The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Consequences of the Platonic Worldview

[ 1 ] Aristotle rebelled in vain against the Platonic division of the conception of the world. He saw in nature a unified being that contains the ideas as well as the things and phenomena that can be perceived by the senses. Only in the human mind can ideas have an independent existence. But in this independence they have no reality. Only the soul can separate them from the perceptible things with which they make up reality. If Western philosophy had followed the correctly understood view of Aristotle, it would have been saved from many things that must appear as aberrations to Goethe's world view.

[ 2 ] But this correctly understood Aristotle was initially uncomfortable for some who wanted to gain a basis of thought for Christian ideas. Some people who considered themselves to be genuinely "Christian" thinkers did not know what to do with a view of nature that transferred the highest effective principle to the world of experience. Some Christian philosophers and theologians therefore reinterpreted Aristotle. They gave his views a meaning which, in their opinion, was suitable to serve as logical support for Christian dogma. The mind should not search for the creative ideas in things. After all, the truth is communicated to people by God in the form of revelation. Reason should only confirm what God has revealed. The Aristotelian propositions were interpreted by the Christian thinkers of the Middle Ages in such a way that the religious truth of salvation received its philosophical affirmation through them. Only the view of Thomas Aquinas, the most important Christian thinker, sought to weave Aristotle's thoughts into the Christian development of ideas in a profound way, as far as was possible in the time of this thinker. According to this view, revelation contains the highest truths, the doctrine of salvation of Holy Scripture; but it is possible for reason to delve into things in an Aristotelian way and to extract their idea content from them. Revelation descends so low and reason can rise so high that the doctrine of salvation and human knowledge merge into one another at a boundary. Aristotle's way of penetrating into things thus serves Thomas to reach the realm of revelation.

[ 3 ] When, with Bacon of Verulam and Descartes, a time arose in which the will to seek the truth by the own power of the human personality asserted itself, the habits of thought were taken in such directions that all striving led to nothing other than the establishment of views which, despite their apparent independence from the preceding occidental world of ideas, were nothing but new forms of the same. Bacon and Descartes also inherited the evil eye for the relationship between experience and idea as an heirloom of a degenerate world of thought. Bacon only had a sense and understanding of the details of nature. He believed that he could arrive at general rules about natural events by collecting together what was the same or similar through the spatial and temporal diversity. Goethe says the following about him: "For although he himself always indicates that particulars should only be collected so that one can choose from them, organize them and finally arrive at universals, the individual cases retain too many rights for him, and before one can arrive at simplification and conclusion through induction, even that which he praises, life goes away and the forces consume themselves." For Bacon, these general rules are means by which reason is able to comfortably survey the realm of details. But he does not believe that these rules are grounded in the idea content of things and are truly creative forces of nature. Therefore he does not seek the idea directly in the particular, but abstracts it from a multiplicity of particulars. He who does not believe that the idea lives in the individual thing can also have no inclination to seek it in it. He accepts the thing as it presents itself to mere external perception. Bacon's significance is to be sought in the fact that he pointed to the external way of looking at things, which had been degraded by the one-sided Platonism that characterized it. He emphasized that there was a source of truth in it. However, he was not able to help the world of ideas to gain its rights in the same way as the world of perception. He declared the ideal to be a subjective element in the human spirit. His way of thinking is inverted Platonism. Plato sees reality only in the world of ideas, Bacon only in the world of perception without ideas. In Bacon's view lies the starting point of the way of thinking that has dominated natural scientists up to the present day. It suffers from a false view of the ideal element of the world of experience. It could not come to terms with the view of the Middle Ages, which was generated by a one-sided approach to questions and which held that ideas were only names, not realities lying in things.

[ 4 ] Three decades after Bacon, Descartes made his observations from a different point of view, but no less influenced by one-sided, platonizing ways of thinking. He too suffers from the original sin of Western thought, the mistrust of unbiased observation of nature. Doubt about the existence and recognizability of things is the beginning of his research. He does not focus his gaze on things in order to gain access to certainty, but rather seeks out a very small gateway, a secret path, in the fullest sense of the word. He withdraws into the most intimate area of thought. Everything I have believed to be true up to now can be wrong, he says to himself. What I have thought can be based on deception. But the one fact remains that I think about things. Even if I think lies and deception, I still think. And when I think, I also exist. I think, therefore I am. With this, Descartes believes he has gained a firm starting point for all further reflection. He goes on to ask himself: is there not something else in the content of my thinking that points to a true existence? And there he finds the idea of God as a most perfect being. Since man himself is imperfect, how does the idea of a most perfect being enter his world of thought? An imperfect being cannot possibly generate such an idea from within itself. For the most perfect thing it is capable of thinking is precisely an imperfect one. This idea of the most perfect being must therefore be placed in man himself. So God must also exist. But how can a perfect being deceive us? The external world, which presents itself to us as real, must therefore also be real. Otherwise it would be an illusion that the deity is pretending to be. In this way, Descartes seeks to gain the trust in reality that he initially lacked because of inherited sensations. He seeks the truth in an extremely artificial way. He proceeds unilaterally from thinking. He concedes that only thinking has the power to produce conviction. Conviction can only be gained through observation if it is mediated by thinking. The consequence of this view was that it became the endeavor of Descartes' successors to determine the full extent of the truths that thinking can develop and prove on its own. They wanted to find the sum of all knowledge from pure reason. They wanted to start from the simplest, immediately clear insights and progressively wander through the entire circle of pure thought. This system was to be structured along the lines of Euclidean geometry. For it was believed that this, too, proceeded from simple, true propositions and developed its entire content by mere deduction, without the aid of observation. Spinoza attempted to provide such a system of pure rational truths in his "Ethics". A number of ideas: Substance, attribute, mode, thought, extension, etc., he takes and examines purely rationally the relations and content of these ideas. The essence of reality is to be expressed in the structure of thought. Spinoza regards only the cognition that comes about through this activity that is alien to reality as one that corresponds to the true nature of the world, that provides adequate ideas. The ideas arising from sense perception are for him inadequate, confused and mutilated. It is easy to see that even in this world of ideas the one-sided Platonic conception of the opposition of perceptions and ideas continues to have an effect. Thoughts, which are formed independently of perception, are the only thing of value for knowledge. Spinoza goes even further. He also extends the contrast to people's moral feelings and actions. Feelings of displeasure can only arise from ideas that originate from perception; such ideas generate the desires and passions in man, to which he can become a slave if he surrenders to them. Only that which springs from reason generates unconditional sensations of pleasure. Man's highest happiness is therefore his life in the ideas of reason, his devotion to the knowledge of the pure world of ideas. He who has overcome what comes from the world of perception and lives only in pure knowledge feels the highest bliss.

[ 5 ] Not quite a century after Spinoza, the Scotsman David Hume came up with a way of thinking that again allows knowledge to arise from perception alone. Only individual things in space and time are given. Thought links the individual perceptions, but not because there is something in them that corresponds to this link, but because the mind has become accustomed to putting things into a context. Man is accustomed to seeing that one thing follows another in time. He forms the idea that it must follow. He makes the first the cause, the second the effect. Man is further accustomed to see that a thought of his mind is followed by a movement of his body. He explains this by saying that the spirit has caused the movement of the body. Human ideas are nothing more than habits of thought. Only perceptions have reality.

[ 6 ] The unification of the most diverse schools of thought that have come into existence through the centuries is the Kantian worldview. Kant also lacks a natural feeling for the relationship between perception and idea. He lives in philosophical prejudices that he has absorbed through the study of his predecessors. One of these prejudices is that there are necessary truths that are generated by pure thinking, free of all experience. The proof of this, in his view, is provided by the existence of mathematics and pure physics, which contain such truths. Another of his prejudices is that he denies experience the ability to arrive at equally necessary truths. Distrust of the world of perception is also present in Kant. In addition to these habits of thought, Kant is influenced by Hume. He agrees with Hume with regard to the assertion that the ideas into which thought summarizes individual perceptions do not come from experience. But that thought adds them to experience. These three prejudices are the roots of Kant's thought structure. Man possesses necessary truths. They cannot come from experience, because experience does not offer them. Nevertheless, man applies them to experience. He links the individual perceptions according to these truths. They come from man himself. It is in his nature that he brings things into such a connection that corresponds to the truths gained through pure thinking. Kant now goes even further. He also ascribes to the senses the ability to bring what is given to them from outside into a certain order. This order, too, does not flow in with the impressions of things from outside. The spatial and temporal order is only given to the impressions through sensory perception. Space and time do not belong to things. Man is organized in such a way that when things make impressions on his senses, he brings them into spatial or temporal contexts. Man only receives impressions, sensations from outside. The arrangement of these in space and time, their combination into ideas, is his own work. But even sensations are not something that originates from things. Man does not perceive things, but only the impressions they exert on him. I know nothing of a thing when I have a sensation. I can only say: I notice the occurrence of a sensation in me. I can find out nothing about the qualities that enable the thing to evoke sensations in me. According to Kant, man is not concerned with the things themselves, but only with the impressions they make on him and with the contexts into which he himself brings these impressions. The world of experience is not objectively received from outside, but only generated subjectively from within on external instigation. It is not the things that give it its character, but the human organization. Consequently, it does not exist as such independently of the human being. From this point of view, the assumption of necessary truths independent of experience is possible. For these truths merely refer to the way in which man determines his world of experience from within himself. They contain the laws of his organization. They have no reference to the things themselves. Kant has thus found a way out that allows him to stand by his prejudice that there are necessary truths that apply to the content of the world of experience without originating from it. However, in order to find this way out, he had to decide on the view that the human mind is incapable of knowing anything about things in themselves. He had to restrict all cognition to the world of appearances, which the human organization spins out of itself as a result of the impressions caused by things. But what did Kant care about the nature of things in themselves if he could only save the eternal, necessarily valid truths in the sense in which he imagined them. In Kant, one-sided Platonism produced a fruit that paralyzed knowledge. Plato turned away from perception and directed his gaze to the eternal Ideas, because they did not seem to him to express the essence of things. Kant, however, renounces the idea that the Ideas open up a real insight into the essence of the world if they only retain the quality of being eternal and necessary. Plato sticks to the world of ideas because he believes that the true essence of the world must be eternal, indestructible, unchangeable, and that he can only attribute these qualities to the ideas. Kant is satisfied if he can only assert these qualities of the ideas. They then no longer need to express the essence of the world at all.

[ 7 ] Kant's philosophical way of thinking was particularly nourished by his religious sensibility. He did not assume to see the living harmony of the world of ideas and sensory perception in the human being, but rather posed the question: Can something be recognized by man through the experience of the world of ideas that can never enter the realm of sense perception? Whoever thinks in the sense of Goethe's world view seeks to recognize the reality character of the world of ideas by grasping the essence of the idea, by realizing how it allows reality to be seen in the sensory illusory world. Then he may ask himself: To what extent can I, through the reality character of the world of ideas experienced in this way, penetrate into the realms in which the supersensible truths of freedom, immortality and the divine world order find their relation to human knowledge? Kant denied the possibility of being able to know anything about the reality of the world of ideas from its relationship to sense perception. From this presupposition arose for him as a scientific result that which, unconsciously to him, was demanded by his religious sensibility: that scientific knowledge must stop short of such questions as concern freedom, immortality, the divine world order. He realized that human cognition could only go as far as the limits that enclose the sensory realm, and that only faith was possible for everything beyond that. He wanted to limit knowledge in order to make room for faith. It is in the spirit of Goethe's world view to first provide knowledge with a firm foundation by seeing the world of ideas in its essence in nature, in order to then proceed in the fortified world of ideas to an experience that lies beyond the world of the senses. Even when areas are recognized that do not lie within the realm of the sense world, the gaze is directed to the living harmony of idea and experience and thereby the certainty of cognition is sought. Kant could not find such certainty. He therefore set out to find a basis for the ideas of freedom, immortality and the order of God outside of cognition. In the sense of Goethe's world view, it is to want to recognize as much of "things in themselves" as the essence of the world of ideas, grasped from nature, allows. It is in the spirit of Kant's world view to deny knowledge the right to shine a light into the world of "things in themselves". Goethe wants to light a light in knowledge that illuminates the essence of things. It is also clear to him that the essence of the illuminated things does not lie in the light; but he nevertheless does not want to do without allowing this essence to become apparent through illumination with the light. Kant maintains that the essence of the illuminated things does not lie in the light; therefore, the light cannot reveal anything about this essence

[ 8 ] Kant's worldview can only stand before Goethe's in the sense of the following ideas: This world-view arose not by the removal of old errors, not by a free, original immersion in reality, but by the logical fusion of acquired and inherited philosophical and religious prejudices. It could only spring from a mind in which the sense of living creation within nature remained undeveloped. And it could only have an effect on minds that suffered from the same deficiency. From the far-reaching influence that Kant's way of thinking exerted on his contemporaries, it can be seen how strongly they were under the spell of one-sided Platonism.