The Rudolf Steiner Archive

2. The Basic Drive for Science

Two souls dwell, alas! in my breast,
One wants to separate from the other;
The one holds on, in the ardor of love,
Clings to the world with clutching organs;
The other lifts itself violently from the Dust
To the realms of high ancestors.

Faust I

[ 1 ] With these words, Goethe expresses a trait deeply rooted in human nature. Man is not a uniformly organized being. He always demands more than the world freely gives him. Nature has given us needs; among these are those whose satisfaction she leaves to our own activity. The gifts given to us are abundant, but our desires are even more abundant. We seem to be born to dissatisfaction. Only one particular instance of this dissatisfaction is our urge for knowledge. We look at a tree twice. One time we see its branches at rest, the other time in motion. We are not satisfied with this observation. Why does the tree appear to be at rest on one occasion and in motion on the other? So we ask. Every time we look at nature, we ask ourselves a series of questions. With every phenomenon that confronts us, we are given a task. Every experience becomes a riddle for us. We see a creature emerge from the egg that resembles the mother animal; we ask why this resemblance exists. We observe the growth and development of a living being up to a certain degree of perfection: we search for the conditions of this experience. Nowhere are we satisfied with what nature spreads out before our senses. We search everywhere for what we call the explanation of the facts.

[ 2 ] The excess of what we seek in things over what is directly given to us in them divides our whole being into two parts; we become aware of our opposition to the world. We confront the world as an independent being. The universe appears to us in the two opposites: I and world.

[ 3 ] We erect this partition between ourselves and the world as soon as consciousness lights up within us. But we never lose the feeling that we do belong to the world, that there is a bond that connects us to it, that we are not a being outside but within the universe.

[ 4 ] This feeling generates the aspiration to bridge the gap. And the bridging of this opposition is ultimately the whole spiritual endeavor of humanity. The history of spiritual life is a continuous search for unity between us and the world. Religion, art and science pursue this goal in equal measure. The religious believer seeks in the revelation that God grants him the solution to the riddles of the world that his ego, dissatisfied with the mere world of appearances, gives him. The artist seeks to imagine the ideas of his ego into the material in order to reconcile what lives within him with the outside world. He too feels unsatisfied by the mere world of appearances and seeks to mold into it that something more which his ego, going beyond it, contains. The thinker searches for the laws of phenomena, he strives to penetrate by thinking what he experiences by observing. Only when we have made the content of the world into our content of thought, only then do we find the context again from which we have detached ourselves. We will see later that this goal can only be achieved if the task of the scientific researcher is understood much more deeply than is often the case. The whole relationship that I have outlined here confronts us in a world-historical phenomenon: in the contrast between the unified world view or monism and the two-world theory or dualism. Dualism focuses only on the separation between the self and the world as carried out by the human consciousness. His entire endeavor is a powerless struggle for the reconciliation of these opposites, which he sometimes calls spirit and matter, sometimes subject and object, sometimes thought and appearance. He has a feeling that there must be a bridge between the two worlds, but he is unable to find it. By experiencing himself as "I", man cannot think otherwise than this "I" on the side of the spirit; and by opposing this "I" to the world, he must reckon to it the world of perception given to the senses, the material world. Thus man places himself in the opposition of spirit and matter. He must do this all the more because his own body belongs to the material world. The "I" thus belongs to the spiritual as a part; the material things and processes that are perceived by the senses, to the "world". All riddles relating to spirit and matter must be found by man in the basic riddle of his own being. Monism focuses solely on unity and seeks to deny or blur the opposites that once existed. Neither of the two views can satisfy, because they do not do justice to the facts. Dualism sees spirit (ego) and matter (world) as two fundamentally different entities and therefore cannot understand how the two can interact. How is the mind supposed to know what is going on in matter if its peculiar nature is completely alien to it? Or how is it to act upon it under these circumstances, so that its intentions may be translated into deeds? The most astute and the most absurd hypotheses have been put forward to solve these questions. But monism has not fared much better to this day. It has so far tried to help itself in three ways: either it denies the spirit and becomes materialism; or it denies matter in order to seek its salvation in spiritualism; or it claims that even in the simplest world being, matter and spirit are inseparably connected, which is why one need not be at all surprised when these two modes of existence, which are nowhere separate, appear in man.

[ 5 ] Materialism can never provide a satisfactory explanation of the world. For every attempt at an explanation must begin by forming thoughts about world phenomena. Materialism therefore begins with the thought of matter or material processes. It thus already has two different areas of fact before it: the material world and the thoughts about it. He seeks to understand the latter by conceiving them as a purely material process. He believes that thinking comes about in the brain in much the same way as digestion in the animal organs. Just as he ascribes mechanical and organic effects to matter, he also attributes to it the ability to think under certain conditions. He forgets that he has now only transferred the problem to another place. Instead of himself, he attributes the ability to think to matter. And this brings him back to his starting point. How does matter come to think about its own nature? Why is it not simply satisfied with itself and accepts its existence? The materialist has turned his gaze away from the definite subject, from our own ego, and has arrived at an indeterminate, nebulous entity. And here he is confronted with the same riddle. The materialist view is not able to solve the problem, but only to postpone it.

[ 6 ] What about the spiritualist view? The pure spiritualist denies matter in its independent existence and understands it only as a product of the spirit. If he applies this world view to the unraveling of his own human essence, he is driven into a corner. The ego, which can be placed on the side of the spirit, is suddenly confronted by the sensual world. There seems to be no spiritual access to it; it must be perceived and experienced by the ego through material processes. The "I" does not find such material processes in itself if it only wants to be considered a spiritual entity. What it works out spiritually never contains the sensory world. The "I" seems to have to admit that the world would remain closed to it if it did not relate to it in a non-spiritual way. In the same way, when we set about acting, we must transform our intentions into reality with the help of material substances and forces. We are therefore dependent on the outside world. The most extreme spiritualist, or if you like, the thinker who presents himself as an extreme spiritualist through absolute idealism, is Johann Gottlieb Fichte. He attempted to derive the entire world structure from the "I". What he really succeeded in doing was a magnificent conceptual image of the world, without any experiential content. Just as it is impossible for the materialist to decipher the spirit, it is just as impossible for the spiritualist to decipher the material outside world.

[ 7 ] Because man, when he directs knowledge to the "I", first perceives the work of this "I" in the mental formation of the world of ideas, the spiritualist worldview can feel tempted, when looking at its own human essence, to recognize only this world of ideas from the spirit. In this way, spiritualism becomes a one-sided idealism. It does not come to seek a spiritual world through the world of ideas; it sees the spiritual world in the world of ideas itself. As a result, he is driven to remain within the effectiveness of the "I" itself, as if spellbound, with his worldview.

[ 8 ] A strange variety of idealism is the view of Friedrich Albert Lange, as he represented it in his widely read "History of Materialism". He assumes that materialism is quite right when it declares all world phenomena, including our thinking, to be the product of purely material processes; only, conversely, matter and its processes are themselves a product of our thinking. "The senses give us... effects of things, not faithful images, or even the things themselves. But these mere effects also include the senses themselves, together with the brain and the molecular movements conceived in it." In other words, our thinking is generated by material processes and these are generated by the thinking of the "I". Lange's philosophy is therefore nothing other than the story, translated into concepts, of the brave Munchausen, who holds on to his own shock of hair freely in the air.

[ 9 ] The third form of monism is that which already sees the two entities, matter and spirit, united in the simplest being (atom). However, this achieves nothing other than moving the question that actually arises in our consciousness to a different arena. How does the simple being come to express itself in a twofold way if it is an undivided unity?

[ 10 ] Against all these points of view it must be asserted that the ground and primordial opposition first confronts us in our own consciousness. It is we ourselves who detach ourselves from the mother earth of nature and confront the "world" as "I". This is classically expressed by Goethe in his essay "Nature", even if his style may initially be considered completely unscientific: "We live in the midst of it (nature) and are strangers to it. She talks to us incessantly and does not reveal her secret to us." But Goethe also knows the flip side: "People are all in her and she in all of them."

[ 11 ] As true as it is that we have alienated ourselves from nature, it is equally true that we feel that we are in it and belong to it. It can only be her own work that also lives in us.

[ 12 ] We must find our way back to her. A simple consideration can show us this way. We may have torn ourselves away from nature, but we must have taken something with us into our own being. We must seek out this natural being within us, then we will find the connection again. Dualism fails to do this. It regards the human inner being as a spiritual being completely alien to nature and tries to link it to nature. No wonder it cannot find the link. We can only find nature outside ourselves if we first know it within ourselves. That which is like it within ourselves will be our guide. Our path is thus mapped out for us. We do not want to speculate about the interaction of nature and spirit. But we want to descend into the depths of our own being in order to find those elements that we rescued when we fled from nature.

[ 13 ] The exploration of our being must bring us the solution to the riddle. We must come to a point where we can say to ourselves: Here we are no longer merely "I", here lies something that is more than "I".

[ 14 ] I am prepared for the fact that some people who have read this far will not find my explanations "in line with the current state of science". I can only reply that so far I have not wanted to deal with any scientific results, but with the simple description of what everyone experiences in their own consciousness. The fact that individual sentences about attempts to reconcile the consciousness with the world have also been included is only for the purpose of clarifying the actual facts. I have therefore not attached any importance to using the individual expressions such as "I", "spirit", "world", "nature" and so on in the precise way that is usual in psychology and philosophy. Everyday consciousness does not know the sharp distinctions of science, and up to now it has merely been a matter of recording everyday facts. It is not how science has interpreted consciousness up to now that concerns me, but how it lives itself every hour.