in the same way as the problem of the nature of wheat would be
from the point of view of bio-chemistry.
Thus we can say: when you once realize what Thomism can be in
our time, how it springs up from its most important achievement
in the Middle Ages, then you see it springing up in its
twentieth century shape in Spiritual Science, then it
re-appears as Spiritual Science. And so a light is already
thrown on the question: How does it look now if one comes and
says: We must go back to Thomas Aquinas, he must be studied,
possibly with a few critical comments, as he wrote in the
thirteenth century. We see what it means sincerely and honestly
to take our place in the chain of development which started
with Scholasticism, and also what it means to put ourselves
back into the thirteenth century, and to overlook everything
that has happened since then in the course of European
civilization. This is, after all, what has really happened as a
result of the Papal Encyclical of 1879, which enjoins the
Catholic clergy to regard the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas as
the official one of the Catholic Church. I will not here
discuss the question: Where is Thomism? for one would have to
discuss, ladies and gentlemen, the question: Is the rose which
I have before me, best seen if I take no notice of the bloom,
and only dig into the earth, to look at the roots, and overlook
the fact that from this root something is already sprung
— or if I look at everything which is sprung from this
root?
Well, ladies and gentlemen, you can answer that for yourselves.
We experience all that which is of value among us as a renewal
of Thomism, as it was in the thirteenth century, by the side of
all that which contributes honestly to the development of
Western Europe. We may ask: Where is Thomism to be found
to-day? One need only put the question: What was Thomas
Aquinas' attitude to the Revelation-content? He sought a
relationship with it. Our need is to adapt ourselves to the
revelation-content of Nature. Here we cannot rest on dogma.
Here the dogma of experience, as I wrote already in the
eighties of last century, must be surmounted, just as on the
other side must the dogma of revelation. We must, in fact,
revert to the spiritual-psychic content of man, to the
idea-world which contains the transformed Christ-principle, in
order again to find the spiritual world through the Christ in
us, that is, in our idea-world. Are we then to rest content to
leave the idea-world on the standpoint of the Fall?
Is
the idea-world of the Redemption to have no part? In the
thirteenth century the Christian principle of redemption could
not be found in the idea-world; and therefore the idea-world
was set off against the world of revelation. The advance of
mankind in the future must be, not only to find the principle
of redemption for the external world, but also for human
reason. The unredeemed human reason alone could not raise
itself into the spiritual world. The redeemed human reason
which has the real relationship with Christ, this forces itself
upward into the spiritual world; and this process is the
Christianity of the twentieth century, — a Christianity
strong enough to enter into the innermost recesses of human
thinking and human soul-life.
This is no Pantheism; this is none of those things for being
which it is to-day calumniated. This is the most serious
Christianity, and perhaps you can see from this study of Thomas
Aquinas' philosophy, even if in certain respects it was bound
to digress into the realm of the abstract, how seriously
Spiritual Science concerns itself with the problems of the
West, how Spiritual Science always will stand on the ground of
the Present, and how it can stand on no other, whatever else
can be brought against it.
These remarks have been made to demonstrate that a climax of
European spiritual evolution took place in the thirteenth
century with High Scholasticism, and that the present age has
every reason to study this climax, that there is a vast amount
to be learnt from such a study, especially with regard to what
we must call in the highest sense the deepening of our
idea-life; so that we may leave all Nominalism behind, so that
we may find again the ideas that are permeated with Christ, the
Christianity which leads to the spiritual Being, from whom man
is after all descended; for if man is quite honest and open
with himself, nothing else can satisfy him but the
consciousness of his spiritual origin.
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