The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Platonic Worldview

[ 1 ] With his own admirable boldness, Plato expresses this mistrust in experience: The things of this world, which our senses perceive, have no true being at all: they always become, but never are. They have only a relative being, are altogether only in and through their relation to one another; therefore one can just as well call their whole existence a non-being. They are consequently also not objects of actual knowledge. For there can only be such knowledge of that which is in and of itself and always in the same way; they, on the other hand, are only the object of a perception induced by sensation. As long as we are limited only to their perception, we resemble men who sit so firmly bound in a dark cave that they could not turn their heads and see nothing but by the light of a fire burning behind them, on the wall opposite them, the shadow images of real things, which would pass between them and the fire, and even of each other, indeed each of themselves, just the shadows on that wall. But their wisdom would be to predict the order of those shadows learned from experience.

[ 2 ] The Platonic view tears the idea of the world as a whole apart into two parts, into the idea of an illusory world and into another of the world of ideas, to which alone true, eternal reality is supposed to correspond. "What alone can be called truly existing, because it always is, but never becomes, nor passes away: these are the ideal archetypes of those shadowy images, they are the eternal Ideas, the archetypes of all things. They have no multiplicity; for each is in its essence only one in that it is the archetype itself, whose afterimages or shadows are all individual, transient things of the same kind with the same name. Nor do they come into being or pass away; for they are truly existing, but never becoming, nor perishing like their vanishing afterimages. Of them alone, therefore, there is an actual knowledge, since the object of such a knowledge can only be that which is always and in every consideration, not that which is, but also again is not, depending on how one looks at it."

[ 3 ] The distinction between idea and perception is only justified when we speak of the way in which human cognition comes about. Man must allow things to speak to him in two ways. They tell him part of their essence voluntarily. He need only listen. This is the part of reality that is free of ideas. The other, however, he must elicit from them. He must set his thinking in motion, then his inner being will be filled with the ideas of things. Within the personality is the arena in which things also reveal their ideal inner being. There they express what remains eternally hidden from external perception. The essence of nature is expressed here. But it is only due to human organization that things must be recognized through the harmony of two tones. In nature there is an exciter which produces both sounds. The unbiased person listens to the harmony. He recognizes in the ideal language of his inner being the statements that things make to him. Only those who have lost their impartiality interpret things differently. He believes that the language of his inner self comes from a different realm than the language of external perception. Plato realized the importance for the human world view of the fact that the world reveals itself to man from two sides. From his insightful evaluation of this fact, he recognized that the world of the senses, considered on its own, cannot be attributed reality. Only when the world of ideas shines forth from the life of the soul and man can place the idea and sense observation before his mind as a unified experience of knowledge, does he have true reality before him. What sense observation has before it, without being illuminated by the light of ideas, is an illusory world. Seen in this way, Plato's insight also sheds light on Parmenides' view of the illusory character of sensory things. And it can be said that Plato's philosophy is one of the most sublime constructs of thought that has ever sprung from the mind of mankind. Platonism is the conviction that the goal of all striving for knowledge must be the appropriation of the ideas that support the world and form its foundation. Anyone who cannot awaken this conviction in himself does not understand the Platonic world view. - But insofar as Platonism has intervened in the development of Western thought, it also shows another side. Plato did not stop at emphasizing the insight that in human perception the sense world becomes an illusion if the light of the world of ideas is not thrown upon it, but by his presentation of this fact he encouraged the opinion that the sense world in itself, apart from man, is an illusory world and that true reality can only be found in the ideas. This opinion gives rise to the question: how do ideas and the world of the senses (nature) come together outside of man? For those who cannot recognize an idea-free sense world outside of man, the question of the relationship between idea and sense world is one that must be sought and solved within the human being. And so the matter stands before Goethe's world view. For it, the question: "What relationship exists outside of man between the idea and the sense world?" is an unhealthy one, because for it there is no sense world (nature) without the idea outside of man. Only man can separate the idea from the sensory world for himself and thus imagine nature without an idea. Therefore one can say: for Goethe's world view, the question: "How do ideas and sensory things come together?", which has occupied the development of Western thought for centuries, is a completely superfluous question. And the precipitation of this current of Platonism running through the development of Western thought, which Goethe confronted, for example, in the above-mentioned conversation with Schiller, but also in other cases, had the effect on his sensibility of an unhealthy element of human imagination. What he did not express clearly in words, but what lived in his perception and became a co-forming impulse of his own world view, is the view: what healthy human perception teaches at every moment: how the language of perception and thought combine to reveal the full reality, that was ignored by the brooding thinkers. Instead of looking at how nature speaks to man, they formed artificial concepts about the relationship between the world of ideas and experience. In order to fully comprehend the profound significance of this school of thought, which Goethe felt to be unhealthy, in the worldviews that he encountered and which he wanted to orientate himself towards, one must consider how the implied current of Platonism, which evaporates the world of the senses into appearance and thereby brings the world of ideas into a skewed relationship with it, has been reinforced by a one-sided philosophical grasp of Christian truth in the course of the development of Western thought. Because Goethe was confronted with the Christian view, which he felt to be connected with the unhealthy current of Platonism, he was only able to develop his relationship to Christianity with difficulty. Goethe did not follow in detail the continued influence of the current of Platonism, which he rejected, in the development of Christian thought, but he felt the impact of this continued influence in the ways of thinking that he encountered. Therefore, an examination of the development of his way of thinking sheds light on the formation of this precipitation in the schools of thought that had developed over the centuries before Goethe's appearance. Many of the representatives of Christian thought endeavored to come to terms with the belief in the afterlife and with the value of sensory existence in relation to the spiritual world. If the view was accepted that the relationship between the world of senses and the world of ideas has a significance separate from that of man, the resulting question led to the view of the divine world order. And church fathers who were confronted with this question had to think about the role of the Platonic world of ideas within this divine world order. They were thus faced with the danger of combining that which is connected in human cognition through direct observation: Not only to think of ideas and the world of senses as separate for themselves apart from man, but to separate them from each other, that the ideas, outside of what is given to man as nature, also have an existence for themselves in a spirituality separate from nature. If this idea, which was based on an untrue view of the world of ideas and the world of the senses, were combined with the justified view that the divine can never be fully consciously present in the human soul, a complete separation of the world of ideas and nature would result. Then whatever should be sought in the human spirit is sought outside it in creation. The archetypes of all things are thought to be contained in the divine spirit. The world becomes the imperfect reflection of the perfect world of ideas resting in God. As a result of a one-sided view of Platonism, the human soul is then separated from the relationship between idea and "reality". It extends its justifiably conceived relationship to the divine world order to the relationship that exists within it between the world of ideas and the world of sensory appearances. Augustine arrives at views such as these through this kind of conception: "Without any wavering we want to believe that the thinking soul is not of the same essence as God, for the latter does not permit communion, but that the soul can be enlightened through participation in the nature of God." In this way, if this way of thinking is exaggerated one-sidedly, the human soul is deprived of the possibility of experiencing the world of ideas as the essence of reality in the contemplation of nature. And such co-experience is interpreted as unchristian. The one-sided view of Platonism is spread over Christianity itself. Platonism, as a philosophical world view, remains more in the element of thought; religious feeling immerses thought in the emotional life and in this way anchors it in human nature. Thus anchored in the life of the human soul, the unhealthiness of one-sided Platonism could gain deeper meaning in the development of Western thought than if it had remained mere philosophy. For centuries, this development of thought was faced with questions such as: how does what man forms as an idea relate to the things of reality? Are the concepts that live in the human soul through the world of ideas just ideas, names that have nothing to do with reality? Are they themselves something real that man receives by perceiving reality and comprehending it through his intellect? For Goethe's view of the world, such questions are not intellectual questions about anything that lies outside the human being. In the human contemplation of reality, these questions are resolved in perpetual vitality through true human cognition. And this Goethean view of the world must not only find that in Christian thought lives the precipitate of a one-sided Platonism, but it feels itself alienated from genuine Christianity when the latter, soaked in such Platonism, confronts it. - What lives in many of the thoughts that Goethe formed within himself in order to make the world comprehensible to himself was a rejection of the current of Platonism, which he felt to be unhealthy. That he also had an open mind for the Platonic elevation of the human soul to the world of ideas is attested to by many a statement he made in this direction. He felt within himself the efficacy of the reality of ideas, as he approached nature in his way of contemplation and research; he felt that nature itself speaks in the language of ideas when the soul opens itself up to such language. But he could not admit that the world of ideas was regarded as something separate, and that this made it possible for him to say to an idea of a plant being: "This is not an experience, this is an idea. Then he felt that his spiritual eye saw the idea as reality, just as the sensual eye sees the physical part of the plant being. Thus in Goethe's view of the world the direction of Platonism towards the world of ideas was established in its purity, and in it the current of Platonism that distracts from reality is overcome. Because of this shaping of his world view, Goethe also had to reject what presented itself to him as Christian ideas in such a way that it could only appear to him as transformed one-sided Platonism. And he had to feel that in the forms of some worldviews that confronted him and with which he wanted to come to terms, he had not succeeded in overcoming the Christian-Platonic view of reality within Western education, which was not in keeping with nature and ideas.