The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Appendix I
Addendum to the Revised Edition of 1918

[ 1 ] Objections made to me by philosophers immediately after the publication of this book have prompted me to add the following brief explanation to this new edition. I can well imagine that there are readers who are interested in the rest of the contents of this book, but who regard the following as a superfluous and remote abstract conceptual conglomeration. They can leave this brief account unread. Only within the philosophical view of the world do problems arise which have their origin more in certain prejudices of thinkers than in the natural course of every human thought itself. What else is dealt with in this book seems to me to be a task that concerns every person who struggles for clarity with regard to the nature of man and his relationship to the world. The following, however, is more a problem which certain philosophers demand to be dealt with when speaking of the things presented in this book, because these philosophers have created certain difficulties for themselves through their way of thinking which are not generally present. If such problems are completely ignored, certain personalities are quick to accuse them of dilettantism and the like. And the opinion arises as if the author of an account such as the one given in this book had not dealt with views that he did not discuss in the book itself.

[ 2 ] The problem I am referring to here is this: There are thinkers who are of the opinion that a particular difficulty arises when one wants to understand how another human soul life can have an effect on one's own (the observer's). They say: my conscious world is closed in me; another conscious world is also closed in itself. I cannot see into the conscious world of another. How do I come to know that I am in a common world with him? The world view that considers it possible to deduce from the conscious world to an unconscious world that can never become conscious tries to solve this difficulty in the following way. It says: the world that I have in my consciousness is the world represented in me of a world of reality that I cannot consciously reach. In this world lie the unknown causes of my world of consciousness. In this also lies my real entity, of which I also have only one representative in my consciousness. But in this also lies the entity of the other person who confronts me. What is now experienced in the consciousness of this other person has its corresponding reality in his entity, independent of this consciousness. In the area that cannot become conscious, this has an effect on my principle unconscious entity, and thereby a representation is created in my consciousness for that which is present in a consciousness that is completely independent of my conscious experience. As you can see, a hypothetical world that is inaccessible to my consciousness is added to the world that is accessible to it in my experience, because otherwise I would feel compelled to assert that all the external world that I think I have before me is only my conscious world, and that would result in the - solipsistic - absurdity that the other persons also only live within my consciousness.

[ 3 ] Clarity about this question, created by some epistemological currents of recent times, can be gained if one seeks to survey the matter from the point of view of spiritual observation, which is adopted in the presentation of this book. What do I first have before me when I face another personality? I look at the next thing. It is the sensory physical appearance of the other person given to me as perception; then, for instance, the auditory perception of what he says, and so on. I do not merely stare at all this, but it sets my thinking activity in motion. As I stand thinking before the other personality, the perception marks itself out to me, as it were, as psychically transparent. I am compelled to say to myself in my thinking grasp of perception that it is not at all what it appears to the outer senses. In what it is directly, the sense-appearance reveals something else that it is indirectly. Its placing itself before me is at the same time its obliteration as a mere sense appearance. But what it makes manifest in this erasure forces me as a thinking being to erase my thinking for the time of its working and to put its thinking in its place. This their thinking, however, I grasp in my thinking as an experience like my own. I have really perceived the thinking of the other. For the immediate perception that extinguishes itself as a sensory phenomenon is seized by my thinking, and it is a process that lies completely within my consciousness, which consists in the fact that the other thinking takes the place of my thinking. The separation between the two spheres of consciousness is actually abolished through the obliteration of the sensory phenomenon. This is represented in my consciousness by the fact that in the experience of the other content of consciousness I experience my own consciousness just as little as I experience it in dreamless sleep. Just as my day consciousness is switched off in the latter, so my own is switched off in the perception of the other consciousness. The illusion, as if this were not so, arises only from the fact that in the perception of the other person, firstly, the extinction of my own consciousness is not replaced by unconsciousness as in sleep, but by the other consciousness, and secondly, that the alternating states between extinction and re-illumination of my own consciousness follow each other too quickly to be usually noticed. - The whole problem at hand is not solved by artificial conceptual constructions that infer from what is conscious to what can never become conscious, but by truly experiencing what arises in the connection between thinking and perception. This is the case with many questions that arise in philosophical literature. Thinkers should seek the path to unbiased, spiritually appropriate observation; instead, they push an artificial conceptual construction in front of reality.

[ 4 ] In a treatise by Eduard von Hartmann entitled "Die letzten Fragen der Erkenntnistheorie und Metaphysik" (in Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, 108. Bd. 5. 55 ff.), my "Philosophy of Freedom" is classified in the philosophical school of thought that seeks to base itself on an "epistemological monism". Eduard von Hartmann rejects such a standpoint as impossible, which is based on the following. According to the way of thinking expressed in the above-mentioned essay, there are only three possible epistemological standpoints. Either one remains on the naive standpoint, which takes the perceived appearances as real things apart from human consciousness. Then one lacks critical insight. One does not realize that the content of one's consciousness is only in one's own consciousness. One does not realize that one is not dealing with a "table in itself", but only with one's own object of consciousness. Whoever remains on this standpoint or returns to it through any considerations is a naive realist. But this point of view is impossible, for it fails to recognize that consciousness has only its own objects of consciousness. Or one sees through this fact and fully admits it. Then one first becomes a transcendental idealist. But then one would have to reject that anything of a "thing in itself" could ever appear in human consciousness. But this does not mean that one escapes absolute illusionism, if one is only consistent enough to do so. For the world one is confronted with is transformed into a mere sum of objects of consciousness, and only of objects of one's own consciousness. One is then also - absurdly - forced to think of other people as being present only in the content of one's own consciousness. A possible point of view is only the third, transcendental realism. This assumes that there are "things in themselves", but that consciousness cannot have anything to do with them in direct experience. They cause the objects of consciousness to appear beyond human consciousness in a way that does not fall into consciousness. One can only arrive at these "things in themselves" by inference from the solely experienced, but merely imagined content of consciousness. Eduard von Hartmann now claims in the above-mentioned essay that an "epistemological monism", as which he understands my point of view, must in reality commit itself to one of the three points of view; it only does not do so because it does not draw the actual consequences of its presuppositions. And then the essay says: "If one wants to find out which epistemological standpoint an alleged epistemological monist belongs to, one only needs to put some questions to him and force him to answer them. For no such person will allow himself to express himself on these points, and he will also try in every way to avoid answering direct questions, because every answer invalidates the claim to epistemological monism as a standpoint different from the other three. These questions are the following: 1. are things continuous or intermittent in their existence? If the answer is: they are continuous, then we are dealing with some form of naive realism. If the answer is: they are intermittent, then we are dealing with transcendental idealism. But if it is: they are continuous on the one hand (as contents of absolute consciousness, or as unconscious ideas, or as perceptual possibilities), and intermittent on the other (as contents of limited consciousness), then transcendental realism is established. - 2. if three people are sitting at a table, how many copies of the table are there? Whoever answers: one, is a naive realist; whoever answers: three, is a transcendental idealist; but whoever answers: four, is a transcendental realist. It is presupposed, however, that such dissimilar things as the one table as a thing in itself and the three tables as objects of perception in the three consciousnesses may be subsumed under the common designation "specimens of the table". To whom this seems too great a liberty, he will have to give the answer "one and three" instead of "four". - 3. if two people are alone together in a room, how many copies of these people are there? He who answers: two, is a naive realist; he who answers: four (namely, in each of the two consciousnesses an I and another), is a transcendental idealist; but he who answers: six (namely, two persons as things in themselves and four objects of conception of persons in the two consciousnesses), is a transcendental realist. Whoever wanted to prove epistemological monism to be different from these three standpoints would have to give a different answer to each of these three questions; but I would not know what this answer could be." The answers of the "philosophy of freedom" would have to be as follows: 1. he who only grasps the perceptual contents of things and takes these for reality is a naive realist, and he does not realize that he may actually regard these perceptual contents as existing only as long as he looks at the things, that he must therefore think what he has before him as intermittent. But as soon as he realizes that reality is only present in the perceptible interspersed with thought, he arrives at the insight that the perceptual content that appears as intermittent interspersed with what has been worked out in thought reveals itself as continuous. The following must therefore be regarded as continuous: the perceptual content grasped by experienced thinking, of which that which is only perceived would have to be thought as intermittent if it were real - which is not the case. - (2) If three people are sitting at a table, how many copies of the table are there? There is only one table; but as long as the three persons wanted to remain with their perceptual images, they would have to say: these perceptual images are no reality at all. As soon as they pass over to the table they have grasped in their thinking, the one reality of the table reveals itself to them; they are united with their three contents of consciousness in this reality. - (3) If two persons are alone together in a room, how many copies of these persons are there? There are certainly not six - not even in the sense of the transcendental realist - but only two. But each of the persons initially has only the unreal perceptual image of himself as well as of the other person. There are four of these images, in the presence of which the apprehension of reality takes place in the mental activity of the two persons. In this mental activity, each of the persons overlaps their own sphere of consciousness; that of the other and of their own person comes to life in them. In the moments of this coming to life the persons are just as little resolved in their consciousness as in sleep. Only in the other moments the consciousness of this resurrection arises again in the other, so that the consciousness of each of the persons takes hold of itself and the other in the thinking experience. I know that the transcendental realist calls this a relapse into naive realism. But I have already pointed out in this paper that naive realism retains its justification for experienced thinking. The transcendental realist does not engage with the true facts of the cognitive process at all; he closes himself off from them through a web of thought and becomes entangled in it. The monism that appears in the "Philosophy of Freedom" should also not be called "epistemological", but, if one wants an epithet, thought-monism. All this was misjudged by Eduard von Hartmann. He did not go into the specifics of the presentation in the "Philosophy of Freedom", but claimed: I would have made the attempt to combine Hegel's universalistic panlogism with Hume's individualistic phenomenalism (p. 71 of the Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 108th vol., note), while in fact the "Philosophy of Freedom" as such has nothing at all to do with these two points of view, which it supposedly endeavors to unite. (This is also the reason why it was not obvious for me to deal with Johannes Rehmke's "epistemological monism", for example. The point of view of the "philosophy of freedom" is quite different from what Eduard von Hartmann and others call epistemological monism.