The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Worldviews of Scientific Fact

[ 1 ] An attempt to gain an overall view of the world and life from the mere basis of strict science was undertaken in France in the course of the nineteenth century by Auguste Comte (1798 to 1857). This undertaking, which in Comte's "Cours de philosophie positive" (6 volumes, 1830-1842) showed a comprehensive view of the world, stands in stark contrast to the idealistic views of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel in the first half of the century, as well as in a less strong, but nevertheless clear contrast to all thought constructs that take their results from the Lamarck-Darwinian ideas of development. What is at the center of Hegel's worldview, the contemplation and comprehension of man's own spirit, is completely rejected by Comte. He says to himself: If the human spirit wanted to contemplate itself, it would have to divide itself into two personalities; it would have to slip out of itself and confront itself. Even psychology, which does not exhaust itself in physiological observation but wants to consider mental processes for themselves, is not accepted by Comte. Everything that wants to become an object of knowledge must refer to objective connections of facts, must present itself as objectively as the laws of the mathematical sciences. And this is also the source of Comte's opposition to what Spencer and the scientific thinkers based on Lamarck and Darwin attempted with their world views. For Comte, the human species is given as fixed and unchangeable; he wants nothing to do with Lamarck's theory. Simple, transparent laws of nature, as applied by physics to its phenomena, are ideals of knowledge for him. As long as a science does not work with such simple laws, it is unsatisfactory for Comte as knowledge. He is a mathematical mind. And anything that cannot be treated transparently and simply as a mathematical problem is still immature for him as a science. Comte has no feeling for the fact that the more one ascends from purely mechanical and physical processes to the higher forms of nature and to man, the more vital ideas are needed. His view of the world thus acquires something dead and rigid. The whole world presents itself like the gears of a machine. Comte sees past the living everywhere; he drives life and spirit out of things and then merely explains what is mechanical, machine-like about them. In his depiction, the rich historical life of man is like the conceptual picture that the astronomer draws of the movements of the heavenly bodies. Comte has constructed a ladder of the sciences. Mathematics is the lowest level, followed by physics, chemistry, then the science of living beings, and finally sociology, the knowledge of human society. His aim is to make all these sciences as simple as mathematics is. The phenomena that the individual sciences deal with are always different; the laws are basically always the same. The waves made by Holbach, Condillac and other ideas are still clearly audible in the lectures on the "Relationship of the Soul to the Body", which Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis (1757-1808) gave from 1797 to 1798 at the college established by the Convention in Paris. Nevertheless, these lectures can be described as the beginning of the development of France's worldview in the nineteenth century. They express a clear awareness that Condillac's way of looking at the phenomena of mental life was too closely modeled on the views one has of the occurrence of purely mechanical processes in inorganic nature. Cabanis examines the influence of age, sex, way of life and temperament on man's way of thinking and feeling. He develops the idea that the spiritual and the physical are not like two entities that have nothing in common, but that they form an inseparable whole. What distinguishes him from his predecessors is not the basic view, but the way in which he develops it. Those simply carry the views gained in the inorganic world into the spiritual world; Cabanis says to himself: Let us first look at the spiritual world as impartially as we look at the inorganic; then it will tell us how it relates to the other natural phenomena. - Destutt de Tracy (1754 to 1836) proceeded in a similar way. He, too, initially wanted to look at spiritual processes impartially, as they appear when one approaches them without philosophical, but also without scientific prejudice. In the opinion of this thinker, we are committing an error if we imagine the soul to be as automatic as Condillac and his followers did. We can no longer maintain this automatism if we look at ourselves honestly. We do not find in ourselves an automaton, not a being that is merely led by the reins from the outside. We always find in ourselves self-activity and self-being. Indeed, we would know nothing of the effects of the outside world if we did not experience a disturbance in our own life through collisions with the outside world. We experience ourselves; we develop our activity out of ourselves; but in doing so, we encounter resistance; we realize that not only we are there, but also something else that resists us, an outside world.

[ 2 ] Although based on Destutt de Tracy, the introspection of the soul led to completely different paths of two thinkers: Maine de Biran (1766-1824) and André-Marie Ampére (1775-1836). Biran is a subtle observer of the human mind. What in Rousseau appears to be a tumultuous way of looking at things, caused only by an arbitrary whim, appears to us in him as clear, substantive thinking. What is in man through the nature of his being, through his temperament, and what he makes of himself through his active intervention, his character: Biran, as a deeply thinking psychologist, makes these two factors of his inner life the subject of his observations. He seeks out the ramifications and transformations of the inner life; he finds the source of knowledge within the human being. The forces that we come to know within ourselves are the intimate acquaintances of our lives; and we only know an outer world insofar as it is more or less similar and related to our inner world. What would we know of forces in nature outside if we did not really get to know a force in the self-acting soul as an experience and could therefore compare with it what we encounter in the outside world that is similar to a force. Biran is therefore tireless in his search for the processes in man's own soul. He focuses his attention on the involuntary, the unconscious in the inner life, on the spiritual processes that are already present in the soul when the light of consciousness appears in it. - Biran's search for wisdom within the soul led him in later years to a peculiar mysticism. If we draw the deepest wisdom from the soul, then we must also come closest to the primal grounds of existence when we delve into ourselves. Experiencing the deepest processes of the soul is therefore a way of living into the primal source of existence, into the God within us.

[ 3 ] The appeal of Biran's wisdom lies in the intimate way in which he presents it. He also found no more suitable form of presentation than that of a "journal intime", a diary-like form. Biran's writings, which lead most deeply into his world of thought, were only published after his death by E. Naville. (Cf. his "Maine de Biran. Sa vie et ses pensées", 1857, and the "Oeuvres inédites de M. de Biran" published by Naville). Cabanis and Destutt de Tracy were older men who belonged to a close circle of philosophers, while Biran was younger. - Among those who were already fully initiated into Biran's views during his lifetime was Ampére, who as a natural scientist is significant for his expansion of Oersted's observations on the relationship between electricity and magnetism (cf. p. 358 above). Biran's approach is more intimate, Ampére's more scientific and methodical. On the one hand, the latter pursues how sensations and ideas are linked in the soul, and on the other, how the mind arrives at a science of world phenomena with the help of its thinking.

[ 4 ] The significance of this worldview current, which is a continuation of Condillac's teachings, lies in the fact that the independent life of the soul is decisively emphasized, that the self-activity of the human inner personality moves to the forefront of consideration, and that all the minds under consideration here nevertheless work towards knowledge in a strictly scientific sense. They investigate the spirit scientifically, but they do not want to equate its phenomena with other processes in nature from the outset. And from their more materialistic beginnings, they ultimately strive for a world view that is decidedly inclined towards the spirit.

[ 5 ] Victor Cousin (1792-1867) undertook several journeys through Germany and became personally acquainted with the leading spirits of the idealistic epoch. Hegel and Goethe made the deepest impression on him. He brought their idealism to France. He was able to work for them through his captivating oratory, with which he made a deep impression, first as a professor at the Ecole Normale (from 1814), then at the Sorbonne. Cousin had learned from the idealistic spiritual life that a satisfactory world view could be gained not by observing the outside world, but by observing the human spirit. He based what he wanted to say on the self-observation of the soul. And from Hegel he adopted the idea that spirit, idea and thought not only reign within man, but also outside in nature and in the progress of historical life, that reason is present in reality. He taught that the character of a people, of an age, is not governed by the blind folly and caprice of individuals, but that a necessary thought, a real idea is expressed in it, indeed, that a great man appears in the world only as the messenger of a great idea in order to realize it within the course of history. It must have made a deep impression on his French listeners, who had to comprehend unparalleled world-historical storms in the most recent phases of their nation's development, to hear a brilliant speaker explain the rationality of historical development on the basis of great worldview ideas.

[ 6 ] Energistically and purposefully, Comte placed himself in the midst of this development of the French worldview with his basic principle: the starting point for a worldview can only be sought in science, which is based on such strict mathematical and observed truths as physics or chemistry. He can only accept human thinking as mature when it has come to this view. To get there, mankind had to go through two epochs of immaturity, one in which it believed in gods, and a subsequent one in which it gave itself over to abstract ideas. In the ascent from the theological through the idealistic to the scientific view of the world, Comte sees the necessary course of mankind's development. In the first stage, man imagined human-like gods in the processes of nature, who bring about these processes as arbitrarily as man brings about his activities. Later he replaced the gods with abstract ideas such as life force, general world reason, world purpose and so on. This phase of development must also make way for a higher one. It must be recognized that an explanation of world phenomena can only be found in observation and in the strictly mathematical and logical consideration of facts. Only what physics, chemistry and the science of living beings (biology) investigate in this way can be combined by thinking for the purpose of a world view. It has nothing to add to what the individual sciences have researched, as theology does with its divine entities and idealistic philosophy with its abstract thoughts. Even the views on the course of human development, on the coexistence of people in the state, in society, etc., will only become completely clear when they seek such laws as the strict natural sciences. The reasons why families, associations, legal systems and state institutions come into being must be sought in the same way as those why bodies fall to earth or why the digestive organs of animals do their work. The science of human coexistence, of human development, sociology, is therefore particularly close to Comte's heart. He seeks to give it the rigorous character that other sciences have gradually assumed. In this direction, he had a predecessor in Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825). The latter already held the view that man would only be a perfect controller of his own destiny if he understood his own life in the state, in society, in the course of history in a strictly scientific sense and organized it in terms of a natural law of development. Comte was on intimate terms with Saint-Simon for a time and parted company with him when the latter's views seemed to be lost in all kinds of bottomless reveries and utopias. Comte continued to work in the direction he had taken with rare zeal. His "Cours de philosophie positive" is an attempt to develop the scientific achievements of his time into a world view in an uninspired style by merely compiling them for orientation and by expanding sociology in their spirit, without the aid of theological or idealistic ideas. Comte set the philosopher no other task than that of such an orienting compilation. He has nothing of his own to add to what the sciences have established about the connection between facts. This was the sharpest expression of the opinion that only the sciences, with their observation of reality and their methods, have a say when it comes to the development of worldviews.

[ 7 ] Within German intellectual life, Eugen Dühring (1833 to 1921) emerged in 1865 with his "Natural Dialectics" as an energetic advocate of this idea of the sole authority of scientific thought. In 1875, he presented his views to the world in further detail in his book "Kursus der Philosophie als streng wissenschaftliche Weltanschauung und Lebensgestaltung", and in numerous other mathematical, scientific, philosophical, scientific-historical and national-economic writings. Dühring's entire oeuvre emerges from a strictly mathematical and mechanistic way of thinking. Dühring is admirable in his ability to think through everything that can be achieved in world phenomena using mathematical laws. But where such thinking does not suffice, he loses all possibility of finding his way in life. His intellectual character explains the arbitrariness, the bias with which Dühring judges so many things. Where one has to judge according to higher ideas, as in the complicated relationships of human coexistence, he therefore has no other point of reference than the sympathies and antipathies planted in him by chance personal relationships. He, the mathematical-objective mind, falls into complete arbitrariness when he undertakes to evaluate human achievements of the historical past or the present. His sober mathematical way of thinking has led him to denounce a personality such as Goethe as the most unscientific mind of modern times, whose entire significance, in his opinion, is exhausted in a few lyrical achievements. One cannot go further in underestimating everything that transcends sober reality than Dühring did in his book "The Greats of Modern Literature". Despite this one-sidedness, Dühring is one of the most inspiring figures in the development of the modern world view. No one who has immersed himself in his thoughtful books can admit to anything other than this, that he has received profound effects from them.

[ 8 ] Dühring uses the crudest expressions to describe all world views that are based on anything other than strictly scientific points of view. All such unscientific ways of thinking "understand themselves in the stage of childish immaturity or feverish impulses, or in the regressions of senility; under these conditions they may afflict entire epochs and parts of humanity or occasionally individual elements or degenerate strata of society, but they always belong to the realm of the immature, the pathological or the over-mature already decomposed by decay" (Kursus der Philosophie p 44). He condemns what Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel have achieved as an outgrowth of charlatanic professorial wisdom; idealism as a world view is for him a theory of madness. He wants to create a philosophy of reality that is solely natural because it "eliminates the artificial and unnatural fabrications and for the first time makes the concept of reality the measure of all ideal conceptions"; reality is conceived by it "in a way that excludes any tendency towards a dreamlike and subjectivistically limited conception of the world". (Course in Philosophy p. 13.)

[ 9 ] Think like the right mechanic, the right physicist thinks, who sticks to what the senses can perceive, the mind can logically combine and the calculation can determine. Anything that goes beyond that is idle play with concepts. So says Dühring to himself. But he also wants to give this way of thinking its full rights. Whoever adheres exclusively to this way of thinking can be sure that it will give him insights into reality. All pondering as to whether we can actually penetrate the secrets of world events with our thinking, all research which, like Kant's, seeks to limit the faculty of knowledge, springs from a logical fallacy. We should not fall into the self-sacrificing self-denial of the intellect, which does not dare to say anything positive about the world. What we can know is a true unclouded representation of the real. "The whole of things has a systematic structure and inner logical consistency. Nature and history have a constitution and development whose essence corresponds to a large extent to the general logical relations of all concepts. The general properties and relations of the concepts of thought with which logic is concerned must also apply to the special case in which its object is the totality of being together with its principal forms. Since the most general thinking decides to a wide extent what can be and how it can be, the highest principles and main forms of logic must also have the decisive meaning for all reality and its forms" (Kursus der Philosophie p. 11). Reality has created an organ in human thought through which it can mentally recreate itself in an ideal image. Nature is everywhere governed by a consistent lawfulness that is right in itself and cannot be criticized. How could it make sense to criticize the scope of thought, the organ of nature? It is folly to expect nature to create an organ through which it reflects itself only imperfectly or incompletely. The order and regularity outside in reality must therefore correspond to the logical order and regularity in human thought. "The ideal system of our thoughts is the image of the real system of objective reality; perfect knowledge has the same form in the form of thoughts that things have in the form of real existence." - Despite this general correspondence between thought and reality, there is nevertheless the possibility for the former to go beyond the latter. Thought continues in the idea the operations that are imposed on it by reality. In reality, every body is divisible, but only up to a certain limit. Thought does not stop at this limit, but divides even further in the idea. Thought goes beyond reality; it allows the body to be infinitely divisible, to consist of infinitely small parts. In reality this body consists only of a very definite finite number of small, but not infinitely small parts. - In this way all concepts of infinity that transcend reality arise. One proceeds from each event to another which is its cause; from this cause again to its cause, and so on. As soon as thought leaves the ground of reality, it wanders into infinity. It imagines that for every cause another cause must be sought, that the world is without a beginning in time. Thinking also proceeds in a similar way with the fulfillment of space. When it traverses celestial space, it always finds others beyond the most distant stars; it goes beyond this real fact and imagines space to be infinite and filled with an endless number of world bodies. According to Dühring, one must be clear about the fact that all such ideas of infinity have nothing to do with reality. They only arise from the fact that thinking, using the methods that correspond completely to reality, skims over it and thus reaches infinity.

[ 10 ] If thinking remains aware of its divergence from reality, then, in Dühring's view, it need not be reticent in transferring concepts borrowed from human activity to nature. Starting from such points of view, Dühring does not even shy away from attributing imagination to nature in its creation, just as he does to man in his own. "The imagination reaches ... into nature itself; it is rooted, like all thought in general, in impulses that precede the finished consciousness and do not themselves form any elements of the subjectively perceived" (Kursus der Philosophie p. 50). The idea defended by Comte, that all world-view must be nothing more than an attribution of the purely factual, dominates Dühring so completely that he transfers the imagination to the world of facts, because he believes he must simply reject it if it only occurs in the realm of the human mind. Starting from these ideas, he also arrives at other transfers of such concepts, which are taken from human activity, to nature. He thinks, for example, not only that man can make unsuccessful attempts in his activities, which he abandons because they do not lead to the goal, but also that one sees attempts in this or that direction in the activities of nature. "The experimental character of formations is nothing less than alien to reality, and one does not see why the parallel of nature apart from man and nature in man should only be half valid out of favor for a superficial philosophy. If the subjective error of thinking and imagining arises from the relative separateness and independence of this sphere, why should not a practical error or misconception of objective and non-thinking nature also be the result of a relative separation and mutual alienation of its various parts and driving forces? A true philosophy, which does not shrink from common prejudices, will finally recognize the complete parallelism and the continuous unity of the constitution on both sides" (Kursus der Philosophie p. 51).

[ 11 ] Dühring is thus not brittle when it comes to transferring the concepts that thinking generates within itself to reality. But because his whole disposition is such that he only has a sense for mathematical concepts, the picture he creates of the world also takes on a mathematical-schematic character. He is opposed to the way of looking at the world that was developed by Darwin and Haeckel. He has no understanding for the search for the reasons why one being develops from another. The mathematician also juxtaposes the shapes: triangle, square, circle, ellipse; why should we not be reassured by a similar schematic juxtaposition in nature? Dühring does not focus on becoming in nature, but on the fixed shapes that nature works out through combinations of its forces, just as the mathematician looks at the specific, strictly outlined spatial shapes. And Dühring does not find it inappropriate to ascribe to nature a purposeful working towards such solid formations. Dühring does not conceive of this purposeful natural striving as a conscious activity, as it develops in man; but it is nevertheless just as clearly expressed in the actions of nature as the rest of the laws of nature. - In this respect, Dühring's view is therefore the opposite pole to that held by Friedrich Albert Lange. The latter declares the higher concepts, namely all those in which the imagination has a share, to be legitimate poetry; Dühring rejects all poetry in concepts, but instead ascribes actual reality to certain higher ideas that are indispensable to him. It therefore seems quite logical when Lange wants to withdraw the basis of morality from all ideas rooted in reality (cf. p. 434 above), and also when Dühring extends ideas that he considers valid in the realm of morality to nature. He is completely convinced that what happens in man and through man takes place just as naturally as inanimate processes. So what is right in human life cannot be wrong in nature. Such considerations helped to make Dühring an energetic opponent of Darwin's doctrine of the "struggle for existence". If the struggle of all against all was the condition of perfection in nature, it would also have to be the case in human life. "Such an idea, which above all gives itself the appearance of scientificity, is the most morally unconceivable of all. The character of nature is thus conceived in an anti-moral sense. It is regarded not merely as indifferent to the better morality of man, but as being in agreement and in alliance with that bad morality to which the crooks also pay homage" (Kursus der Philosophie p. 164). - What man perceives as moral impulses must, in the sense of Dühring's view of life, already be predisposed in nature. In nature an aim towards the moral must be observed. Just as nature creates other forces that combine purposefully to form solid entities, so it places sympathetic instincts in man. Through them he allows himself to be determined in his coexistence with others. Thus the activity of nature is continued in man at a high level. Dühring ascribes to the lifeless mechanical forces the ability to generate feeling from themselves, like a machine. "The mechanical causality of the forces of nature is, so to speak, subjectivized in fundamental sensation. The fact of this elementary process of subjectivation can obviously not be further explained; for somewhere and under some conditions the unconscious mechanics of the world must arrive at the feeling of itself" (Kursus der Philosophie p. 147). But when it arrives at this, then a new lawfulness, a realm of the spirit, does not begin, but only continues what was already present in the unconscious mechanics. This mechanics is thus unconscious, but nevertheless wise, for "the earth with all that it produces, together with the causes of life-support lying outside, namely in the sun, as well as generally including all influences that come from the surrounding world as a whole, this whole system and arrangement must be thought of as essentially produced for man, that is, as being in accordance with his welfare" (Kursus der Philosophie p. 177)

[ 12 ] Dühring attributes thoughts to nature, even goals and moral tendencies, without admitting that he is idealizing it. Explaining nature involves higher ideas that go beyond the real; however, according to Dühring, such ideas must not exist; consequently, he reinterprets them as facts. Something similar was expressed in the world view of Julius Heinrich v. Kirchmann, who appeared with his "Philosophy of Knowledge" around the same time (1864) as Dühring with his "Natural Dialectic". Only that which is perceived is real: this is Kirchmann's assumption. Through his perception, man is in contact with existence. Everything that man does not gain from perception, he must eliminate from his knowledge of the real. He achieves this by rejecting everything that is contradictory. "Contradiction is not"; this is Kirchmann's second principle alongside the first: "The perceived is."

[ 13 ] Kirchmann only accepts feelings and desires as states of the human soul that have an existence of their own. He contrasts knowledge with these existential states of the soul. "Knowledge forms a contrast to the two other states, to feeling and desire ... Knowledge may be based on some mental process, perhaps even something similar, such as pressure, tension; but understood in this way, knowledge is not grasped in its essence. As knowledge, and only as such is it to be examined here, it conceals its own being and makes itself only the mirror of an alien being. There is no better simile for this than the mirror. Just as the mirror is all the more perfect the more it does not allow itself to be seen, but only reflects another being, so too is knowledge. Its essence is this pure reflection of another's being, without any admixture of its own being." However, it is impossible to imagine a stronger contrast to Hegel's conception than this view of knowledge. Whereas in Hegel the essence of a thing comes to light in the thought, i.e. in what the soul brings to the perception through its own activity, Kirchmann presents an ideal of knowledge in which this is a mirror image of the perception freed from all of the soul's own ingredients.

[ 14 ] If you want to judge Kirchmann's position in intellectual life correctly, you have to take into account the great difficulties encountered at the time of his appearance by someone who had the drive within himself to establish an independent worldview. The results of natural science, which were bound to have a profound influence on the development of the world view, were still young. They were just enough to shake the belief in the classical, idealistic world view, which had had to build its proud edifice without the help of the newer natural sciences. However, it was not easy to come up with new basic ideas to guide the wealth of individual results. In many circles, the thread that led from scientific knowledge of the facts to a satisfactory overall view of the world was lost. A certain helplessness in questions of worldview took hold of many. There was hardly any understanding left for the kind of momentum of thought that had been expressed in Hegel's view.