The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Preface to the 1st Edition 1892

[ 1 ] Present-day philosophy suffers from an unhealthy belief in Kant. This paper is intended as a contribution to overcoming it. It would be sacrilegious to want to belittle the immortal merits of this man in the development of German science. But we must finally realize that we can only lay the foundation for a truly satisfying view of the world and of life if we place ourselves in decisive opposition to this spirit. What has Kant achieved? He showed that the primordial ground of things lying beyond our world of sense and reason, which his predecessors sought with the help of misunderstood conceptual templates, is inaccessible to our cognitive faculty. From this he concluded that our scientific endeavors must remain within the realm of what can be attained through experience and cannot approach the knowledge of the supersensible primordial ground, the "thing in itself". But how if this "thing in itself" together with the otherworldly primordial ground of things were only a phantom! It is easy to see that this is the case. To search for the deepest essence of things, for their original principles, is a drive inseparable from human nature. It underlies all scientific activity.

[ 2 ] But there is not the slightest reason to seek this primordial reason outside the sensory and spiritual world given to us, as long as an all-round investigation of this world does not reveal that within it there are elements that clearly point to an influence from outside.

[ 3 ] Our writing now seeks to prove that everything that must be drawn upon to explain and explain the world is accessible to our thinking. The assumption of principles lying outside our world is shown to be the prejudice of a dead philosophy living in a vain delusion of dogma. Kant should have come to this conclusion if he had really investigated what our thinking is predisposed to. Instead, he proved, in the most laborious manner, that we cannot arrive at the ultimate principles, which lie beyond our experience, because of the disposition of our cognitive faculty. Reasonably, however, we must not transfer them to such a beyond. Kant may have refuted "dogmatic" philosophy, but he did not replace it. German philosophy, which followed on from him, therefore developed everywhere in opposition to Kant. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel were no longer concerned with the limits of our cognition as defined by their predecessor and sought the original principles of things within this world of human reason. Even Schopenhauer, who claimed that the results of Kant's critique of reason were eternally incontrovertible truths, could not avoid taking paths to knowledge of the ultimate causes of the world that differed from those of his master. The fate of these thinkers was that they sought knowledge of the highest truths without having laid the foundation for such a beginning through an investigation of the nature of knowledge itself. The proud intellectual edifices of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel therefore stand without a foundation. The lack of such a foundation also had a damaging effect on the philosophers' thought processes. Without knowledge of the significance of the pure world of ideas and its relationship to the realm of sense perception, they built error upon error, one-sidedness upon one-sidedness. No wonder that the overly bold systems were unable to withstand the storms of an age hostile to philosophy, and that much of the good they contained was mercilessly blown away with the bad.

[ 4 ] The following investigations are intended to remedy the deficiency indicated here. They are not intended to show, as Kant did, what the faculty of knowledge is not capable of; rather, their purpose is to show what it really is capable of.

[ 5 ] The result of these investigations is that truth is not, as is usually assumed, the ideal reflection of some real thing, but a free product of the human mind, which would not exist anywhere at all if we did not produce it ourselves. The task of cognition is not to repeat something that already exists elsewhere in conceptual form, but to create a completely new realm which, together with the sensually given world, results in full reality. Thus the highest activity of man, his spiritual creation, is organically integrated into the general world event. Without this activity, world events could not be conceived as a self-contained whole. Man is not an idle spectator of the course of the world, who visually repeats within his mind what takes place in the cosmos without his intervention, but the active co-creator of the world process; and cognition is the most perfect link in the organism of the universe.

[ 6 ] For the laws of our actions, for our moral ideals, this view has the important consequence that these too cannot be regarded as the image of something outside us, but as something existing only within us. A power, as whose commandments we would have to regard our moral laws, is thus also rejected. We do not know of a "categorical imperative", a voice from beyond, as it were, that tells us what we should or should not do. Our moral ideals are our own free product. We only have to carry out what we prescribe to ourselves as the norm for our actions. The view of truth as an act of freedom thus also establishes a moral doctrine whose foundation is the completely free personality.

[ 7 ] These propositions apply, of course, only to that part of our actions whose laws we penetrate ideally in perfect knowledge. As long as the latter are merely natural or conceptually still unclear motives, someone higher up spiritually can recognize the extent to which these laws of our actions are founded within our individuality, but we ourselves perceive them as acting on us from outside, as compelling us. Every time we succeed in clearly recognizing and penetrating such a motive, we make a conquest in the area of freedom.

[ 8 ] The reader will see from our paper in detail how our views relate to the most important philosophical phenomenon of the present day, Eduard von Hartmann's world view, insofar as the problem of knowledge comes into question.

[ 9 ] A "philosophy of freedom" is what we have created a prelude to with the present. This itself will soon follow in more detail.

[ 10 ] The elevation of the existential value of the human personality is the ultimate goal of all science. Anyone who does not pursue the latter with this intention is only working because he has seen his master do so, he is "researching" because he has just learned to do so by chance. He cannot be called a "free thinker".

[ 11 ] What gives the sciences their true value is the philosophical explanation of the human significance of their results. I wanted to make a contribution to this explanation. But perhaps contemporary science does not require philosophical justification! Then two things are certain: firstly, that I have delivered an unnecessary paper; secondly, that modern scholarship is fishing in the doldrums and does not know what it wants.

[ 12 ] At the end of this preface, I cannot suppress a personal remark. Up to now, I have always presented my philosophical views with reference to Goethe's world view, to which I was first introduced by my revered teacher Karl Julius Schröer, who is so highly regarded by me in Goethe research because his view always goes beyond the individual to the ideas.

[ 13 ] With this essay, however, I hope to have shown that my structure of thought is a whole founded in itself, which does not need to be derived from Goethe's world view. My thoughts, as they are presented here and will continue to follow as the "Philosophy of Freedom", have developed over the course of many years. And it is only out of a deep sense of gratitude that I say that the affectionate way in which the Specht house in Vienna accommodated me during the time in which I had to take care of the education of the children there provided a uniquely desirable "milieu" for the development of my ideas; furthermore, that I found the atmosphere for the final rounding off of some of the thoughts of my preliminary sketches on pp.86 to 88 of my "Philosophy of Freedom" to the stimulating conversations with my highly esteemed friend Rosa Mayreder in Vienna, whose literary works, which spring from a subtle, noble artistic nature, will probably soon be handed over to the public.

Written in Vienna, early December 1891.
Dr. Rudolf Steiner