The Rudolf Steiner Archive

8. The Factors of Life

[ 1 ] Let us recapitulate what we have gained in the previous chapters. The world confronts man as a multiplicity, as a sum of particulars. One of these details, a being among beings, is himself. We describe this form of the world as given, and insofar as we do not develop it through conscious activity, but find it, as perception. Within the world of perceptions we perceive ourselves. This self-perception would simply remain as one among the many other perceptions if something did not emerge from the middle of this self-perception that proves to be suitable for connecting the perceptions in general, i.e. also the sum of all other perceptions, with that of our self. This emerging something is no longer mere perception; nor is it simply found in the same way as the perceptions. It is produced through activity. It initially appears bound to what we perceive as our self. In terms of its inner meaning, however, it reaches beyond the self. It adds ideal determinants to the individual perceptions, but these relate to each other and are founded in a whole. It determines what it has gained through self-perception in the same ideal way as all other perceptions and contrasts it with the objects as a subject or "I". This something is thinking, and the ideal determinations are the concepts and ideas. Thought therefore expresses itself first of all in the perception of the self; but it is not merely subjective, for the self only designates itself as a subject with the help of thought. This mental relationship to oneself is a life determination of our personality. Through it we lead a purely ideal existence. It makes us feel like thinking beings. This determination of life would remain a purely conceptual (logical) one if no other determinations of our self were added. We would then be beings whose life would be exhausted in the establishment of purely ideal relationships between the perceptions among each other and between the latter and ourselves. If one calls the establishment of such a mental relationship a cognition, and the state of our self gained through it knowledge, then we would have to regard ourselves as merely cognizing or knowing beings if the above premise were fulfilled.

[ 2 ] But the presupposition is not true. We relate perceptions to ourselves not only in an ideal sense, through the concept, but also through the feeling of how we have seen. We are therefore not beings with a purely conceptual purpose in life. The naive realist even sees in the life of feeling a more real life of personality than in the purely ideal element of knowledge. And he is quite right from his point of view when he puts the matter in this way. Feeling is initially exactly the same on the subjective side as perception is on the objective side. According to the principle of naive realism: everything is real that can be perceived, feeling is therefore the guarantee of the reality of one's own personality. The monism meant here, however, must give feeling the same complement that it considers necessary for perception if it is to present itself as perfect reality. For this monism, feeling is an incomplete reality which, in the first form in which it is given to us, does not yet contain its second factor, the concept or idea. This is why feeling, like perception, occurs everywhere in life before cognition. We first feel ourselves as being; and in the course of gradual development we only struggle through to the point where the concept of our self emerges for us in our own dimly felt existence. What for us only emerges later, however, is originally inseparably connected with feeling. This circumstance leads the naïve person to believe that existence presents itself to him directly in feeling and only indirectly in knowledge. The development of the emotional life will therefore appear important to him above all other things. He will only believe that he has grasped the context of the world when he has absorbed it into his feelings. He does not seek to make knowledge, but feeling, the means of cognition. Since feeling is something quite individual, something equivalent to perception, the emotional philosopher turns a principle that only has meaning within his personality into a world principle. He seeks to permeate the whole world with his own self. What the monism meant here strives to grasp in the concept, the emotional philosopher seeks to achieve with the feeling, and regards this as the more immediate aspect of his being together with the objects.

[ 3 ] The direction characterized here, the philosophy of feeling, is often referred to as mysticism. The error of a mystical approach based solely on feeling is that it wants to experience what it is supposed to know, that it wants to educate an individual, the feeling, to a universal.

[ 4 ] Feeling is a purely individual act, the relationship of the external world to our subject, insofar as this relationship finds its expression in a merely subjective experience.

[ 5 ] There is another expression of the human personality. Through its thinking, the ego participates in the general life of the world; through it, it relates perceptions to itself in a purely ideal (conceptual) way, relates itself to perceptions. In feeling it experiences a relation of the objects to its subject; in will the reverse is the case. In volition we also have a perception before us, namely that of the individual reference of our self to the objective. What is not a purely ideal factor in volition is just as much an object of perception as is the case with any thing in the external world.

[ 6 ] However, naïve realism will again believe itself to have a far more real being before it than can be attained through thinking. It will see in the will an element in which it becomes aware of an event, a causation immediately, in contrast to thinking, which first grasps the event in concepts. What the ego accomplishes through its will represents a process that is directly experienced for such a way of looking at things. In the will, the confessor of this philosophy believes that he has really grasped a corner of world events. While he can only follow other events by perceiving them from the outside, he believes that in his volition he experiences a real event quite directly. The form of being in which the will appears to him within the self becomes for him a real principle of reality. His own volition appears to him as a special case of general world events; the latter thus as general volition. Will becomes the world principle, just as feeling becomes the principle of cognition in emotional mysticism. This way of looking at things is philosophy of will (thelism). What can only be experienced individually is made the constituent factor of the world through it.

[ 7 ] As little as emotional mysticism can be called science, so little can the philosophy of will. For both claim to be unable to get by with the conceptual penetration of the world. Both demand a real principle in addition to the ideal principle of being. And with some justification. But since we only have perception as a means of comprehension for these so-called real principles, the assertion of emotional mysticism and the philosophy of will is identical with the view that we have two sources of knowledge: that of thought and that of perception, which the latter presents itself in feeling and will as individual experience. Since the outflows of the one source, the experiences, cannot be directly absorbed by these world views into those of the other, thinking, the two modes of cognition, perception and thinking, remain side by side without higher mediation. In addition to the ideal principle that can be attained through knowledge, there should also be a real principle of the world that cannot be grasped through thinking. In other words, emotional mysticism and the philosophy of will are naive realism because they pay homage to the proposition: That which is directly perceived is real. They are inconsistent with the original naïve realism only in that they make a certain form of perception (feeling or volition) the sole means of cognition of being, whereas they can only do so if they generally pay homage to the principle: That which is perceived is real. They would therefore also have to ascribe an equal cognitive value to external perception.

[ 8 ] The philosophy of will becomes metaphysical realism if it also transfers the will into the spheres of existence in which a direct experience of it is not possible as in the subject itself. It hypothetically assumes a principle outside the subject for which subjective experience is the only criterion of reality. As metaphysical realism, the philosophy of will falls prey to the criticism stated in the previous chapter, which must overcome the contradictory moment of every metaphysical realism and recognize that the will is only a general world event insofar as it relates ideally to the rest of the world.

Addition to the new edition (1918)

[ 9 ] The difficulty of grasping thinking in its essence through observation lies in the fact that this essence has all too easily slipped away from the observing soul when it wants to bring it into the direction of its attention. Then all that remains is the dead abstract, the corpse of living thinking. If one looks only at this abstract, one will easily find oneself compelled to enter into the "vital" element of emotional mysticism, or also of the metaphysics of the will. One will find it strange if someone wants to grasp the essence of reality in "mere thoughts". But whoever brings himself to truly have life in thought will come to the realization that the weaving in mere feelings or the contemplation of the element of will cannot even be compared to the inner richness and the experience within this life, which is at rest in itself but at the same time moved within itself, let alone that these should be placed above the latter. It is precisely from this richness, from this inner fullness of experience, that its counter-image in the ordinary attitude of the soul looks dead, abstract. No other human activity of the soul can be so easily misjudged as thinking. Willing, feeling, they warm the human soul even in the after-experience of its original state. Thinking all too easily leaves us cold in this after-experience; it seems to dry up the life of the soul. But this is only the strongly assertive shadow of its light-permeated reality, warmly immersed in world phenomena. This submersion takes place with a force flowing in the activity of thought itself, which is the force of love of a spiritual kind. One must not object that anyone who sees love in active thinking in this way is transferring a feeling, love, into it. For this objection is in truth a confirmation of what has been asserted here. For he who turns into thinking finds in it both feeling and will, the latter also in the depths of its reality; he who turns away from thinking and turns only to "mere" feeling and willing loses the true reality from these. Whoever wants to experience intuitively in thinking will also do justice to the emotional and volitional experience; but emotional mysticism and the metaphysics of will cannot do justice to the intuitive and intellectual penetration of existence. The latter will all too easily come to the conclusion that they stand in the real; the intuitive thinker, however, forms a shadowy, cold world view in "abstract thoughts" without feeling and alien to reality.