Lecture Three by Rudolf Steiner given in Berlin, 7 March 1922
“Anthroposophy and Philosophy.”
My
dear venerated friends! It is always difficult when you have a
serious scientific conscience to translate the traditional
expression of “Logos” into some or other younger
language. We usually employ “Word” to translate
“Logos” as is commonly found in the Bible. However,
when we have the word “Logic” in a sentence we
don't use “Word” but rather think about
“Thought,” as it operates in the human individual
and its laws. Yet when we speak about “philology”
we are aware that we are developing a science which is derived
from words. I would like to say: what we have today in the word
“Logos” is basically in everything which is
philosophic. When we speak about “philosophy”, we
can, even though defined as experience in relation to the
Logos, sense how a reflection of these undetermined experiences
are contained in all that we feel in
“philosophy”.
Philosophy implies that the words — which no doubt came
into question when philosophy was created, that only words were
implied — indicate a certain inner personal experience;
the word philosophy points to a connection of the Logos to
“Sophia”; one could call it a particular, if not
personal, general interest. The word philosophy is less
directly referred to as possessing a scientific nature but
rather an inner relationship to the wisdom filled scientific
content. Because our feeling regarding philosophy is not as
sure as in those cases when philosophy, on the one hand was
included with, I'd rather not call it science, but scientific
aims, and on the other hand with something which points to
inner human relationships; so we have today an extraordinarily
undefined experience when we speak about philosophy or involve
ourselves with philosophy. This vague experience is extremely
difficult to lift out of the depth of our consciousness if we
try to do it through mere dialectical or external definitions,
without trying to enter into the personal experience which ran
its course in the consequential development. To such an
examination the present will produce something special.
If
we look back a few decades at people in central Europe, the
involvement they were looking for with philosophy was quite a
different experience, in central Europe, as it is today in the
second decade of the twentieth century, where we basically have
lived through so much, not only externally in the physical but
also spiritually — one can quietly declare this —
than what had been experienced for centuries. When one looks
back over the experiences, of — if I may use a pedantic
and philistine expression — the philosophic zealot of the
fifties, sixties and seventies of the nineteenth century,
perhaps even later, which the central Europeans could have, it
is essentially as follows. Looking at the time of German
philosophy's blossoming, you look back at the great philosophic
era of the Fichtes, Schellings, and Hegels; surrounding you
there had been a world of the educated and the scholars, a
world which this philosophic era thoroughly dismisses and which
in the rising scientific world view sees what should be taking
the place of the earlier philosophic observations. One admires
the magnitude of the elevation of thoughts found in a
Schelling, one admires the energy and force of Fichte's
development of thoughts, one can perhaps also develop a feeling
for the pure comprehensive, insightful thoughts of Hegel, but
one would more or less consider this classical time of German
philosophy as something subdued.
Besides this is the endeavour to develop something out of
science which should present a general world view, right from
the striving of the “power/force and matter/substance
people,” to those who carefully strive to find a
philosophic world view out of natural scientific concepts, but
who lean towards the former idealistic philosophy. There were
all kinds of thoughts and research in this area.
A
third kind of thinker appeared in this sphere, who couldn't go
along with the purely scientifically based world view but could
on the other hand also not dive into solid thought of the Hegel
type. For them a big question came about: How can a person
create something within his thoughts, which originate in
himself, and place this in an objective relationship to the
outer world? — There were epistemologists of different
nuances who agreed with the call “Back to Kant”,
but this way to Kant was aimed in the most varied ways; there
were sharp-witted thinkers like Liebman, Volkelt and so on, who
basically remained within the epistemological and didn't get to
the question: How could someone take the content of his
thoughts and imaginative nature from within himself and find a
bridge to a trans-subjective reality existing outside human
reality?
What I'm sketching for you now as a situation in which the
philosophic zealots found themselves in the last third of the
nineteenth Century, which didn't lead to any kind of solution.
This was to a certain extent in the middle of some or other
drama during a time-consuming work of art, to which no finality
had been found. These efforts more or less petered out into
nothing definite. The efforts ran into a large number of
questions and overall, basically failed to acquire the courage
to develop a striving for solutions regarding these
questions.
Today the situation in the entire world of philosophy is such
that one can't sketch it in the same way as I've done for the
situation in the last third of the nineteenth century, in its
effort to determine reality. Today philosophic viewpoints have
appeared which, I might say, have risen out of quite different
foundations, and which make it possible for us to characterise
it in quite a different way. Today, if we wish to characterise
the philosophic situation, our glance which we have homed in
the second half of the twentieth century comes clearly before
our soul eyes, namely such sharply differentiated philosophic
viewpoints of the West, of central Europe and Eastern Europe.
Today things appear in quite a different way which not long ago
flowed through our experience of the philosophical approach to
be found in three names: Herbert Spencer — Hegel —
Vladimir Soloviev. By placing these three personalities in
front of us we have the representatives who can epitomise our
philosophic character of today. Inwardly this had to some
extent already been the case for some time, but these
characteristics of the philosophic situation only appear today
before the eyes of our souls.
Let's look at the West: Herbert Spencer. If I want to be
thorough I would have to give an outline of the entire course
of philosophic development, how it went from Bacon, Locke over
Mill to Spencer, but this can't be my task today. In Herbert
Spencer we meet a personality who wanted to base his philosophy
on a pure system of concepts, as is determined in natural
science. We find in Spencer a personality who totally agrees
with science and out of this agreement arrives at a conclusion:
‘This is the way in which all philosophic thought in the world
must be won by natural science.’ So we see how Spencer searched
in science to determine certain steps to understand concepts,
like for example how matter is constantly contracting and
expanding, differentiating and consolidating. He saw this for
instance in plants, how the leaves spread out and how they drew
together in the seed, and he tried to translate such concepts
into clear scientific forms with which to create his world
view. He even tried to think about the human community, the
social organism, only in such a way in which his thoughts would
be analogous to the natural organism. Here he suddenly became
cornered.
The
natural human organism is connected to the confluence of
everything relating to it from the surrounding world, through
observations, through imagination and so on. Every single
organism is bound to what it can develop under the influence of
the nervous or sensory system (sensorium). In the human
community organism Herbert Spencer couldn't find a sensorium,
no kind of centralised nervous system. For this reason, he
constructed a kind of community organism, totally based on
science, as the crown of his philosophic structure.
What lay ahead for the West with this? It meant that scientific
thought could reach its fully entitled, one-sided development.
What lay ahead was the finest observational results and
experimental talents developing out of folk talents. What came
out of it was interest created to observe the world in its
outer sensory reality into the smallest detail, without
becoming impatient and wanting to rise out of it to some
encompassing concepts. What came out of it was also a tendency
to remain within this outer sense-world of facts. There was
what I could call, a kind of fear of rising up to one
encompassing amalgamation. Because they could do nothing else
but exist in what the sense world presented to them, simply
being pushed directly into the senses here in the West, there
appeared the belief that the entire spiritual world should be
handed over to the singular faiths of individuals, and that
these beliefs should develop free from all scientific
influences. Religious content was not to be touched by
scientific exploration. So we see with Herbert Spencer, who in
his way took up the scientific way of thought consequentially
right into sociology, earnestly separated, on the one hand,
from science, which would proceed scientifically, and on the
other hand with a spiritual content for people who wanted
nothing to do with science.
Let's go now from Herbert Spencer to what we meet with Hegel.
It doesn't matter that Hegel, who belonged to the first third
of the 19th Century, was outwitted during the second
third for central European philosophy because what was
characteristic for Middle Europe was most meaningful in what
exactly had appeared in Hegel. Let's look at Hegel. Already in
his, I could call it, emotional predisposition, lies a certain
antipathy against this universalist natural scientific way with
which to shape the world view as Herbert Spencer had done in
the West, but of course had been prepared by predecessors, both
by scientific researchers and philosophers as well. We see how
Hegel could not stand Newton and was unsympathetic to his
unique way by thinking of the world-all as totally mechanical,
how he rejected Newton not merely in terms of the colour theory
but also in his interpretation of the cosmos. Hegel took the
trouble to go back to Kepler's planetary movement formulations,
he analysed Kepler's formulations about planetary movements and
found out for himself, that Newton had actually not added
anything new because Kepler's formulation already contained the
laws of gravitation. This he applied from the basis of a
scientifically formulated thought, while with Kepler it had
resulted more out of a spiritual experience, which he saw as
encompassing and that one could try to grasp the outer natural
scientific through the spirit. Kepler is for Hegel simply the
personality who is capable of penetrating thoughts with the
spirit and building a bridge between what is acceptable
scientifically, and what simply has to be believed according to
the West, and which is also capable of lifting science into the
area which for the West is limited to belief.
From this basis Hegel, in tune with Goethe, strongly opposed
the Newtonian colour theory. We can see how the Hegelian system
had a kind of antipathy against what appeared quite natural in
the Newtonian system. For this Hegel had a decisive talent — to
live completely in a thought itself. For Hegel Goethe's
utterance to Schiller was obvious: “I see my ideas with
my eyes.” It appears naive, however, such naivety, when
considered correctly, comes out of the deepest philosophic
wisdom. Hegel would simply not have understood how one could
state that the idea of the triangle is not to be grasped,
because Hegel's life went completely — if I might use the
expression — according to the plan of thinking. For him
there was also a higher world of revelations, a world of higher
spirituality, which gradually casts its shadow images on a
plane which is filled with thoughts. From up above the
spiritual worlds throw their shadow images on the plane of the
human soul, on which human thought can develop. Through this
the idea of higher spirituality came about for Hegel, that on
the plane of the soul it is shadowed as thoughts. Hegel was
inclined to experience these thoughts as fully spiritual, and
he also experienced natural events not in their elementary
present time, but he saw them in mental pictures, thrown on to
the plane of the soul.
So
it is impossible in Hegel's philosophy to separate, in an outer
way, wisdom from belief, which was quite natural in the West.
For Hegel his life task was the unification of the spiritual
world (which the West wanted to simply refer to as part of the
large sphere of belief) with the sensory physical world, into
such a world about which one can have knowledge. This means
there is no longer knowledge on the one hand and belief on the
other; here the human soul faces the great, meaningful problem:
How does one find during earthly life the bridge between belief
and knowledge, between spirit and nature? To a certain extent
it was the tragedy of Hegel that the problem he posed in such a
grandiose manner, he wanted to understand actually only on the
level of thinking, that he wanted to understand the experience
of the inner power, the inner liveliness of thinking, but he
could not grasp anything living from the content of
thought.
Consider Hegel's logic — he wanted to return repeatedly
to the concept of the Logos! He felt that when we actually
wanted to attain a true understanding of the Logos, then the
Logos must be something which is not merely something thought,
but a real activity which floods and works through the world.
For him the Logos did not only have an abstract, logical
content, but for him it became real world content. If we look
at one of the three parts of his philosophy, namely his
“logic” we only find abstract concepts! So it is
terribly moving for someone who enters on the one side into the
Hegelian philosophy, with his whole being, and has the
fundamental experience: that which can be grasped through the
Logos, must be penetrated with the creative principle of the
world. The Logos must be “God before the creation of the
world” — to use an expression of Hegel.
This is on the one side. Now how did Hegel develop this idea of
the Logos on the other side? He starts with “being”
and arrives at “nothing”, goes from
“becoming” to “existence.” He arrives
at the goal through the causality, to the belief that certain
phenomena are best explained in terms of purpose rather than
cause. One can look at the all the concepts of Hegel's logic
and ask oneself: Is that what, “before the beginning of
creation as the content of the divine” could have been
there? This is abstract logic, the demand of the creative, the
logos as postulate, but as a purely human thought postulate!
One finds this tragic. This tragedy goes further, for the
Hegelian philosophy is deemed as valid. Yet it contains
instances where through action new life can germinate. It
contains sprouts. Hegel saw his redemption in this: being
— nothing — becoming — existence.
When people are presented with Hegel, they say: ‘This is a dark
one, we don't need to be lured into it.’ However, when one
makes the effort to allow one's inner soul to enter into it, to
experience the concept inwardly, as Hegel tried to experience
it, then all the ideas of empiricism and rationalism
disappears, then thought experiences and the one who is
thinking is directly thought of. Whoever goes along with it
finds the impetus of loosening the thoughts from the
abstraction, and take Hegel's logic as the sprouts which can
become something quite different, when they become alive. For
me Hegel's logic looks like the seed of a plant in which one
can hardly see what it will become and yet still carries the
most varied structures possible within it.
For
me it appears that when this seed sprouts, when one lovingly
cares for it and plants it into the soul's earth through
anthroposophical research, then what emerges is that thought
can not only be thought but can be experienced as reality. Here
we have the central European aspect.
If
we now go to the East, we have in Vladimir Soloviev a man who
is able like no other philosopher, to become gradually more the
content of our own philosophic striving, who must now become so
important to us because we allow the particularities of his
character to work in on us. We see in Soloviev both the
European-eastern way of thinking, which is of course not
Oriental-Asiatic. Soloviev absorbed everything which was
European, he only developed it in an Eastern fashion. What do
we see being developed in terms of human scientific striving?
Here we see how actually this method of thinking, found mostly
in the West by Herbert Spencer, which Soloviev basically looked
down on, is something against which the truth and knowledge he
was seeking, could so to speak be illustrated. In comparison,
what he actually presents is a full experience of spirituality
itself. It appeared in full consciousness to him, it appeared
more atavistically, subconsciously, yet it is an experience in
spirituality itself. It was more or less a dreamlike attempt to
knowingly experience what in the West — here quite
consciously — was transposed into the realm of belief. So
we find in the East a discussion which can be experienced in an
imprecise way, which looks like a one-sided experience which
Hegel wanted to use to cross the bridge out of the natural
existence to the spiritual world.
If
a person delves into the spiritual development of someone from
central Europe, like Soloviev, then he will primarily have an
extraordinary uncomfortable feeling. He is reminded of an
experience of something misty, mystical; an overheated element
in the soul life which doesn't arrive at concepts, which can
externally leave him empty completely, but which can only be
experienced inwardly. He senses the entirely vague mystical
experience, but he also finds that Soloviev makes use of
conceptual forms and means of expression which we know, from
Hegel, Humes, Mills, even those of Spencer, but only as
illustrations. Throughout one can say he doesn't remain stuck
in the mist but through the way with which he treats religious
aspects as scientific, how he searches for it everywhere and
unfolds it as philosophy, he can evermore be measured and
criticised according to the philosophic conceptual development
of the West.
So
we find ourselves today in the following situation. In the West
comes the striving to formulate a world view scientifically;
science is on the one side and the spiritual on the other side
and wrestle in the centre with the problem of how to create a
bridge to include both, to express it imprecisely, as Hegel
said: “Nature is Spirit in its dissimilarity,”
“Spirit is the concept of when it has returned again to
itself.” In all these stuttering expressions lie the
tragedy that Hegel could only care for abstract ideas, which he
strived for. Then in the East, with Soloviev we see how it was
somewhat still maintained, how well the church fathers wanted
to save it in terms of philosophy, before the Council of
Nicaea. It places us completely back in the first three post
Christian Centuries of the West.
So
we have in the East an experience of the spiritual world, which
is not able to soar up into self-owned terminological
formulations, formulations and concepts used by the West in
which they express themselves, and as a result remain in vague,
somewhat extraneous, foreign expressions.
So
we see how the threefold nature of the philosophic world view
unfolded. By our tracing how the threefold philosophic world
view was formed through the characteristics and abilities of
humanity in the West, the centre and the East, we can see that
we are obliged today — because science as something
embracing must spread over all of mankind — to find
something which can lift it above these various philosophic
aspects which basically still provide elements where philosophy
is still a human-personal matter. We see today in different
ways in the West, central Europe and the East, how they love
wisdom. We understand that in ancient times, philosophy could
still be an inner condition of the soul. Now however, in recent
times, where people are strongly differentiated, this way of
loving wisdom expresses itself in a magnitude of ways. Perhaps
we could realise due to this, what we have to do ourselves,
particularly what we have to do in Central Europe, where the
most tragic and intensified problem is raised even if it is not
regarded in the same way by all philosophic minds.
If
I want to summarise all of what I have brought into a picture,
I would like to express it as follows. Regarded philosophically
Soloviev speaks like the old priest who lived in higher worlds
and who had developed a kind of inner ability to live in these
higher worlds: priestly speech translated philosophically is
what one encounters all the time with Soloviev. In the West,
with Herbert Spencer, speaks the man of the world who wants to
enter practical life — as it has come out of Darwinian
theory — to expand science in such a way that it becomes
the practical basis of life. In the Middle we have neither the
man of the world not the priest: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel have
no priestly ways like a Soloviev. In the Middle we have the
teacher, the educators of the people and it is also here where
the German philosophy emerged, for example, from religious
deepening; because the priest became the teacher once again.
The educated also adheres to the Hegelian philosophy.
We
see recently — as with Oswald Külpe — how it
has happened that philosophy, when it was already lost, is no
more than a summary of the individual sciences. From inorganic
science you can ask — what are the concepts? From organic
science you can ask — what are the concepts? Likewise
with history, with the science of religion, and so on. One
collects these concepts and forms a separate abstract unit. I
would like to say that the subject of the teaching in the
separate sciences should create the totality of teaching. This
is what the science in the Middle must basically come to after
the entire assessment.
If
we look back at what has happened, we see with Herbert Spencer
the unconditional belief in science, the belief for the
necessity to cling to observation, experiment and a thinking
mind, which can be experienced through the observation and
experiment; and one is mistaken about the contradiction which
appears here, when the acquired concepts can be applied to the
social organism and — although these do not have the most
important characteristics of a natural organism, the sensorium
— they are nevertheless grasped with the same concepts which
arise in natural existence. We see the inclination to the
natural sciences so strong that some characters — like
Newton — became one-sidedly stuck to the mechanistic and
even satisfied their soul-striving with it. It is generally
known that Newton had tried in a one-sided mystical way to
clarify the Apocalypse; besides his scientific world view he
had his own mystical needs.
Let's look, for example, at everything which has arisen from
natural science and what it gradually in the course of the
19th Century has subconsciously taken over in
Central Europe; because in Central Europe science has simply
followed the pattern of the Western scientific way of thinking.
There is a tendency not to take notice of it, but still all
points of view are modelled on the Western pattern. How wild
the people become when someone tries to apply Goethe's way of
thinking in physics in contrast to them taking shelter under
Newton!
How
does the development happen in biology? Goethe created an
organism for which the integration into its concepts depended
on an understanding of a mathematical nature. Time was short to
obtain a biology more appropriate to modern thinking than to
that of olden times. The progress in the 19th
Century in central Europe however brought about not the
Goethean biology but Darwinism, which was interspersed with
concepts contrary to those of Goethe, like the concepts of the
16th Century opposed to those of the 18th
Century. Only in Central Europe did these concepts develop; in
the West people remained with those concepts that sufficed for
the understanding of nature. So it happened that certain
concepts in the West simply were not available and simply got
lost because people in Central Europe had adopted western
thinking. For example, that a thought, a lively thought, can
form a concept of grasping a reality, quite apart from
empiricism, as it had happened with Hegel — this is not present
in Central Europe; it got lost because the central European
thinking was flooded by western thinking.
So
we have the task in Central Europe to look at what scientific
thinking can be. Anthroposophists resent it when this
scientific way of thinking is cared for with as much love as
for the researcher himself. Nothing, absolutely nothing will be
said by me in opposition to scientific thinking; if someone
believes this then it is a misunderstanding. However, I must
understand the scientific way of thinking in its purity and
then also try to characterise it in its purity. Now these
things are presented to those who confront scientific thinking
with impartiality — somewhat like a western researcher
will present them, like Haeckel in his genial way did it
— these results are presented in a western way of
research, when they are thus left and not reinterpreted
philosophically, not given as solutions, not as answers, but
are presented above all as questions. The totality of natural
science does not gradually become an answer to a question for
the impartial person, because it turns into the great world
question itself. This is experienced everywhere: what is now
being researched in the most beautiful way by these researchers
— for my sake right up to atomic theory, which I don't
negate but only want to put it in its correct place —
this comes to a question and out of the West a great question
is posed to us. Where does this question come from?
When we link our gaze to the outer world and only turn to the
observation of the given elements, we don't fathom its complete
reality. We are born as human beings in the world, are
constituted as such, as we already were before and take part in
the reality by looking at ourselves in our own inner being. As
we look then at the outer world, the sense perceptible objects
— we find that part which is living in us, is missing in
reality, as we can only through human struggle connect to the
other half-reality, which observes us from the outside. If we
look towards the West, so we see the half-reality is researched
with particular devotion; however, it only provides a number of
questions because it's only a half-reality. So on the one side
there appears only one half of reality as a given; if one
really looks at it, it raises questions. In Central Europe you
discover examples of questions which Western thinking can
answer and one tries to push through to thinking. That is the
Hegelian philosophy.
In
the East one felt that which lives above the thought, which
works down into the thought; but one couldn't come as far as
awakening it to life, that so to speak the flesh could also
sustain a skeleton. Soloviev was able to develop it in flesh,
muscles and even blood in his philosophy — but the
skeleton was missing. As a result, he took Hegel's concepts,
those of Humes and others, and built in a foreign skeletal
system. Only when one is in the position of not using a foreign
skeletal system then something comes about which can be lived
through spiritually. So, however, as it happened with Soloviev,
it leads to a shadowed existence because it didn't manifest
into a skeletal system which could as a result be descriptive.
If one doesn't want to remain with building only an outer
skeletal system, but live spiritually and prepare oneself
through strong spiritual work, then one develops for oneself an
inner skeleton within spiritual experiences; one develops the
necessary concepts. For this, various exercises have been given
in my writings,
“Occult Science”
and
“Knowledge of the Higher Worlds”
and in others. Here one develops what really can become a conceptual
organism. This is then the other side of reality, and this side of
reality has its seed in the eastern philosophy of Soloviev.
In
central Europe there is always the big problem of striking a
bridge between nature and the spiritual. For us it has at the
same time become a meaningful historical problem: to strike the
bridge between West and East, and this task must stand before
us in philosophy. This task also directs itself into
Anthroposophy. If Anthroposophy becomes capable of inward
thought experiences developing into living form, then it may on
the other side experience quite materialistic natural phenomena
as they are experienced in the West, because then it will not
be through abstract concepts but through living scientific
circles that the bridge is built between mere belief and
knowledge, between knowing and subjective certainty. Then out
of philosophy a real Anthroposophy will develop and philosophy
can be fructified from both sides by these living sciences.
Only then would Hegel's philosophy be awakened to life, when
through the anthroposophical experience you let the blood of
life be spiritually added to it. Then there won't be a logical
base which is so abstract that it can't be “Spirit on the
other side of Nature”, as Hegel wanted it, but that it
really can be grasped, not as abstraction but as the living
spirituality of philosophy.
This gives Anthroposophy the following task. How must we,
according to our present viewpoints, which lie decades behind
Hegel, strike the bridge between what we call truth on the one
side, which must encompass all of reality, and that which we
call science on the other side, which also must encompass the
entirety of reality? Briefly, the problem must be raised
— and that is the most important philosophic problem in
Anthroposophy: what is the relationship between truth and
science?
This is the problem I wanted to present in the introduction
today at the start of our consideration, which I believe you
will now understand.
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