The Rudolf Steiner Archive

3. Thinking in the Service of a Worldview

[ 1 ] If I observe how a billiard ball that is hit transfers its movement to another, I have no influence whatsoever on the course of this observed process. The direction of movement and speed of the second ball is determined by the direction and speed of the first. As long as I act merely as an observer, I can only say something about the movement of the second ball when it has occurred. The situation is different when I begin to think about the content of my observation. The purpose of my reflection is to form concepts of the process. I bring the concept of an elastic sphere into connection with certain other concepts of mechanics and take into consideration the particular circumstances that prevail in the case in question. I thus seek to add to the process that takes place without my intervention a second process that takes place in the conceptual sphere. The latter is dependent on me. This is shown by the fact that I can content myself with observation and dispense with all search for concepts if I have no need for them. But if this need is present, then I only calm down when I have brought the concepts: ball, elasticity, movement, impact, speed etc. into a certain connection with which the observed process stands in a certain relationship. As certain as it is that the process takes place independently of me, it is equally certain that the conceptual process cannot take place without my intervention.

[ 2 ] Whether this activity of mine is really the outflow of my independent being, or whether the modern physiologists are right, who say that we cannot think as we want, but must think as determined by the thoughts and thought connections present in our consciousness (see Ziehen, Leitfaden der physiologischen Psychologie, Jena 1893, p. 171), will be the subject of a later discussion. For the present we merely wish to establish the fact that we feel ourselves continually compelled to seek concepts and conceptual connections to objects and processes given to us without our intervention, which stand in a certain relationship to those objects and processes. Whether this action is in truth our action, or whether we carry it out according to an unalterable necessity, we leave aside for the time being. That it initially appears to us as our own is without question. We know quite well that we are not given their concepts at the same time as the objects. That I myself am the doer may be based on an appearance; to direct observation, at any rate, this is how the matter presents itself. The question now is: what do we gain by finding a conceptual counterpart to a process?

[ 3 ] There is a profound difference between the way in which the parts of a process relate to each other before and after the corresponding concepts have been found. Mere observation can follow the parts of a given process in their course; but their connection remains obscure before the aid of concepts. I see the first billiard ball moving in a certain direction and at a certain speed towards the second; I have to wait and see what happens after the shot and can then follow it again only with my eyes. Let us assume that at the moment of impact someone obscures the field on which the process takes place, then I - as a mere observer - am unaware of what happens afterwards. The situation is different if I have found the corresponding concepts for the constellation of conditions before the obscuring. In this case, I can state what happens, even if the possibility of observation ceases. A merely observed process or object does not in itself reveal anything about its connection with other processes or objects. This connection only becomes apparent when observation is combined with thinking.

[ 4 ] Observation and thinking are the two starting points for all of man's spiritual endeavors, insofar as he is aware of them. The operations of common sense and the most intricate scientific research rest on these two basic pillars of our mind. Philosophers have proceeded from various primordial opposites: Idea and reality, subject and object, appearance and thing-in-itself, ego and non-ego, idea and will, concept and matter, force and substance, conscious and unconscious. But it is easy to show that all these opposites must be preceded by that of observation and thought, as the most important for man.

[ 5 ] Whatever principle we may establish: we must prove it somewhere as observed by us, or express it in the form of a clear thought that can be thought by anyone else. Every philosopher who begins to speak about his original principles must make use of the conceptual form, and thus of thought. He thus indirectly admits that he already presupposes thinking for his activity. Whether thinking or something else is the main element in the development of the world is not yet decided here. But it is clear from the outset that the philosopher cannot gain any knowledge about it without thinking. Thinking may play a secondary role in the emergence of world phenomena, but it certainly plays a major role in the emergence of an opinion about them.

[ 6] As far as observation is concerned, it is in our organization that we need it. Our thinking about a horse and the object horse are two things that appear separately to us. And this object is only accessible to us through observation. Just as we cannot form an idea of a horse by merely staring at it, we are just as little able to produce a corresponding object by merely thinking about it.

[ 7 ] In terms of time, observation even precedes thinking. For we must first get to know thinking through observation. It was essentially the description of an observation when we described at the beginning of this chapter how thinking is ignited by a process and goes beyond what is given without its intervention. We first become aware of everything that enters the circle of our experiences through observation. The content of sensations, perceptions, views, feelings, acts of will, dreams and fantasies, notions, concepts and ideas, all illusions and hallucinations are given to us through observation.

[ 8 ] But thinking as an object of observation is essentially different from all other things. The observation of a table or a tree occurs to me as soon as these objects appear on the horizon of my experiences. But I do not observe thinking about these objects at the same time. I observe the table, I carry out the thinking about the table, but I do not observe it at the same moment. I must first place myself in a position outside my own activity if I want to observe my thinking about the table as well as the table. While observing objects and processes and thinking about them are quite everyday states that fill my ongoing life, the observation of thinking is a kind of exceptional state. This fact must be taken into account accordingly when it comes to determining the relationship of thinking to all other contents of observation. One must be clear about the fact that in the observation of thinking one applies to it a procedure that forms the normal state for the observation of the entire remaining content of the world, but which does not occur in the pursuit of this normal state for thinking itself.

[ 9 ] Someone might object that what I have said here about thinking also applies to feeling and other mental activities. If, for example, we have the feeling of pleasure, it is also kindled by an object, and I observe this object, but not the feeling of pleasure. But this objection is based on a mistake. Pleasure does not stand in the same relation to its object as the concept formed by thought. I am most definitely aware that the concept of a thing is formed by my activity, whereas pleasure is produced in me in a similar way by an object, as, for example, the change that a falling stone causes in an object on which it falls. For observation, pleasure is given in exactly the same way as the process that causes it. The same is not true of the concept. I can ask: why does a certain process produce the feeling of pleasure in me? But I cannot ask: why does a process produce a certain sum of concepts in me? That would simply make no sense. Thinking about a process has no effect on me at all. I cannot learn anything about myself by knowing the corresponding concepts for the observed change that a stone thrown against a window pane causes in it. But I can learn something about my personality if I know the feeling that a certain process arouses in me. If I say to an observed object: this is a rose, I am not saying the slightest thing about myself; but if I say of the same thing: it gives me a feeling of pleasure, I have characterized not only the rose but also myself in my relationship to the rose.

[ 10 ] There can therefore be no question of equating thinking with feeling in relation to observation. The same could easily be deduced for the other activities of the human mind. They belong to the same series as thinking as other observed objects and processes. It belongs to the peculiar nature of thinking that it is an activity which is directed merely to the observed object and not to the thinking personality. This is already expressed in the way we express our thoughts about a thing in contrast to our feelings or acts of will. If I see an object and recognize it as a table, I will generally not say: I am thinking about a table, but rather: this is a table. But I will say: I am happy about the table. In the former case it is not at all important for me to say that I enter into a relationship with the table; in the latter case, however, it is precisely about this relationship. By saying: I think about a table, I already enter into the exceptional state characterized above, where something is made the object of observation that is always included in our mental activity, but not as an observed object.

[ 11 ] This is the peculiar nature of thinking, that the thinker forgets thinking while he is practicing it. It is not thinking that preoccupies him, but the object of thinking that he observes.<

[ 12 ] The first observation we make about thinking, then, is that it is the unobserved element of our ordinary mental life.

[ 13 ] The reason why we do not observe thinking in everyday mental life is none other than that it is based on our own activity. What I do not produce myself enters my field of observation as something objective. I face it as something that has come about without me; it approaches me; I must accept it as the precondition of my thinking process. While I am thinking about the object, I am occupied with it, my gaze is turned towards it. This preoccupation is thinking contemplation. My attention is not focused on my activity, but on the object of this activity. In other words: while I am thinking, I am not looking at my thinking, which I produce myself, but at the object of thinking, which I do not produce.

[ 14 ] I am even in the same case when I allow the state of exception to occur and think about my thinking itself. I can never observe my present thinking; I can only make the experiences I have had about my thinking process the object of my thinking afterwards. I would have to divide myself into two personalities: one that thinks and the other that observes itself thinking, if I wanted to observe my present thinking. I can't do that. I can only do this in two separate acts. The thinking that is to be observed is never the one that is active, but a different one. Whether for this purpose I make my observations on my own earlier thinking, or whether I follow the thought process of another person, or finally, whether I presuppose a fictitious thought process, as in the above case with the movement of the billiard balls, it does not matter.

[ 15 ] Two things are not compatible: active production and contemplative juxtaposition. The first book of Moses already knows this. In the first six days of the world, God brings the world into being, and only when it is there is it possible to contemplate it: "And God looked upon all that he had made, and behold, it was very good." It is the same with our thinking. It must first be there if we want to observe it.

[ 16 ] The reason that makes it impossible for us to observe thinking in its respective present course is the same as the reason that allows us to recognize it more directly and intimately than any other process in the world. It is precisely because we produce it ourselves that we know the characteristic features of its course, the way in which the event under consideration takes place. What can only be found in an indirect way in the other spheres of observation: the factually corresponding connection and the relationship of the individual objects, we know in a very direct way in thinking. Why, for my observation, thunder follows lightning, I do not know without further ado; why my thinking connects the concept of thunder with that of lightning, I know directly from the contents of the two concepts. Of course, it is not at all important whether I have the right concepts of lightning and thunder. The connection of the ones I have is clear to me, through them themselves.<

[ 17 ] This transparent clarity with regard to the thinking process is completely independent of our knowledge of the physiological foundations of thinking. I am speaking here of thinking insofar as it arises from the observation of our mental activity. How one material process of my brain causes or influences another while I am carrying out an operation of thought does not come into consideration at all. What I observe in thinking is not: what process in my brain connects the concept of lightning with that of thunder, but what causes me to bring the two concepts into a certain relationship. My observation shows that there is nothing available to me for my thought connections that I am guided by other than the content of my thoughts; I am not guided by the material processes in my brain. For a less materialistic age than ours, this remark would of course be completely superfluous. At the present time, however, when there are people who believe that if we know what matter is, we will also know how matter thinks, it must be said that one can speak of thinking without immediately coming into collision with brain physiology. Many people today find it difficult to grasp the concept of thinking in its purity. Anyone who immediately opposes the idea I have developed here of thinking with the sentence of Cabanis: "The brain secretes thoughts like the liver secretes bile, the salivary gland secretes saliva, etc." simply does not know what I am talking about. He seeks to find thought through a mere process of observation in the same way that we proceed with other objects of the world's content. But he cannot find it in this way because, as I have shown, it eludes normal observation precisely there. He who cannot overcome materialism lacks the ability to bring about in himself the exceptional state I have described, which makes him conscious of what remains unconscious in all other mental activity. Anyone who does not have the good will to put himself in this position could no more talk to him about thinking than to a blind man about color. But let him not believe that we take physiological processes for thinking. He does not explain thinking because he does not see it at all.

[ 18 ] But for anyone who has the ability to observe thinking - and with good will every normally organized person has it - this observation is the most important one he can make. For he observes something of which he himself is the originator; he does not see himself confronted with an initially alien object, but with his own activity. He knows how what he observes comes about. He sees through the conditions and relationships. A firm point has been gained from which one can search with justified hope for an explanation of the other phenomena of the world.

[ 19 ] The feeling of having such a fixed point prompted the founder of modern philosophy, René Descartes, to base all human knowledge on the sentence: I think, therefore I am. All other things, all other events are there without me; I do not know whether as truth or as a fairy tale and dream. I only know one thing for certain, because I myself bring it to its secure existence: my thinking. May it have another origin of its existence, may it come from God or elsewhere; that it is there in the sense in which I myself bring it forth, of that I am certain. Descartes initially had no justification for attributing a different meaning to his proposition. He could only assert that I grasp myself within the content of the world in my thinking as in my very own activity. What the attached: therefore I am should mean has been much debated. But it can only have a meaning under one single condition. The simplest statement I can make about a thing is that it is, that it exists. How this existence is then to be determined more precisely cannot be said at once about any thing that enters the horizon of my experience. Each object will first have to be examined in its relation to others in order to be able to determine in what sense it can be spoken of as existing. An experienced process can be a sum of perceptions, but it can also be a dream, a hallucination and so on. In short, I cannot say in what sense it exists. I will not be able to deduce this from the process itself, but I will find out when I look at it in relation to other things. But there again I cannot know more than how it stands in relation to these things. My search only comes to a firm foundation when I find an object for which I can draw the meaning of its existence from itself. But this is myself as a thinker, for I give my existence the definite, intrinsically based content of thinking activity. Now I can start from there and ask: Do the other things exist in the same or in a different sense?

[ 120] If one makes thinking the object of observation, one adds something to the other observed contents of the world that otherwise escapes attention; but one does not change the way in which man also behaves towards other things. The number of objects of observation is increased, but not the method of observation. While we are observing other things, a process is intermingled with world events - to which I now include observation - which is overlooked. There is something different from all other events that is not taken into account. But when I look at my thinking, there is no such unconsidered element. For what now hovers in the background is itself only thinking. The observed object is qualitatively the same as the activity that is directed towards it. And this is again a characteristic peculiarity of thinking. When we make it an object of observation, we are not forced to do so with the help of an oualitative-different, but we can remain in the same element.

[ 21 ] If I spin an object given without my intervention into my thinking, I go beyond my observation, and it will be a question of: what gives me a right to do so? Why do I not simply allow the object to have an effect on me? In what way is it possible for my thinking to have a relation to the object? These are questions that everyone who thinks about his own thought processes must ask himself. They fall away when we think about thinking itself. We do not add anything foreign to thinking, so we do not have to justify such an addition.

[ 22 ] Schelling says: To recognize nature is to create nature. - Anyone who takes these words of the bold natural philosopher literally will probably have to do without all knowledge of nature for the rest of their lives. For nature exists once, and in order to create it a second time, one must recognize the principles according to which it came into being. For the nature that we first wanted to create, we would have to copy the conditions of its existence from those that already exist. But this copying, which would have to precede creation, would be the recognition of nature, even if, after copying has taken place, creation would not take place at all. Only a nature that does not yet exist could be created without recognizing it beforehand.

[ 23 ] What is impossible with nature: creating before recognizing; with thinking we accomplish it. If we wanted to wait to think until we had recognized it, we would never get around to it. We have to think resolutely in order to come to its realization afterwards by observing what we have created. We ourselves first create an object for the observation of thought. The existence of all other objects has been taken care of without our intervention.

[ 24 ] Someone could easily counter my sentence: we must think before we can observe thinking, with the other as equally valid: we cannot wait with digesting until we have observed the process of digesting. That would be an objection similar to the one Pascal made to Cartesius, claiming that one could also say: I am walking, therefore I am. Certainly I must also digest resolutely before I have studied the physiological process of digestion. But this could only be compared with the contemplation of thinking if I did not want to contemplate digestion afterwards in terms of thinking, but rather wanted to eat and digest. It is not without reason that digestion cannot be the object of digestion, but thinking can very well become the object of thinking.

[ 25 ] There is therefore no doubt that in thinking we hold world events at a point where we have to be present if something is to come about. And that is precisely what matters. That is precisely the reason why things are so mysterious to me: that I am so uninvolved in their creation. I simply find them; in thinking, however, I know how they are made. Therefore, there is no more original starting point for observing everything that happens in the world than thinking.

[ 26 ] I would now like to mention a widespread misconception that prevails with regard to thinking. It consists in saying that thinking, as it is in itself, is not given to us anywhere. The thinking that connects the observations of our experiences and weaves them into a web of concepts is not at all the same as that which we subsequently extract from the objects of observation and make the object of our contemplation. What we first unconsciously weave into things is quite different from what we then consciously separate out again.

[ 27 ] Those who conclude in this way do not understand that it is not possible for them to escape from thinking in this way. I cannot get out of thinking at all if I want to look at thinking. If one distinguishes preconscious thinking from later conscious thinking, one should not forget that this distinction is an entirely external one that has nothing at all to do with the thing itself. I do not make one thing into another at all by looking at it thinking. I can imagine that a being with completely different sensory organs and with a differently functioning intelligence has a completely different idea of a horse than I do, but I cannot imagine that my own thinking becomes different by the fact that I observe it. I myself observe what I myself accomplish. What my thinking looks like to another intelligence than mine is not the question now; but what it looks like to me. In any case, however, the image of my thinking in another intelligence cannot be a truer one than my own. Only if I were not the thinking being myself, but if thinking confronted me as the activity of a being alien to me, could I speak of my image of thinking appearing in a certain way, but I could not know what the thinking of the being itself was like.

[ 28 ] But for the time being I have not the slightest reason to view my own thinking from a different standpoint. I look at the rest of the world with the help of thinking. How could I make an exception to this in my own thinking?

[ 29 ] Thus I consider it sufficiently justified to start from thinking in my view of the world. When Archimedes invented the lever, he believed that he could unhinge the entire cosmos with its help if he could only find a point where he could support his instrument. He needed something that was supported by itself, not by something else. In thinking we have a principle that exists through itself. It is from here that an attempt is made to grasp the world. We can grasp thinking through itself. The only question is whether we can also grasp something else through it.

[ 30 ] I have so far spoken of thinking without taking its carrier, human consciousness, into consideration. Most contemporary philosophers will object to me: before there is thinking, there must be consciousness. Therefore, one should start from consciousness and not from thinking. There is no thinking without consciousness. I must reply to this: If I want to know the relationship between thinking and consciousness, I have to think about it. I thereby presuppose thinking. Now, however, one can reply to this: If the philosopher wants to comprehend consciousness, then he makes use of thinking; he presupposes it insofar; in the ordinary course of life, however, thinking arises within consciousness and thus presupposes it. If this answer were given to the creator of the world, who wants to create thinking, it would undoubtedly be justified. Of course, thinking cannot come into being without first bringing consciousness into being. The philosopher, however, is not concerned with the creation of the world, but with the comprehension of it. He must therefore not seek the starting points for creating the world, but for understanding it. I find it quite strange when the philosopher is reproached for being concerned above all else with the correctness of his principles, but not immediately with the objects he wants to comprehend. The creator of the world must above all know how to find a support for thought, but the philosopher must seek a secure foundation from which he can comprehend what exists. What good does it do us to start from consciousness and subject it to thinking contemplation if we know nothing beforehand about the possibility of gaining insight into things through thinking contemplation?

[ 31 ] We must first consider thinking in a completely neutral way, without reference to a thinking subject or a thought object. For in subject and object we already have concepts that are formed by thinking. It cannot be denied: before anything else can be understood, it must become thinking. Whoever denies it overlooks the fact that he, as a human being, is not the beginning of creation, but its end. Therefore, in order to explain the world through concepts, we cannot start from the temporally first elements of existence, but from what is given to us as the closest, as the most intimate. We cannot leap to the beginning of the world in order to begin our observation there, but we must start from the present moment and see whether we can ascend from the later to the earlier. As long as geology has spoken of imaginary revolutions to explain the present state of the earth, it has groped in the dark. Only when it began to investigate what processes were still taking place on the earth at the present time and inferred from them what had happened in the past, did it gain a firm footing. As long as philosophy assumes all possible principles, such as atom, movement, matter, will, the unconscious, it will hover in the air. Only when the philosopher will regard the absolute last as his first can he reach his goal. But this absolute ultimate, to which the development of the world has led, is thought.

[ 32] There are those who say that we cannot determine with certainty whether our thinking is correct or not. In this respect, the starting point remains dubious. That is just as reasonable as doubting whether a tree is right in itself or not. Thinking is a fact; and to talk about the rightness or wrongness of such a fact is pointless. The most I can do is to doubt whether reasoning is used rightly, just as I can doubt whether a certain tree gives the right wood for a useful tool. To show to what extent the application of thought to the world is right or wrong will be the task of this paper. I can understand if someone doubts that something can be determined about the world through thinking; but it is incomprehensible to me how someone can doubt the correctness of thinking itself.

Addition to the new edition (1918)

[ 33 ] In the preceding remarks, reference is made to the significant difference between thinking and all other activities of the soul as a fact that arises from truly impartial observation. Anyone who does not strive for this impartial observation will be tempted to make objections to these statements, such as the following: if I think about a rose, then this only expresses a relationship of my "I" to the rose, as if I feel the beauty of the rose. There is just as much a relationship between "I" and object in thinking as there is, for example, in feeling or perceiving. He who makes this objection does not take into consideration that only in the activity of thinking does the "I" know itself to be one being with the active being in all ramifications of the activity. In no other activity of the soul is this completely the case. When, for example, a pleasure is felt, a finer observation can very well distinguish to what extent the "I" knows itself to be one with an active being and to what extent a passive being is present in it, so that the pleasure merely arises for the "I". And so it is with the other activities of the soul. One should not confuse "having mental images" and processing thoughts through thinking. Thought images can appear in the soul like dreams, like vague intuitions. This is not thinking. - However, someone could now say: if thinking is meant in this way, the volition is in the thinking, and then one is not only dealing with thinking, but also with the volition of thinking. But this would only justify saying that real thinking must always be willed. But this has nothing to do with the characterization of thinking as it is made in these remarks. While the nature of thinking may make it necessary for it to be willed, what matters is that nothing is willed which, in the process of taking place, does not appear to the "I" completely as its own activity that it can comprehend. One must even say that because of the essence of thinking asserted here, it appears to the observer as thoroughly willed. Whoever really tries to see through everything that comes into consideration for the evaluation of thinking will not be able to avoid noticing that this activity of the soul has the peculiarity that is spoken of here.

[ 34] A person whom the author of this book holds in very high esteem as a thinker has objected to him that thinking cannot be spoken of as it is done here, because what one believes to observe as active thinking is only an appearance. In reality, one only observes the results of an unconscious activity that underlies thinking. It is only because this non-conscious activity is not observed that the illusion arises that the observed thinking exists by itself, as when one believes to see a movement in rapid successive illumination by electric sparks. This objection, too, is based only on an inaccurate view of the facts. Whoever makes it does not take into account that it is the "I" itself that observes its activity standing inside thinking. The "I" would have to be outside of thinking if it could be deceived in the same way as with rapid successive illumination by electric sparks. One could rather say: whoever makes such a comparison is violently deceiving himself, like someone who would say of a light in motion: it is lit anew by an unknown hand at every place where it appears. - No, whoever wants to see in thinking something other than that which is produced in the "I" itself as manageable activity, must first blind himself to the simple facts available to observation in order to be able to base thinking on a hypothetical activity. He who does not blind himself in this way must recognize that everything he "adds" to thinking in this way leads out of the essence of thinking. Unbiased observation shows that nothing can be counted as part of the essence of thinking that is not found in thinking itself. One cannot arrive at something that affects thinking if one leaves the realm of thinking.