The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Chapter X

[ 1 ] When I look back on my life, I see the first three decades of my life as a self-contained period. At the end of this period, I moved to Weimar to work at the Goethe and Schiller Archive for almost seven years. I look back on the time that I spent in Vienna between the Weimar journey described above and my move to the city of Goethe as the time that brought to a certain conclusion what my soul had been striving for until then. This conclusion lived in the work towards my "philosophy of freedom".

[ 2 ] An essential part of the ideas through which I expressed my views at that time was that I did not regard the sensory world as true reality. In the writings and essays that I published at that time, I always expressed myself in such a way that the human soul appears as a true reality in the activity of a thinking that it does not draw from the sense world, but unfolds in free activity that goes beyond sense perception. I presented this "sensory-free" thinking as that with which the soul stands within the spiritual essence of the world

[ 3 ] But I also sharply asserted that man, by living in this sensuality-free thinking, is also really consciously in the spiritual primal grounds of existence. Talking about the limits of knowledge made no sense to me. For me, cognition was the retrieval of the spiritual content experienced by the soul in the perceived world. When someone spoke of the limits of cognition, I saw in it the concession that he could not experience true reality spiritually within himself and therefore could not find it again in the perceived world.

[ 4 ] In presenting my own insights, I was primarily concerned with refuting the view of the limits of knowledge. I wanted to reject the path of knowledge that looks at the sensory world and then wants to break through the sensory world to a true reality. I wanted to point out that not in such a breaking through to the outside, but in the immersion into the inside of the human being the true reality is to be sought. Anyone who wants to break through to the outside and then sees that this is an impossibility is talking about the limits of knowledge. But it is not an impossibility because the human faculty of cognition is limited, but because one is seeking something of which one cannot speak at all with proper self-reflection. To a certain extent, by wanting to penetrate further into the sensory world, we are looking for a continuation of the sensory behind what we perceive. It is as if the person living in illusions sought the causes of his illusions in further illusions.

[ 5 ] The meaning of my descriptions at that time was this: Man, by developing further in his earthly existence from birth onwards, confronts the world in a recognizing way. He first arrives at sensory perception. But this is only an outpost of cognition. Not everything that is in the world is yet revealed in this perception. The world is substantial; but man does not yet reach this substantiality. He still closes himself off from it. Because he does not yet confront his own essence with the world, he forms a view of the world that lacks essence. This world view is in truth an illusion. Sensually perceiving, man stands before the world as an illusion. But when sensory perception is joined from within by sensory-free thinking, then the illusion becomes imbued with reality; then it ceases to be an illusion. Then the human spirit experiencing itself within itself encounters the spirit of the world, which for the human being is now not hidden behind the sensory world, but weaves in the sensory world and West.

[ 6 ] Finding the spirit in the world, I saw at that time not as a matter of logical reasoning, or the continuation of sensory perception; but as something that arises when man develops from perception to the experience of sensory-free thinking.

[ 7 ] What I wrote in the second volume of my 1888 edition of Goethe's scientific writings is permeated by such views: "Whoever acknowledges to thinking its perceptive faculty that goes beyond sense perception must of necessity also acknowledge to it objects that lie beyond mere sensory reality. But these objects of thought are the ideas. When thinking takes possession of the idea, it merges with the primordial ground of world existence; that which works outside enters the spirit of man: he becomes one with objective reality at its highest potency. The realization of the idea in reality is the true communion of man. - Thinking has the same significance in relation to ideas as the eye has in relation to light, the ear in relation to sound. It is the organ of perception." (Cf. introduction to Goethe's scientific writings in Kürschner's German National Literature, 2nd vol. p. IV.)

[ 8 ] I was less concerned at that time with presenting the world of the spiritual as it emerges when sensory-free thinking progresses via self-awareness to spiritual perception, than with showing that the essence of nature given in sensory perception is the spiritual. I wanted to express that nature is in truth spiritual.

[ 9 ] This was due to the fact that my destiny led me to an argument with the epistemologists of the time. They imagined a mindless nature as their premise and therefore had the task of showing to what extent man is entitled to form a mental image of nature in his mind. I wanted to contrast this with a completely different theory of cognition. I wanted to show that man thinking does not form images about nature like an outsider, but that cognition is experience, so that man stands cognitively in the essence of things.

[ 10 ] And furthermore, it was my destiny to link my own views to Goethe. In this connection one has much opportunity to show how nature is spiritual, because Goethe himself strove for a spiritual view of nature; but one has no similar opportunity to speak of the purely spiritual world as such, because Goethe did not carry the spiritual view of nature as far as the immediate spiritual view.

[ 11 ] In the second place, it was important to me at that time to express the idea of freedom. If man acts from his instincts, drives, passions, etc., he is unfree. Impulses, which become as conscious to him as the impressions of the sensory world, then determine his actions. But his true nature does not act there either. He acts at a stage where his true nature is not yet revealed. He does not reveal himself as a human being there any more than the sense world reveals its essence to mere sensory observation. Now the sense world is not in reality an illusion, but is only made so by man. Man in his actions, however, can make the sensual-like drives, desires etc. real as illusions; he then lets an illusory thing act in itself; it is not he himself who acts. He lets the unspiritual act. His spiritual acts only when he finds the impulses of his action in the realm of his sensuality-free thinking as moral intuitions. There he acts himself, nothing else. There he is a free being, a being acting of himself.

[ 12 ] I wanted to show how he who rejects sensuality-free thinking as a purely spiritual thing in man can never come to an understanding of freedom; but how such an understanding occurs immediately when one sees through the reality of sensuality-free thinking.

[ 13 ] In this area, too, I was less concerned at that time with depicting the purely spiritual world in which man experiences his moral intuitions than with emphasizing the spiritual character of these intuitions themselves. If I had been concerned with the former, I should probably have begun the chapter "The Moral Imagination" in my "Philosophy of Freedom" as follows: "The free spirit acts according to its impulses; these are intuitions which are experienced by it outside the natural world in the purely spiritual world, without it becoming aware of this spiritual world in ordinary consciousness." But at that time it was important to me to characterize only the purely spiritual character of moral intuitions. That is why I pointed to the existence of these intuitions in the totality of the human world of ideas and said accordingly: "The free spirit acts according to its impulses, these are intuitions that are selected from the whole of its world of ideas through thinking." - Anyone who does not look at a purely spiritual world, i.e. who could not write the first sentence, cannot fully commit to the second. However, there are enough references to the first sentence in my "Philosophy of Freedom"; for example: "The highest level of individual life is conceptual thinking without regard to a specific perceptual content. We determine the content of a concept through pure intuition from the ideal sphere. Such a concept then initially contains no reference to specific perceptions." What is meant here are "sensory perceptions". If at that time I had wanted to write about the spiritual world, and not merely about the spiritual character of moral intuitions, I would have had to take into account the contrast between sensory and spiritual perception. But it was only important to me to emphasize the non-sensual character of moral intuitions.

[ 14 ] My world of ideas moved in this direction when the first phase of my life came to an end with the third decade of my life, when I entered the Weimar period.