The Rudolf Steiner Archive

4.1 The Philosophical Justification of Anthroposophy

[ 1 ] Those who wish to root their way of thinking in the philosophical thinking of the present day need to justify epistemologically before themselves and before this thinking that which is essentially spiritual, of which the first section of this essay speaks. Many people who know the truly spiritual from direct inner experience and know how to distinguish it from the spiritual experience brought about by the senses do not require such a justification. For them, justification often appears to be an unnecessary, even uncomfortable division of concepts. Their aversion of this kind is countered by the unwillingness of philosophical thinkers. They only want to accept the inner experiences of the soul as subjective experiences to which no cognitive value can be attributed. They are therefore little inclined to seek out the elements in their philosophical concepts through which anthroposophical ideas can be approached. These aversions on both sides make communication extremely difficult. But it is necessary. For in our time a way of thinking can only be ascribed epistemological value if it can bring its views to bear before the same criticism before which the laws of natural science seek their justification. - For an epistemological justification of anthroposophical ideas, it is above all a question of conceptualizing the way in which they are experienced as precisely as possible. This can be done in many different ways. Two of these ways will be described here. For the description of one of them, let us start from the observation of memory. In doing so, however, one is immediately driven to an awkward point in contemporary philosophical science. For the nature of memory is not well understood. I shall start here from ideas which I have found on the paths of anthroposophy, but which can certainly be justified philosophically and physiologically. However, the space I have to give myself in this paper is not sufficient to provide this latter justification here. I hope to provide it in a future publication. However, I believe that what I will say about memory can be substantiated by anyone who is able to look at the results of physiological and psychological science available today with the right eye.

The ideas stimulated by sensory impressions enter the realm of unconscious human experience. They can be retrieved and remembered from this realm. Imaginations are a purely psychic entity; their consciousness in ordinary waking life is bodily conditioned. Nor can the soul, which is bound to the body, raise them from the unconscious state to the conscious state by its own powers. For this it needs the powers of the body. For ordinary memory the body must be active, just as it must be active in the processes of the sense organs for the emergence of sensory concepts. If I imagine a sensory process, a bodily activity must first develop in the sense organs; as a result of this, the imagination arises in the soul. If I remember an idea, then an inner bodily activity (in fine organs) polar opposite to the sensory activity must take place, and the remembered idea arises in the soul as a result. This imagination relates to a sensory process that took place before my soul some time ago. I imagine it through an inner experience that the organization of the body enables me to have. Now visualize the nature of such a memory. For through this visualization one arrives at the essence of what the anthroposophical ideas are. They are not ideas of memory; but they appear in the soul like ideas of memory. This is a disappointment for many people who would like to have a more general idea of the spiritual world. But one cannot experience the spiritual world in a coarser way than in the memory of an event that was experienced in the sensory world a long time ago and no longer stands before one's eyes. Now the ability to remember such an event comes from the power of the body's organization. This must not play a part in the experience of the essential soul. Rather, the soul must awaken in itself the ability to accomplish with ideas what the body accomplishes with the ideas of the senses when it mediates their memory. Such ideas, which are brought up from the depths of the soul solely through the power of the soul, just as the memory ideas are brought up from the depths of the human nature through the organization of the body: these are ideas which relate to the spiritual world. They are present in every soul. What must be acquired in order to become aware of this presence is the power to bring up these ideas from the depths of the soul through purely spiritual activity. Just as the remembered sense-images refer to a past sense-impression, so these ideas refer to a connection of the soul with the spiritual world that does not exist in the sense-world. The human soul faces the spiritual world in the same way as man generally faces a forgotten existence; and it comes to the realization of this world when it awakens forces within itself that are similar to those bodily forces that serve memory.—It is therefore important for the philosophical justification of the ideas of the truly spiritual to investigate the inner life in such a way that one finds in it an activity that is purely spiritual and yet in certain respects similar to the activity practiced in remembering.

[ 2 ] A second way to form a concept of the purely mental is as follows. One can consider what can be discerned through anthropological observation about the willing (acting) human being. A volitional impulse to be carried out is initially based on the idea of what is to be willed. This idea can be recognized physiologically in its conditionality of the body's organization (the nervous system). Attached to the imagination is a feeling tone, a feeling sympathization with the imagined, which causes this imagination to provide the impulse for volition. Then, however, the mental experience loses itself in the depths, and only success consciously reappears. Man imagines how he moves in order to carry out what he has imagined (Th. Ziehen has described all this particularly clearly in his physiological psychology). - We can now see how the conscious imaginative life, when an act of will comes into question, is suspended in relation to the intermediate element of will. What is experienced mentally in the volition of an act performed by the body does not enter into the ordinary conscious imagination. But it is also obvious that such a volition is realized through an activity of the body. But it is also easy to recognize that the soul develops a volition by seeking the truth through the combination of ideas in accordance with logical laws. A will that cannot be encompassed in physiological laws. Otherwise an illogical combination of ideas - or even just an alogical one - would not be distinguishable from one that follows the paths of logical regularity. (There is no serious need to take account of amateurish talk, as if logical inference consisted only in a quality acquired by the soul through adaptation to the external world). In this volition, which proceeds purely within the soul and which leads to logically founded convictions, one can see the soul being permeated with a purely spiritual activity. Ordinary imagination knows as little of what goes on outwardly in the volition as man knows of himself in sleep. Nor does he have as full an awareness of the logical determination involved in forming convictions as he has of the content of the convictions themselves. He who knows how to observe inwardly, even if only anthropologically, will nevertheless be able to form a concept of the presence of logical determination in ordinary consciousness. He will recognize that man knows of this determinacy as he knows dreaming. It is quite possible to maintain the correctness of the paradox: the ordinary consciousness knows the content of its convictions; but it only dreams of the logical regularity that lives in the search for these convictions. One sees that in ordinary consciousness one sleeps through the will when one develops a will outwardly through the body; one dreams through the will when one searches for convictions in thinking. But one recognizes that in the latter case that which one dreams of cannot be corporeal, for otherwise the logical laws would have to coincide with the physiological ones. If one grasps the concept of the will living in the thinking search for truth, then this concept is that of a spiritual being.

One can see from the two ways (besides which others are possible) of approaching the concept of the soul-being in the sense of anthroposophy, how sharply this soul-being separates itself from everything that is abnormal soul activity, such as the visionary, hallucinatory, mediumistic, etc., being. being. For the origin of all this abnormality must be sought in the physiologically determinable. The soul of anthroposophy, however, is not only that which is experienced in the soul in the manner of ordinary healthy consciousness, but that which is experienced in fully awake consciousness when forming ideas, just as one experiences when one remembers experienced facts of life, or as one experiences when forming logically conditioned convictions. It is easy to see that the cognitive experience of anthroposophy proceeds in conceptions which retain the character of the ordinary consciousness endowed with reality by the external world, and add to it faculties which lead into the spiritual realm; while everything visionary, hallucinatory, etc., lives in a consciousness which adds nothing to the ordinary, but takes away faculties from it, so that the state of consciousness sinks below the degree which is present in conscious sense-perception.

For the readers of my writings who are familiar with what I have said elsewhere about memory and recollection, I note the following. The ideas which have passed into the unconscious and which are later remembered, while they remain unconscious, are to be sought as ideas in that part of the human being which in these writings is called the vital body (etheric body). The activity, however, by which the ideas anchored in the vital body are remembered, belongs to the physical body. I make this remark so that some people do not construct a contradiction "hastily with judgment" where a distinction required by the nature of the matter is necessary.