The Rudolf Steiner Archive

7. Final Epistemological Reflections

[ 1 ] We have established that epistemology is the science dealing with the significance of all human knowing (Wissen). Only through epistemology do we achieve clarity about the relation of the content of the individual sciences to the world. Epistemology makes it possible for us, with the help of the sciences, to arrive at a world view. Wie learn to know certain things through the individual areas of knowledge; through epistemology we experience the value of this knowing for reality. Through the fact that we have kept strictly to this basic principle and have not made use of any of the individual sciences in our considerations, we have overcome all the one-sided world views. One-sidedness usually arises from the fact that an investigation, instead of focusing on the process of knowledge itself, immediately takes up some object or other of this process. Our considerations show that dogmatism must give up its “thing-in-itself,” and subjective idealism its “I" as basic principle, because it is in thinking that these are essentially first characterized in their mutual relation. The “thing-in-itself” and the “I” are not to be characterized by deriving one from the other, but rather the character and relation of both must be determined by thinking. Scepticism must abandon its doubt that the world is knowable, for there is nothing about the “given” to doubt, because it is still untouched by any predicates bestowed by knowing activity. But if scepticism wanted to assert that the thinking activity of knowing can never grasp things, it could only do so through thinking reflection, whereby it also then refutes itself. For, someone who wants to establish doubt through thinking implicitly admits that thinking is to be credited with having sufficient power to support a conviction. And finally, our epistemology overcomes both one-sided empiricism and one-sided rationalism by uniting them on a higher level. In this way it does justice to both. We do justice to the empiricist by showing that any knowledge, with regard to content, about the “given” can be attained only in direct connection with this “given.” And the rationalist is also given his due in our considerations, since we declare thinking to be the necessary and only mediator of knowing activity.

[ 2 ] Our world view, as we have established it epistemologically, is closest to that held by A. E. Biedermann.^{1Christian Dogmatism, The epistemological investigations are in Volume One. Eduard von Hartmann has provided an exhaustive consideration of this standpoint; see Critical Survey of Contemporary Philosophy, p. 200ff.} But, in order to establish his standpoint, Biedennann uses findings that do not belong in epistemology at all. Thus he operates with the concepts of “existence,” “substance,” “space,” “time,” etc., without first having investigated the process of knowledge in its own right. Instead of determining the fact that in the process of knowledge at first only two elements — the “given” and thinking — are present, he speaks of reality's indications of existence. Thus he says, for example, (Paragraph 15): “In every content of consciousness two basic facts are contained. In it two kinds of existence are given us, whose contrasting existence we call sense-perceptible and spiritual material and ideal existence.” And (Paragraph 19): “That which has spatial-temporal existence exists as something material; that which is the basis of all processes of existence and is the subject of life exists ideally; it is real as something existing ideally.” Such arguments do not belong in epistemology; metaphysics, which must first be established with the help of epistemology, is where they belong. Admittedly, Biedermann's assertions are in many ways similar to ours; our methods, however, have absolutely nothing in common with his. Therefore we also did not feel moved to come to terms with him directly. Biedermann, with the help of a few metaphysical axioms, seeks to gain an epistemological standpoint. We seek, by looking at the process of knowledge, to arrive at a view about reality.

[ 3 ] And we believe that we have in fact shown that all conflict between world views stems from the fact that one aspires to gain knowledge about something objective (thing, consciousness, etc.) without knowing exactly, beforehand, that which alone can elucidate all other knowing activity: the nature of knowing activity itself.^{2Wissen is the word used throughout this paragraph instead of Erkennen. —Translator.}