I Evolutionism

1. Introductory Remarks
2. The System-Objects and their Archetypal Phenomena
3. Categories of Development
4. Consciousness, Being, Form

1. Introductory Remarks

The intention to offer a systematic description of Anthroposophical methodology is bound up with a whole series of considerable difficulties of a not merely scientific character. It suffices to point out that one encounters a lack of understanding even in Anthroposophical circles – namely, on the part of those who experience the teaching of Rudolf Steiner in a mystical way only, and who, even if they make certain efforts in the sphere of cognition, do so in an unsystematic and dogmatic manner. In order to conceal the narrowness and superficiality of their understanding of Anthroposophy, they often tear statements of Rudolf Steiner out of their context and absolutize them into dogmas of a belief-system. People of this sort may well refuse categorically to read our book without prejudice on the grounds that, for example, one can read the following in one of the lectures of Rudolf Steiner: “Spiritual science is meant to be an attitude to life, not a theory, a doctrine; it is meant to change our innermost soul-life” (GA 117, 19.11.1909).

For our part, when we meet up with ‘objections’ of this kind, we feel justified in affirming that these words of Rudolf Steiner not only do not contradict in any way the intention and the character of our research, but in a certain way actually constitute its central point. For Rudolf Steiner regarded thinking consciousness as a main instrument by means of which the human being can begin to transform the spiritual life. At the same time he stressed on numerous occasions that this thinking consciousness is at present in a state of decline, is alienated from real life and exhausts itself in empty abstraction. In this sense Anthroposophy is meant to be “not grey theory, but real life” (GA 26, p.56 ff), the life of the ensouled, thinking spirit, since it represents in the last resort a world-view, albeit one which, in contrast to other world-views, needs to be actively taken up in a different way” (ibid.). When Rudolf Steiner calls Anthroposophy ‘spiritual science’, we should take this to mean that it is both ‘teaching’ and ‘theory’, but its content and meaning differ so strongly from those of existing theories, that to understand it demands a qualitative transformation of the entire soul-spiritual nature of the human being. It is clear that the fulfilment of a task of this kind is only possible on the condition that one acquires a thorough knowledge of it. But all knowledge has its own method. The peculiar feature of the Anthroposophical method of cognition consists in the fact that it cannot be grasped by means of the understanding alone, but if we dispense with the understanding and give ourselves over entirely to the mysticism of feelings, we also achieve nothing. As everything of a sectarian and dogmatic nature is foreign to Anthroposophy, the assumption would be that human beings should associate together freely and without restriction on the basis that it provides. But to discuss Anthroposophy in depth and out of true insight is only possible for those who take the trouble to master the “cognitive methods of Anthroposophy” (13.2.1923). Mastery of the method enables one to know Anthroposophy rightly – i.e. in a way that is adequate to its true nature and content. And this presupposes that one is taking it up not only with one’s head, but in such a way that “in everything that it expresses it gives us enthusiasm, and lives in us in such a way that it finds the transition from nervous system to blood system” (GA 169, 13.6.1916). Such is the twofold task confronting anyone who wishes to grasp Anthroposophy, to receive it into himself, and to work on with its content in a fruitful way: He must be able to think intellectually, actively, in order then to rise above the mere faculty of understanding and bring his whole being into activity.

We are endeavouring with the entire content of our research to underline the necessity of this task and to warn the reader against the intention, in his dealings with spiritual science, to grasp its method with the understanding alone, to ‘adapt’ to it the methods of abstract-logical, linguistic etc. manipulations (this also happens in the chance, unsystematic, chaotic accumulations of thoughts which, especially in the last ten to fifteen years, have to an increasing degree inflated so-called Anthroposophical secondary literature).

Thus it is quite clear that Anthroposophy cannot be ‘just theory’. It must form the immediate life of the soul. But what can contribute to this to a greater degree than the (full)filling of the thinking – and therefore unavoidably theorizing – consciousness with ideal real being? If we proceed in this way, we alter the nature of consciousness. A first step in this direction must already be taken on the level of learning about Anthroposophy; at a certain point we will show why it is senseless merely to reflect its ideas. But it would not be right suddenly and ‘in one go’ to do without reflection. When one has adequately grasped the central core of the task one must, by dint of strenuous effort, create within oneself the conditions that are necessary for a new and different form of cognition. Ideas are subject to development. Anyone who has no relation to the experiencing of ideas as they move autonomously on the abstract level will never find a right relation to their real being, either. In this sense we should try to grasp from the very beginning a very simple fact: we are investigating the methodology of spiritual science, and this can, so it follows, be nothing other than science. Indeed, it is specific in all its parts and its essential nature, but at the same time it cannot develop its own doctrine of evolution, for example, if it ignores the theory of development put forward by Darwin and Haeckel; it cannot set up its theory of knowledge outside the stream of the history of philosophy. But its evolutionism stands on a level that is qualitatively different from that of natural science, because it embraces sensible-supersensible reality. In Anthroposophy, philosophy undergoes a profound metamorphosis when the thinking consciousness itself is subject to metamorphosis. Rudolf Steiner says: “.... The age of philosophy has been fulfilled.” “The only thing that philosophy can do today is to save that in the human being which the seer must remember at the first stage of his development, to rescue the ‘I’, the self-consciousness. This is what philosophy will need to have grasped.*  Try, therefore, to understand from this standpoint my ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’, where a connection is made to that which must lead philosophical consciousness over into the time that is now approaching, the time in which there must again enter into the development of humanity that which can be a more exact reflection of the higher (the Divine – G.A.B.) Trinity than philosophy, the time when
Theo-Sophy must enter into human development” (GA 137, 12.6.1912).

* This is something that the creators of the philosophical directions related to Anthroposophy were able to understand.
_______

Anthroposophy also has access to the view of nature which Rudolf Steiner closely connected in his methodology with this philosophy that is descended from Theosophy, whereby it reaches out into the dimensions of pure spirit.

Another kind of misunderstanding we encounter in the realizing of our intention lies in the way everything that has a connection to esotericism, to occultism, is lumped together indiscriminately. It has become normal practice to regard any mention of occultism in scientific circles as a mark of ‘bad taste’ and in religious circles as ‘Satanism’. And one will have to admit that in very many cases there are good reasons for such a judgement. For this reason it is extremely difficult to defend the right of true esotericism, which has, quite clearly, nourished human culture directly or indirectly in all epochs, which was sometimes acknowledged and sometimes not, but was nevertheless a main component of it. For centuries this was simply not noticed – but this was due solely to the immaturity of human self-consciousness. Those who had attained maturity understood: What is the sense in telling a small child the composition of the air it breathes? And so in these conditions esotericism came to expression in the form of cults, religious beliefs, art and not as systems of knowledge.

For a humanity that has reached maturity the situation is quite different. Here it is necessary to explain, above all, in what way the developments that have been achieved by the human being on the external, exoteric path stand in harmony with those esoteric, i.e. purely spiritual and in no way abstract or dark sources that nourish him. They were kept secret from the childish understanding of man (this is why they are esoteric), but now the time has come for the hidden to be revealed, as we are told in the Gospel.

It is precisely in this sense that Anthroposophy is, inclusive of its philosophical and Goetheanistic foundation, an esoteric teaching. And this is its main peculiarity, distinguishing it from other, mostly popularized, esoteric directions and streams in which the needs of thinking consciousness are ignored. In the conception that prevails today in the consciousness of many people, esotericism is associated with a certain stage in the past when human beings were mainly involved in the practice of magic, and miracle-workers satisfied all their needs, even those of everyday existence. Then they were seized with enthusiasm for philosophy – we don’t really know why – and for the external sciences, and forgot about the magic, grew superficial and led civilization up a blind alley. But now the time has come to reawaken the old capacities and return to the wonder-workings of the past; not to think about the future, but only be aware of it, as it is fully predetermined by the monotonously repetitive contraction and expansion of the universe; develop clairvoyance rather than a theory of knowledge, telekinesis rather than means of transport etc.

In view of the fact that an ideology of this sort repels many people, its supporters try occasionally to march in time with the scientific spirit of the epoch, but nothing aside from curiosities results from their efforts. Here is a concrete example:

After a long search in the libraries we managed to unearth a book on the methodology of occultism. In it the attempt is made to arrange into a kind of system the stock formulations and terms used by today’s leading occultists (they ought rather to be called parapsychologists or – as the Russians say – ‘extrasensists’), when confronted with the incredulity of thinking people regarding their occult practices. The book is called ‘The Methodology of Yoga’ and appeared in St. Petersburg in 1992. At the very beginning the reader (regardless of his level of preparation) is asked to carry out a meditative exercise. Then he is served up with definitions of concepts such as ‘God’ and ‘evolution’. They are quite intelligently formulated, but from the standpoint of pure mysticism and drawing upon the traditions of antiquity which arose at a time when thinking itself was pictorial and thus fundamentally different from that of today, and when the consciousness of human beings was a group-consciousness and for this reason half clairvoyant. The authors simply do not understand the old spirituality; for this they are rooted too deeply in today’s materialistic, scientific conceptions. Through extrapolating them in a quite elementary way onto the wisdom of the ancients, they give it a materialistic interpretation. This, for example, is their description of the “evolution” of the Purusha: “It begins with the formation of the first elements of diffuse energy on the crystal lattice of the minerals of the planets”. The evolution of God “takes place in cycles, called pulsations in modern astronomy”. Consciousness, in the view of the authors, is “a lump of energy that is conscious of itself”; the human being can “increase” the “mass” of his consciousness, he can “crystallize consciousness”. An attempt is also made to pander to Christianity: “.... the teachings of Jesus Christ and Krishna coincide .... in the methodology of spiritual progression”. But in addition to this the book offers a haphazard, eclectic mixture of “laws” and occult manipulations which have been described by Castañeda, Gurdieff and others. To analyze all this has no sense whatever, and we are willing to concur with a responsible scientist who says he wishes to have nothing to do with such occultism and prefers to remain within the science of the materialists.

In order to make clear the difference between Anthroposophy and all such forms of esotericism, a number of really complex discussions are necessary, which we will enter into in the pages that follow. As their point of departure it must be borne in mind that Anthroposophy as spiritual science maintains consistently the position of evolutionism. This is one of its central characteristics. This needs to be recognized, because in the question of evolutionism humanity is divided into two camps. In the one where religious consciousness plays the main part, the evolution of the world and man is rejected. For example, Christian theology claims that world and man were created in an instant by the Creator in the form in which they exist today. According to this doctrine there is no evolution of species. The world will one day be suddenly transformed in its entirety, and on a purely moral level. One should of course not imagine that the scholars who represent this world-view only have naïve, mythical conceptions. How can one reconcile the process of universal entropy with the idea of continuing development? – asks today’s scientifically trained Catholic or Protestant theologian.

In the rest of humanity there prevails a scientific world-view. Here evolutionism is acknowledged, but it is based only on natural laws, those of natural selection and the struggle for existence. It contains no moral principle.

The evolutionism of Anthroposophy is of a different kind, but it pays the evolutionary theory of Darwin and Haeckel the tribute it deserves – for some of its methodological principles, the manner of observation and finally its central idea of the natural emergence of the species. Recently something paradoxical arose in the relation between Anthroposophy and Darwinism. Right at the end of the 20th century a movement began to grow in strength throughout the world (due to global shifts in international politics), which utterly rejected the Darwinist theory. The sect of neo-creationists in the U.S.A., for example, succeeded in banning it from the teaching syllabus in a number of schools. It is conceivable that, at some point, Anthroposophy, against which Darwinism is waging a long-term battle, will be its only defender (within certain limits, of course).

The evolutionism of Anthroposophy reconciles the positions of both camps into which the world is divided: that of the opponents and that of the advocates of the doctrine of evolution. For their polarization is a reflection of the dualism of matter and spirit, which philosophy was hoping to overcome. Anthroposophy as a monistic way of thinking was able also in its ontology to lead evolutionistic dualism to a synthesis. To the question: How did it succeed in doing this? we will attempt to give an answer in the course of the discussions to follow. But first we will examine the views of two Russian philosophers who stand remark- ably close to the evolutionism of Anthroposophical teaching. The first of these two views was supported by Nikolai Losky, who saw the ultimate ground of evolution “not in the lowest forces of nature, but in God and in the normative Divine ideas”, which, according to Losky, “are inherent in all that is substantially creative”. In this, Losky is aligning himself with the evolutionist standpoint of Vladimir Soloviev, which is put forward by him in his essay ‘The Justification of the Good’ and is expressed as follows: “The order of that which is, is not the same as the order of the world of appearance.... The conditions for appearance stem from the natural evolution of nature; that which manifests in the world of appearance stems from God.”77)

2. The System-Objects and their Archetypal Phenomena

The success of physics in its research into the structure of the atom exposed natural science to the danger of losing itself in a multiplicity of structural elements of the material world, of absolutizing multiplicity and thereby atomizing to a hopeless degree the overall picture of the world. As a natural reaction to this alternative in the development of science there arose the endeavour to introduce into methodology the postulate – put forward as no more than a logical conclusion – that the ultimate expression of any multiplicity whatever proves to be a unity, without first waiting for the necessary empirical data.

It was out of the wish to bring to an end the ‘elementarism of multiplicity’ that L. Bertalanffy turned to the principle of ‘organism’ or ‘system’. He gave the first definition of the system as a totality of the elements which are held together by inner connections and stand in a reciprocal relation to the surroundings. Soon this definition was extended to include the concept of ‘super-summativity’ as a decisive factor in the emphasis placed on the system-objects; and then the existence of a mutual relation between the researcher and the researched system was acknowledged, though this factor was not given the attention it deserves. It was not grasped in the necessary way, either on the level of general methodology or from the position of systems theory. Then in practice the following happened: On the one hand it became apparent that such characteristics, ‘components’ of the system-objects, ‘operate’ on the level of the mathematized theory of systems, with no involvement of the consciousness of the researcher. If one recognizes, here also, that “the law of the holistic totality manifests within the system in the emergence of integrative qualities which are not intrinsic to the components that constitute it”78), one thereby calmly passes over an element that is, in the last resort, metaphysical, by learning to formalize the “indeterminacies”.

On the other hand the super-summative character of the systems, the discovery of the subjective factor in their structure, furtively shifted the science of nature and brought it into the proximity of parapsychology with its quantum empiricism of thinking. Systems theory thereby became the basis for the founding of a meta-theory of materialism. There is only one way out of the situation that has arisen: it consists in a reorientation of systems research towards personalistic empiricism, towards the Goetheanistic method of the observation of reality in its sensible-supersensible unity.

Goethe distinguished three methods of natural-scientific research, and they are all based on the differences in our perception of phenomena. The first is general empiricism, which does not move beyond the limits of what is immediately given. Here the researcher, as Rudolf Steiner says, is concerned only with the single objects of appearance. Science on this level does not have the right to leave the framework of the description and summing-up of single facts (see GA 1, p.187). Rightly considered, this corresponds to the level of surface S in Fig. 2.

The second method is rationalism. It does not limit itself to the description of the phenomena, but strives towards the uncovering of certain causes, whereby it sets up hypotheses and thus explains the phenomena. Here the understanding infers from the appearance the nature of the cause. Often these causes are not contained within the phenomena (indeterminacies). Then, so Goethe says, the arbitrariness of conjecture hastens to the aid of the researcher. For this reason it is not permissible to draw overhasty conclusions from one’s observations. If we work in this way, then we grasp in our spirit the connections, and in nature the single facts (elements); “the spirit strives towards the type or species, nature creates only individuals” (ibid., p.189).*  And therefore we have the right to conclude that the human being is not only the primary element of the system of cognition, but the principle of its super-summativity, its system-forming principle. Here, too, he is “the measure of all things”. In this way we overcome the metaphysics of materialism.

* Let us recall in passing: “The order of what is, is not the same as the or- der of phenomena” (V. Soloviev).
________

Goethe’s third method is explained by Rudolf Steiner as follows: “Because the objects of nature are separated in the realm of appearance, the synthesizing power of the spirit is required, to show their inner unity. Because the unity of the understanding is, in itself, empty, it has to fill itself with the objects of nature” (ibid., p.190). Thus the phenomenon and pure spirit combine to form one system, a unity. The advocate of subtle abstract schemes may well object to what we have said: Well now, the whole thing looks so simple! The most complex problems of refined empirical research, and for their solution you offer a methodological truism! – But Goethe’s method also contains complexities, very big ones in fact; this learned man had the ability to speak simply about difficult things. And besides, his simplicity also needed a commentator of genius to make it accessible to us. Rudolf Steiner says: “Development consists in the process whereby a unity evolves further (through creation of a form – G.A.B.), and the forms which it thus assumes arise as something quite new. This is because these forms do not belong to the unitary process of development, but to the means which it uses in order to manifest itself. The developmental forms must all be capable of explanation in ideal terms from the unity, even though they do not proceed from it on the real level. That Goethe was thinking only of this fact of their ‘being contained’ in an ideal sense is proved, for example, by his statement that “these diverse parts are conceived as having arisen out of an ideal archetypal body and to have unfolded step by step in different formative stages....” (GA 30, p.283). We believe that in this thought of Rudolf Steiner’s, access to the systems theory is opened up to spiritual science. It shows how, when the system-objects are brought into focus, the determining element proves to be what Goethe called the archetypal phenomenon. Its existence is at once ideal and real. It also contains within itself the principle of the autonomous movement of the system.

Our mode of thinking can also have the character of a system or, more precisely, it must have, if the researcher is to be in a position to do research into the system-objects. We must therefore reject the idea that it is possible from the positions of materialism or positivism to uncover the true potential contained within the systems method of cognition.

In his thinking Goethe was ‘system’-atic in the fullest sense of the word. In his characterization of Goethe, Rudolf Steiner says that “his concepts were in constant metamorphosis, and thus they were .... inwardly adapted to the process (of development – G.A.B.) undergone by plant nature itself” (GA 78, p.30); it was the same with animal nature, in fact with nature in all its manifestations. This means that Goethe’s thinking worked according to the laws of the living, organic world, and consequently his unity stood higher than that of the purely logical. It remained so when he turned to the study of inorganic nature. It is extremely important to understand the genesis of this thinking and its non-formal logic. The living, Divine idea created the hierarchy of the kingdoms of nature. They are its manifestations. The task of the scientist is to distill out its fundamental idea from the chaos of chance, secondary phenomena. Rudolf Steiner says in one of his statements on methodology: “The way in which the concept (idea) comes to living expression in the sense-world is that which underlies the differences between the kingdoms of nature. If the real, sense-perceptible entity only attains a form of existence which lies completely outside the concept and is only governed, in the changes it undergoes, by the concept as a law, then we call this entity inorganic. Everything that happens to such an entity is attributable to the influence of another; and the way in which the two work upon each other can be explained by means of a law that lies outside them.” In organic nature that which is graspable in conceptual form stands as sense-perceptible unity before the human being. Here “the concept ....” appears, “not outside the senseperceptible manifoldness as a law, but within it as a principle. The concept underlies it as a pervading element, no longer as something perceptible to the senses.” When it “appears in the form of concept itself, then it comes to expression as consciousness; here, at last, that comes to manifestation which at the lower levels is only present in its essential nature. Here, the concept itself becomes an object of perception.... Natural law, type, concept are the three forms in which the ideal comes to expression. The law of nature is abstract, standing above the manifoldness of the sense-world; it governs the science of inorganic nature. Here, idea and reality are completely separate from one another. The type unites both in a single entity .... In human consciousness the concept itself is perceptible. Beholding and idea form an identity” (GA 1, p.282 ff.).

In this way the entire sense-perceptible world represents a hierarchy of the stages of incarnation of the Divine Idea, the archetypal Idea, which comes to itself in the sphere of ‘otherness’. Phenomenologically, these stages are the hierarchy of system-objects which proceeds from the Idea; first the natural system-objects and then those for which the human ‘I’ can act as mediator in their process of becoming. In them the idea comes to expression as a necessary connection between the phenomena – but we should note here: not as the connections as such, but as their necessary unity and wholeness. Goethe called them an ‘archetypal phenomenon’ or a ‘fundamental fact’. In the manifoldness of experience the archetypal phenomenon endures as its integral and unchangeable part. This constitutes “the higher experience within experience” (GA 2, p.94). Goethe ordered the archetypal phenomenon according to the ascending modes of its working: “chance – mechanical – physical – chemical – organic – psychical – ethical – religious – genius”.*  These are essentially nothing other than the stages of system-formation, on which the archetypal phenomenon reveals itself as a system-building principle in the evolutionary conditions to which it is subject.

* See Rudolf Steiner, ‘Goethe’s World Conception’ (GA 6, p.79 ff, and GA 1, p.137).
_________

Knowledge of the archetypal phenomenon cannot be acquired if one only uses the inductive method. By means of the latter all that one can do is to convince oneself that it is genuine once it has been discovered; it reveals itself to the ‘spiritual eye’ (Goethe), to intellectual beholding, which has the capacity to carry out sense observations within the sphere of the ‘ur’-phenomenal. Rudolf Steiner says of Goethe, that he had no inclination to derive the complex (i.e. that in which the idea of nature is most clearly revealed) from the simple; he wanted “at a single glance to survey” this complexity “as an actively working whole .... and then to explain the simple and imperfect phenomenon as a one-sided formation of the composite and perfect .... The opposite procedure is followed by the natural scientists who regard the perfect form as no more than a mechanical sum of the simple processes. They start from this simple phenomenon and derive the perfected form from it” (GA 6, p.106). We therefore ask again: How can the materialist find access to the system-object? For him it remains a ‘thing-in-itself’. In one of his lectures Rudolf Steiner addresses this question directly: “In a wonderful way, Goethe experienced pure beholding which, in contrast to materialism, he spoke of as the archetypal phenomenon .... It is the pure beholding of reality....” (GA 171, 17.9.1916).

The mystery of the system-object is the mystery of life. It represents a self-organizing totality. For this reason it is, as Nikolai Losky states, absurd to seek the principle of its system nature within the elements and combinations of elements. This principle is the living idea. It is the universal principle of the organism, which embraces all its particular forms. As Rudolf Steiner explained, Goethe also refers to it as the ‘type’: “The type plays in the organic world the same role as the natural law in the inorganic. Just as the latter enables us to recognize each individual occurrence as a member of a larger totality, so the type enables us to see the single organism as a special modification of the archetypal form” (GA 2, p.104 f.), of the archetypal phenomenon. Law and type are the two successive stages in the revelation of the archetypal phenomenon.

The type culminates in the single entity and identifies with it, but does not formally determine it in the manner of a law. “Each single organism is the manifestation of the type in a particular form (thus it is the system-forming principle of the organism – G.A.B.). It is an individuality (emphasis G.A.B.), which regulates and determines itself from a centre outwards. It is a self-contained totality or wholeness ....” (ibid., p.113).

If we attempt to find analogous characteristics in the inorganic system-object, it grows to the full extent of the cosmos. This means that in inorganic nature there is only one true system-object, and this proves to be the entire material universe. Also in its physical sense-appearance it possesses a type of its own; it is therefore a living totality. All its individual parts, including the planetary system, are sub-systems within the universal system and are ultimately determined by it. Let us take by way of example the law of attraction and repulsion. It is universal by nature. In order to grasp its nature (not its working) one must try to ‘behold’ the entire universe in its macro-and microcosmic manifestations, to filter out all secondary and chance phenomena and rise to its spiritual, primordial foundation.

The type can be recognized by means of the comparison of each of the forms of its manifestation on different stages of the organic – and here we may add, also of the social and human-spiritual world – with itself. It is no exaggeration to say that in the broad spectrum of the sciences, from comparative botany (which Goethe engaged in) to comparative philology, we have to do with one and the same essential type (as ‘I’). Here, of course, we do not mean the usual comparative method according to which the forms are merely compared and contrasted with one another (this is an application of the inductive method, of ‘general empiricism’, of ‘rationalism’). In Goetheanism the forms are compared with the type, with their ‘inner unity’ or with the system-forming principle, which works within a given category of systems, but also extends beyond their limits. In the final analysis we have to do, also in this part of general scientific methodology, with a world-whole which, in its forms, is hierarchical and personalistic.

The type is something flowing and changeable. Goethe called it the true Proteus. From it can “be derived all special kinds and species which can be regarded as sub-types, specialized types [sub-systems]” (ibid., p.103). This is the idea of the organism, the “law that reveals itself in the organism, the animal-nature in the animal*,  the life that unfolds its form from within itself, and has the strength and capacity, through the potential lying within it, to develop itself in manifold outer forms (kinds, species)” (GA 1, p.30). The idea, which corresponds fully to the organic, is an entelechy.

* And also the universal plant in the special plant (GA 2, p.203). 92
_________

“But the idea of the organism is active and working in the organism as an entelechy; in the form that is taken hold of by our reason it is simply the essential being of the entelechy itself. It does not sum up experience; it brings into being that which is accessible to our experience” (ibid., p.85).

The entelechy itself – or the archetypal phenomenon as ‘type’ – does not reveal itself in the world directly. It “arises in our inner being as idea when we consider the characteristics shared in common by the living entities” (GA 30, p.75), i.e. the holistic objects, the unities. And it arises in the power of beholding, i.e. in a spirit organized in a particular way, with the capacity to think ‘system’-atically or, to use Rudolf Steiner’s term, morphologically. We define such a spirit as the second entelechy. It is the ‘power of judgement in beholding’. The archetypal phenomena of things are revealed to it, as it is itself also an archetypal phenomenon of the individual human being, who represents a system with its own primary phenomenon type. It is the concept ‘free spirit’ and we are led to it by the ‘Philosophy of Freedom’.

These are, so to speak the fundamentals of spiritual-scientific ‘systems theory’ in its narrowest interpretation. It is one of the basic components of Anthroposophical methodology.

To guide the cognitive process Anthroposophically means to make some kind of holistic totality into its object, or at least to indicate that system-object of which this or that object (problem) of cognition forms a part and by which it is determined. The discovery of the system-object is bound up with the search for its system-forming principle, which is also real in an ontological sense – i.e. it has existence and is somehow personified. Simply stated: the system-forming principle is always the ‘I’. For this reason Anthroposophy is, in the last resort, the teaching of the ‘I’-beings, their genesis, hierarchy, phenomenology etc.

The systems researched into by Anthroposophy can be classified as follows: immanent, which bear the ‘I’-principle within themselves (such systems are the human being, the species of organic nature etc.), and transcendent, whose ‘I’-principle organizes them from without (of this kind are administrative, mechanical, electronic-cybernetic systems etc.). The systems of knowledge are always immanent and metaphysical. The overcoming of dualism is dependent upon an understanding of this fact. Its reality is of a sensible-supersensible nature.

If one is to solve the riddle of the system-nature of human consciousness without contradiction and in unity with the world-whole, theory of knowledge in Anthroposophy must, from a certain stage onwards, advance to spiritual cognition. Then the system-objects can be sub-divided into natural, supernatural and mixed. This classification enables one to approach cognitively the Divine and its relation to the created world. Natural-scientific conceptions do not need to be abandoned here; they simply receive a broader interpretation, but on a basis that is in entire conformity with law. Thus the well-known biogenetic law of the unity of phylo and ontogenesis is observed, in spiritual science, in its working in the cultural-historical process and in psychogenesis. Very important results achieved here have been incorporated, as a solid component, into the system of pedagogy developed on an Anthroposophical basis.

The systems method in research into the human soul as an entelechy has made it possible in Anthroposophy for psychology to be raised to a true psychosophy and for the entire hierarchy of soul-forms to be discovered; from the ‘ur’-phenomenal to the logical and then to the super-individual, the hierarchies of the forms of being and of the consciousness of the second entelechy. Thus, in Anthroposophy, a well-ordered system of the reciprocal relations of world-evolution with human evolution is set up, in which the Darwinian and Haeckelian doctrine of the evolution of species is only a fragment, albeit a valuable one on the methodological level.

In the methodology of Anthroposophy mathematical methods of systems research are also applied, but they undergo changes of special importance. External science is working intensively at the question how general systems theory, “the new paradigm in science” (Bertalanffy) can be brought into a mutual relation with so-called number theory. Scientific-technical progress is advanced considerably by this work, but the human being becomes more and more alienated from science. For Anthroposophy this path of research is, of course, not acceptable. Its methodology contains a strong element of numerical and also symbolic principles of cognition, but it sees in them manifestations of the essential being of holistic objects, systems. For it, the symbols are ‘Sinnbilder’ (meaning-filled pictures) of supersensible reality. Like numbers, they too serve as a form of cognition, one that is more effective than philosophical reflection. This is in no way abstract symbolism or nominalistic operationalism of numerology. Thanks to this form of thinking, we have the rarely-given opportunity to enter into contact with the sacred process of Divine creative activity.

Ultimately speaking, this is the entire method of cognition. It was applied extensively in the ancient Pythagorean school, where an original system of initiation was built up on this basis. Its universality was such that Plato, who stood in a close relation to it, said: God geometrizes. Mathematics proves in its essential nature to be an esoteric science, but in the history of the development of the sciences it is a timeless phenomenon. In neo-Kantian logic one took still further the definition of the essential nature of mathematics. Here, mathematics is understood to be a special form of intellectual construction which is believed to have no correspondence either in physical or in ideal existence. But in our opinion this is already an exaggeration.

The Pythagorean relation to the essence of number can be traced throughout the entire history of science. Thus Galileo stated that he felt remarkably close to the thoughts of Plato, according to whom an understanding of the nature of number means a reaching through to the Divine. In the view of Descartes one could substitute the word ‘God’ with the expression ‘mathematical order of the world’. He was thus repeating the motto of the Gnostics: “Understand mathesis, and you will understand God.” Kepler wrote in a letter to Michael Mestlin (on 19th April 1597): “Reason grasps this thing or that the more correctly, the closer it comes to pure quantity – the source from which it flows.”

In a remarkable way Rudolf Steiner unlocked the meaning (largely forgotten in the course of the centuries) which the Pythagoreans attached to their experience and their conception of numbers and symbols. In addition he enriched them with something new; he filled what over the course of time had grown abstract, lifeless and had really become an empty ‘intellectual construction’, with life and with real content. The significance of what Rudolf Steiner accomplished thus was enormous indeed, since “out of forms, numbers, lines – measure, number and weight, so one says in occultism – the human being was once created by the Gods” (GA 266/1, p.381). Our ability to count is intimately connected with the fact that “we are ourselves counted; we have been counted from out of the being of the world, and ordered in accordance with number. Number is inborn in us, woven into us by the world-whole” (GA 204, 23.4.1921).

If we wish to think spiritually and realistically, then the symbol has a significance related to that of number. In one of his lectures, Rudolf Steiner asks: Why is it necessary to think in symbols? and gives the following answer: “So that one’s inner production is activated” (B. 22, p.11).

The Anthroposophical path of knowledge leads the human being to the threshold of the supersensible world. In order to cross it, it is absolutely necessary to change the form of one’s consciousness. Then the human being will live in two worlds simultaneously: the sense-world and the supersensible world, and the cultural-historical process which guides him to this task will rise to a higher spiritual level. It is necessary to change one’s consciousness without losing the capacities one has already acquired. But they alone are not sufficient. The special forms of thinking with the aid of symbols and numbers also do not help one further if one’s thinking remains on the level of the mere understanding. “Most people imagine the following,” says Rudolf Steiner. “When you have concepts, you make pictures, and then you clothe these in symbolism. But this is always wooden symbolism”.... In reality you proceed, at a certain stage, from the idea; and then “the picture arises in a living way as something true and original” (GA 342, 12.6.1921). Sooner or later it is revealed to the faculty of supersensible vision – consciousness rises to the imaginative level, where ideas are not thought through, but are perceived.

As consciousness moves towards a form of this kind, the entire human being must be engaged, not just the head. Living feeling, above all, must be united with thinking, especially with thinking in ‘beholding’. And here, too, a right use of the symbol will help us, because “the symbol is the means whereby we can find the way to human hearts and awaken them to the supersensible”. But in this case “we must live in the symbol” (GA 343, p.120). A science of this kind is imbued with truth – by virtue of the fact that it really enhances the value of human existence and endows human consciousness with existence. Then ‘I’- consciousness becomes the true ‘I’ of the human being. The entire system nature of his consciousness-being changes its character. It frees itself of everything of a conditional, temporal, chance nature. What was formerly cognition now becomes realization, self-realization.

The principle of number plays an important auxiliary role here. It extends the boundaries of the dialectical, and brings this into connection with the real, cosmic interrelations and laws. Here we will look ahead a little to a later stage in our discussion and give an example to show how this is meant: If you take the number-sequence from 1 to 13, then the number one in the sequence is the absolute whole, the number two is the structure of the whole. The number three fits the structure of the two into the system. This is a dialectical triad. In the four we again have a structure before us; in the five this is transformed into a system – it is microcosm. Seven is the principle of development, viewed as a system; it leads to a unity, or cancels the antithesis of three and three, which are, at bottom, impulses of ascent and descent, of materialization and spiritualization. Eight raises the seven to the octave etc.

3. The Categories of Development

Of the phenomena in which the process of development of the world and man comes to expression, and on the basis of which new forms of the being of Divine world-consciousness arise, Rudolf Steiner points to three most important ones and says of them the following: “Evolution, involution, and creation out of nothing, this is what we must consider if we wish to form a conception of the full majesty and greatness of human development” (GA 107, 17.6.1909). If there were merely evolution and involution and no creation out of nothing there would be no more than a process of repetition such as we find, for example, in the plant kingdom. Here we encounter the first fundamental difference between the spiritual-scientific teaching of evolution and that of Darwin and Haeckel. “As development proceeds,” says Rudolf Steiner, “even the concept of development itself develops further” (GA 324a, 21.4.1909). For this reason, so we would mention in parenthesis, anyone who judges Anthroposophy according to its view of the nature of development – whether ‘mystical’, ‘fantastical’ or ‘heretical’ – ought first to take the trouble to bring his concepts into correspondence with it.

Any phenomenon whatsoever can only be seen in the right light if one grasps not merely what evolves, but also what involutes or ‘involves’. Rudolf Steiner gives us the following definition: “Involution is a suctional drawing inwards, evolution is a giving outwards. All world-conditions alternate between these two” (GA 93, 23.12.1904). In another place, Rudolf Steiner expresses it as follows: “Evolution is expansion of the spirit in the external realm of matter. Involution is contraction of the spirit in the inner realm of soul. No evolution is possible without a corresponding involution taking place at the same time”, and vice-versa (GA 265, p.17). The relation between God and man which holds sway in the world is subject to the working of this law, but also all processes of soul-spiritual ontogenesis on the micro-level: upbringing, education etc. The cycles of the becoming of world and man represent double spirals (comparable to spiral nebula), where every ‘winding inwards’ is necessarily transformed into an unwinding. For this reason “the human being needs to be a vortex movement” (ibid., p.18). The system of education and training applied in Waldorf pedagogy, the foundation of which was created by Rudolf Steiner, is built up on this principle. If it were to be observed in all other social connections, this would lead to a significant healing process.

But does it make sense in the light of all we have said, to speak of a dialectic of development? – The answer is quite definitely: yes. For in Anthroposophical methodology we discover the true essence of the dialectical, its ‘thing-in-itself’. This is fruitful, but few people choose to engage in a cognitive act of this kind, because “everything that takes place in the sense of the vortex movement is magic” (ibid.). Yet all grounds for fear of the supersensible disappear when one begins to recognize reality as a structure which constitutes a totality in its sensible- supersensible substance.

The emanation of the spiritual substance of the higher Divine beings laid the foundation stone of our evolutionary cycle. In this process the object of Divine creation ‘involuted’. It received the higher emanations into itself and transformed them into immanent qualities. There was nothing of a formal nature in this reciprocal relation between Creator and created, nothing mechanical. In its final stage, the earthly phase, the evolutionary process descended to a cultural-historical level, where it raised itself above biological evolution and became soul-spiritual in nature. It ‘descended’ in its individualized spiritual being. The fruit of this sinking-rising movement was the birth of the individual human ‘I’. In it there emerges the prerogative of creative beings: the possibility of creation out of nothing, the creation of the new, thanks to which it treads the path of subjective evolution. This requires the human being to metamorphose the lower ‘I’ – the fruit of cultural-historical evolution – into the higher ‘I’; then this ‘I’ begins, in creative actions which spring from ideal love, in free deeds, to pour itself into the spheres of the spirit.

This activity must be accomplished on the lower level where an object-orientated consciousness prevails, but in accordance with the laws of the higher levels, and it ‘swings itself up’ to the existence of the loftiest beings, the Divine Hierarchies. The beginning of this activity is marked by the ‘power of judgement in beholding’ (anschauende Urteilskraft), which is therefore also an archetypal phenomenon. With the activity of ‘beholding thinking’ in its evoluting movement, the Hierarchies begin to involute, which means for the human being – to express it in religious terms – to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. And entry here is possible for the human being in no other way. This kingdom is the realm of existent being (das seiende Sein), and only what is of like nature can unite with it.

Such is the mystery – not the theory – of development. The act of Divine creation was, in its very nature, a free sacrifice. Through evolution, the sacrifice sank deeper and deeper, culminating in the immanent laws of nature, which in the human being turned into an antithesis to God, into nothingness, and led the human being into the Fall into sin. In the act of his final, great sacrifice, the Divine identified with the ‘nothing’ of being-in-otherness (Anderssein) and thereby laid the foundation-stone for the return of created being to its primal source; not, however, through the elimination of ‘being-in-otherness’, but through its further evolution within the system of the human ‘I’. If one does not let oneself be hypnotized by the dogmas of a religious faith (faith is not identical with the dogmas; understanding only strengthens and confirms it), no particular effort is required to grasp the following: the naïve conception of original sin supposedly committed by an already thinking human being, and of the future direct ascent of the earthly human being into Heaven – just as he was after the expulsion from Paradise (and perhaps even before), only morally improved (repentant) – means nothing other than a disparagement of the Godhead. In reality it pleases God that man in his own human works should experience the presence of the creative Divine will, which leads him by way of evolution back to Himself, when the individual ‘I’ in him makes the transition from involution to individual evolution.

This transition is made possible for the human being only in a series of incarnations, as the result of intensive spiritual, cultural work. Rudolf Steiner uses various means to make its nature understandable. In one of his lectures he says, for example, that if you take Greek sculpture you have to do with an involution of colour and an evolution of form: “If we allow painting to develop out of sculpture, then we have form in involution, colour in evolution.” We see something similar in Italian painting, beginning with Cimabue. Somewhat later, in the 15th and 16th centuries, the epoch of the triumph of rationalism and scientific knowledge begins. In Michelangelo their impulses are still engaged in a process of inner becoming, in involution, while, in contrast to this, colour and sculptural form are undergoing a colossal evolution. In Leonardo both processes are visible simultaneously. Thereafter, science plays the leading role. Michelangelo resurrected at a later time would have become Galileo, says Rudolf Steiner. The intellect goes through an evolution. Parallel with this, human wisdom is involuted. It “involutes itself in poetry. Poetry becomes a preserver of all that has to do with wisdom” (ibid.).

The human being is initiated, not into theory, but into poetry. The most striking example is Goethe with his poetic science. Here, thinking further in the spirit of Rudolf Steiner’s statements, one can say that, had Leonardo resurrected he would, given the strength of soul required for this, have become Goethe, and Dante might well have become Michelangelo.

In the religious consciousness the first stage of objective world evolution, in the course of which the human being began to undergo his transformation from its object to its subject, was reflected in pictorial form as the story of the temptation of the ancestors of the human race in Paradise and the expulsion from thence onto the Earth. After this, thinking consciousness began to emerge in the human being, and by this was determined the specific character of the path of the evolution of species subsequently followed by him, at the end of which he was transformed into rational (sapiens) man. As such he developed within himself an individual soul, the bearer of the ‘I’-consciousness, and for this reason he is obliged to wage an increasingly difficult struggle with the immanentism of nature both within and outside his own being, a struggle for the transformation of the involution of the world-process taking place within him, into an ‘I’-evolution of the individual spirit. In pictorial form it is represented in the shape of the battle of St. George with the dragon; on a cosmic scale it is waged by the Archangel Michael with the Luciferic-Ahrimanic dragon. The dramatic swings in the battle are connected in the most immediate way with the lot of mankind and also of the individual human being, a fact of which he must remain continually aware. The beginning of our entire evolutionary cycle, which consists of seven great stages (aeons) was initiated through an act of the highest Divine primordial revelation. This was clothed in the substance which had been offered as a sacrifice upon the altar of creation by an unusually lofty Hierarchy; in Christian esotericism its beings are called Thrones. In this way the very first act of creation already possessed inwardly an object and thus also its involution and the antithesis accompanying it. This is the initial principle of development. Rudolf Steiner says that “it is necessary, if things are to come to expression in reality in a living way, for them to be differentiated into polarities and for the polarities to unite again in order that life may progress” (GA 155, 24.5.1912). This law, which revealed itself already at the beginning of the evolutionary cycle, became the macro (cosmic) law of the relation between subject and object, and then passed over into the sphere of otherness-of-being (Anderssein), the physical plane, where it came to be recognized as “a fundamental law that everything has to work through antitheses, through polarities” (GA 165, 9.1.1916).

Thus the Anthroposophical doctrine of evolution reveals the ontological nature of dialectic. The object was imbued by the Creator with the capacity to acquire a content of its own, but at a certain stage of development this content places itself unavoidably over against the Creator.*  Rudolf Steiner throws further light on this process as follows: “The Gods set the world over against us, thus creating a duality: outside, objective reality; within us the life of soul.” The antithesis between these two parts of the world – the outer and the inner – arose without our active involvement: “We are [simply] present and are those beings who close, as it were, the single stream [of unitary being – G.A.B.] and thereby bring together the two poles. This happens within us, happens on the stage of our consciousness. Thus arises what for us is freedom. In this way we become independent beings” (GA 155, 24.5.1912). There are two things in this thought of Rudolf Steiner which we should look at more closely. First, it follows from it that the original relation between God and man becomes, under earthly conditions, an antithesis between the earthly human ‘I’ and the world; or, concretely speaking, the antithesis between concept and percept, which arises on the stage of our consciousness, where the path to freedom also begins, as shown in the ‘Philosophy of Freedom’. Secondly, in the measure in which he becomes a subject, the human being completes the transition to the evolution of the (lower) ‘I’, and this means that he transforms the objective evolution of the world, for which he constitutes an object, into his own, individual evolution, whereby he as subject begins to realize within himself something of a God-like nature – in his human hypostasis he acquires a real ‘I’, which is potentially identical with the World-‘I’.

* See Hegel’s ‘Science of Logic’ for a grandiose description of this process in the language of philosophy.
________

But first one must experience the birth of the ‘I’-consciousness, through which the foundation-stone is laid for the most important of all the metamorphoses which the human being must undergo through the entire evolutionary cycle. Its first act was the Fall into sin, which we should not reduce to a mere moment in time. Here we have to do with an extremely long process taking place under the influence and the working of spiritual beings, whose main function is to make involution possible in all its phases and on all its levels right down to the material plane.

So long as the human being is not ripe for his own individual evolution, he is forced to tread the path of the Fall into sin. This is one of the greatest metamorphoses on the path of a human being’s development into an individual ‘I’-being. To avoid it would only have been possible at the cost of renunciation of development – in other words, renunciation of existence. The Fall brought about in the human being the acquisition of the lower ‘I’. And as soon as he comes into possession of this, his position in the evolution of the world is once again radically changed: he sets about the task of overcoming the Fall into sin. But if he thinks and feels with his little ‘I’ and thereby remains completely within his material body, he starts to lose his own existence, to die in his nervous system; i.e. to continue on the path of the Fall. The small ‘I’ must become the starting-point for an impulse of will in the human being, to bring about a further metamorphosis constituting the beginning of individual evolution. Its beginning is bound up with a number of specific difficulties. This is due to the fact that those beings who helped man in the past in such a remarkable way and thanks to whom he accomplished the descent, underwent the ‘expulsion’ from spiritual heights to the material level of existence, drew down evolution as it were ‘from below’, while the Hierarchies ‘pushed’ it downwards, so to speak, from above. In this way the materialization of the spirit was accomplished. It led the human being to thinking consciousness. And now those beings who ‘pull’ evolution downwards strive also to pull the individual principle in man downwards, to bind him to the material world alone, to the experience of sense-perceptions, while pure thinking is left to wither in abstract emptiness of being. These beings understand the key position of man in the whole cycle of evolution and they hope, by taking control of his consciousness, to ‘involve’, as before, the entire future evolution of the world completely in the world of otherness-of-being, to make this process and this secondary world into the eternal antithesis of God, to make within it a kind of universe ‘in itself and for itself’, and to lead evolution through the three future zones back to its point of departure, ancient Saturn, whereby their secondary universe would become absolute.

The beings whose intention it is to lead the world away from its true path are of three kinds. In esotericism they are called Luciferic, Ahrimanic, Asuric. The entire visible universe is the outcome of their ‘involuting’ activity. They set themselves over against the emanations of the World-‘I’ like in-sucking ‘funnels’, corresponding to cosmic egocentrism. Egocentrism is also individual, but in relation to the Divine ‘I’ it is, let us say, counter-individual in that it fixes in one direction, whilst the true ‘I’, which is engaged in development, encompasses within itself the tri-unity of evolution, involution and creation out of nothing. The egocentric ‘I’ – and this, man also has, so long as he does not pass over from reflection to ‘beholding’ – represents in its relation to the Divine the second part of the Fichtean identity “I = not I”. The ‘I’ of Lucifer and Ahriman – beings who belong to the third Hierarchy, but have remained behind in their development – represent ultimately an individualized protest on a cosmic scale against the Divine ‘I’. We have here to do with a world-encompassing dialectic of will and quality which is at the same time the dialectic of good and evil, the ‘unutterable mystery of evil’ as it is called in occultism. Thanks to this dialectic there arose in the world a field of gigantic spiritual tension upon which human freedom comes into being.

Rudolf Steiner says that “in the spiritual world ... there are not things and facts, ... but only beings and the relations of beings to one another....” (GA 266/3, p.302). This means that everything real in the universe possesses an ‘I’: either directly or in the structure of other beings; in the second case the ‘I’ is called a group-‘I’. Every being in the universe has its own functional role; in the case of the lower beings this is fixed in one direction, hence they serve the good only under strictly defined conditions. Given a change in conditions, one and the same function begins to serve evil. In the distant past the functions of Lucifer and Ahriman were not evil in their effects upon man; on the contrary, they were essential for his development.* But when their role became dangerous for the human being, the Gods obliged him to undergo the process of ever-repeated passage through birth and death, whereby they periodically cancel the harmful activity of these beings.

* Relics of these conditions can be found today in the atavistic cults of Af- rican tribes and Siberian shamans, where moral categories are completely lacking.
________

In the Mysteries of antiquity, under whose guiding star all the ancient civilizations stood, the human beings under the guidance of initiates (Hierophants) – many of whom were truly great figures far in advance of the stage of development of humanity – learned to find the balance between the necessary and the dangerous roles of the Luciferic and then the Ahrimanic beings. To dispense with them completely is something the human being has not yet been permitted to do. It suffices here to refer to the great role played by Lucifer in the opening up of the human sense-organs to the outer world, whereby they contribute to our individualization; without the working of Lucifer creative enthusiasm would be impossible. Ahriman ‘involuted’ universal wisdom into the intellectual study of the natural world, without which the human being would not have been able to develop either the subtlety and precision of perceptions and observations that are essential for consciousness, or analytical thinking.

As the human being trod the path of earthly incarnations, he laid the first building-stone of his individual evolution, whereby his relation to the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings assumed an ever more antagonistic character. In the world surrounding the human being, in the kingdoms of nature, where a colossal process of world involution is still taking place, the ‘inwardization’ of the spirit in the realms of otherness-of-being, the role of Lucifer and Ahriman will remain indispensable for a long time to come, but not in the earlier sense, because since the Mystery of Golgotha Christ has also united with the kingdoms of nature in the sphere of otherness-of-being.

Lucifer and Ahriman are spirits who have remained behind with respect to the development of their ‘I’. The same is true of the Asuras. They therefore act in opposition to the human being, who is developing an individual soul, a spirit and an ‘I’. His maturing many-sidedness, multifunctionality, freedom makes him increasingly immune to their influence, and this compels him to wage a battle with them – for the sake of evolution. The fact that Lucifer once awakened passions and desires in the human astral body contributed to the liberating of this body from the astrality of the tribe. It now became the bearer of the ‘I’- consciousness and needed ennobling, and for this reason it became necessary to fight against its involutive, egocentric nature. Pictorially, but also imaginatively, the atavistic, Luciferized part of the human astral body appears in the form of a dragon with which the human being must fight a battle with the ‘sword’ or the ‘lance’ of consciousness and morality in order to tame and ennoble it. This is how the metamorphosis of the human soul takes place.

Ahriman also reveals himself to the human being as a dragon*, which strives to eternalize the conditioned character of human consciousness and cause him to remain for ever a “product of social conditions” (Karl Marx). Such is the being who, in the materialistic world-view, is enthroned as the great master of logic and dialectics.

* In Russian fairy tales we find him sometimes in the form of the obscurantist Kasche Bessmertniy.
________

One can thus say of the beings who oppose man, that they inspire an inappropriate process of involution. Therefore, in the human sphere as a whole, in the education of the human race, starting with the child in particular, it is important to think through, from all sides, the question of the harmony of the elements of determination from without and (self-)determination from within. The soul-spiritual ontogenesis of man can be subject to conscious guidance; in it one must create the basis for human freedom – for self-determination on the level of essential being.

The self-determined ‘I’ can only be dynamic. In cognition it must be able to unite the polarities behind which the substantial streams of world development stand. Such an activity has nothing to do with relativism, and is even diametrically opposed to it. The relatively true means that it is true in its own place, the place that has been strictly determined for it. The human being must be mobile, and capable of creativity, in the world of concepts. Instead of the ponderous doctrine of universal entropy he must include within the body of science the concept of creation out of nothing. But of course this requires that one first review all categories of development. Rudolf Steiner says: “In reality neither the old axiom of Parmenides asserting the fixity of being nor that of Heraclitus concerning becoming, is true. In the world there is being and becoming; it is merely that becoming is alive and being is always dead; and all being is a corpse of becoming” (24.7.1917). Thus the concept of development itself undergoes development. Being dies and is born anew after passing through a phase of non-being. This mode of becoming is bound up with the space-time continuum. In it is “the marriage of the past with the present .... a marriage of the cosmos with chaos” (GA 284, p.85). In the moment of the genesis of the earthly aeon, so we read in the Bible, “the earth was without form, and void”. This was the initial stage of chaos. And if, as Rudolf Steiner says, at a given time chaos had not been added as an ingredient to the cosmos, no process of becoming would have been possible in it. The human genius creates out of chaos, organizing and shaping it. Thus it contributes new impulses to life: “Through the process whereby all laws of causal action are thrown back into chaos, genius arises....” (ibid., p.86).

The inner representations which we receive out of the chaos are symbols and signs: “The imaginations work from out of the chaos upon the human soul. If they work in a living way, then the chaos is wedded to the human soul” (ibid., p.86). Then human freedom arises.

If we consider the ‘Philistine’ spirit of our epoch, which is always fanatical in its attitudes and falls from one extreme to the other – now unchecked in its revolutionary zeal, now caught in fundamentalistic conservatism – we must again emphasize that in Anthroposophy one cannot make an apologia for chaos in the trivial sense of the word. We are concerned with chaos as an element in the creation out of nothing. This is what the Greeks referred to when they spoke of the condition out of which the world arose. In the beginning was chaos, they said, then out of the chaos were born Gaia, Tartaros and Eros (according to Hesiod). And to this day the living is born out of the chaos which bears within it the fertilized egg-cells.

4. Consciousness, Being, Form

Evolution as a whole in the cycle (system) of the seven aeons passes through three stages (conditions): that of consciousness, that of life (being) and that of form. When we understand how this takes place we receive the key to resolving the riddle of the phenomenon of human thinking and being. The methodology of Anthroposophy organizes the process of attaining knowledge of the world and man in the unity of both of these, by way of the separation of the essential from the inessential, the primary from the secondary, instead of a disoriented differentiation of the sciences which is generally tied to the random nature of mere sense-experience. One can say that Nikolai Losky was treading the path of Anthroposophy through the very fact that he made theory of knowledge, ontology, cosmology and religion into structural components of his metaphysics; in this way metaphysics was given back its eternal right to be the science of sensible-supersensible reality. Admittedly, one part was lacking, which Losky was certainly contemplating, but concerning which external pressures beyond his control forced him to remain silent. This part is the immediate esoteric considerations, in the spirit of which all the parts – or subdivisions – of metaphysics enumerated above are examined by Losky in his research. Such considerations are contained in Anthroposophical methodology, and as a result the metaphysics of its doctrine of development possesses the necessary unity and fullness.

If we begin the doctrine of evolution with epistemology, we are following the best possible path, for the simple reason (this reason is of decisive importance for a number of different world-views) that we thereby avoid the hazard of transcendentalism in our inquiry into the sources of consciousness. Hegel made a highly significant contribution to this principle with his logical deduction of the categories. The aims and results of his theory of knowledge coincide in two ways with Anthroposophical methodology. Above all we should recognize the fact that the power of pure reflection in Hegel’s philosophy placed human thinking consciousness at the boundary between two worlds: the sense-world and the supersensible. Anthroposophy teaches how one can cross this boundary without at the same time breaking off one’s connection with the sphere of thinking consciousness: namely, by way of the special actualizing of thinking which moves in accordance with the dialectical method, whereby the metamorphosis of both can follow – that of the method and also of thinking itself – assuming that, albeit on a somewhat different level, we follow the definition given by Hegel to the dialectical method, namely, that it [is] the “immanent progression (beyond the isolated conceptual determination – G.A.B.), wherein the one-sidedness and limitation of these conceptual determinations of the mere understanding shows itself for what it is, namely, their negation”.79) Moving on a step further in this direction, we discover in ourselves the need to negate the understanding itself immanently, whereby its limitation is overcome and the door of ideal perception, of intuitive beholding, is opened up to the ‘I’. This step that we take extends into the future and also into the past – but here we enter already the sphere of Anthroposophical ontology, which researches the nature of the dialectical definitions of the understanding in terms of evolution, through revealing the character of the metamorphoses underlying them, which led in the past to world-wide processes of materialization, but are striving in the future towards processes of dematerialization, towards the spiritualizing of the material world. The ideas, as intelligible beings, descend in the evolutionary process to the level of the abstract and then strive back to their existent being (Seienden) in the sphere of the absolute, through which the dialectical form of their existence is also determined, their permanent cancellation or setting aside (Aufhebung).

A further aspect in which Hegel’s logic is in agreement with the Anthroposophical theory of knowledge lies in the fact that in the latter there is the striving to return to the initial point of departure; in the words of Hegel, to reach through to “the concept of its concept”, the beginning without presupposition, without which the question as to the freedom of the spirit remains empty, and with it the capacity of the human being for genuine creative activity. To relinquish all presuppositions and prejudices arising from existing presuppositions and prejudices, but also from inner representations or thinking, as one enters into scientific cognition – such a task, says Hegel, can only be fulfilled if one has resolved “to will to engage in pure thinking”.80) Hegel was not able to accomplish this task fully, but it is resolved in Rudolf Steiner’s works ‘Truth and Science’ and the ‘Philosophy of Freedom’.

The introduction of the principle of evolutionism into epistemology makes possible an effective extension of the limits and the scientific potential of both. It is the most convincing way of achieving the union of sensible and supersensible realities. The question as to the beginning of science, the beginning of philosophizing, is the question as to the beginning of the individual evolution of the human ‘I’, of its self- determination, its freedom. Central to this question is the finding of that element which, as a fruit of human spiritual phylogenesis, begins to free itself from it, to determine itself, to stand on its own feet and thereafter to determine this phylogenesis – in cognition to begin with, and later in being. It must only be remembered that we are dealing here not with the creation of the world, but with knowledge of it and, we would emphasize particularly, with the creation of the free subject. The capacities of the latter will be described at a later stage.

Rudolf Steiner explains that the element we are seeking arises at the moment when the human being begins ‘to think about thinking’. As a result of this there arises in the world that is given to us without our participation, a quite special given factor which we ourselves create. Rudolf Steiner describes it thus: “Everything else in our world-picture is of such a character that it must be given if we are to experience it; only in the case of concepts and ideas does the opposite also apply: we must first bring them into being if we are to experience them.” This factor is of primary significance on the level of the beginning of epistemology, because it reveals itself to us in its unity of form and content and is thus void of any predicate whatever. It is revealed to us also in ‘intellectual beholding’, which brings forth itself from out of itself. Thus “real consciousness” arises, which only exists “when it realizes itself” (Ph. of F.). The way in which the content of the category of consciousness is made manifest in Anthroposophy, facilitates the solution of the question as to its existence. The first form in which consciousness is realized as selfconsciousness in the ontogenesis of the human spirit is of a logical nature. Dialectics endows logic with an existence, which proves to be the autonomous movement of ideas. Here we must again turn to Hegel, as he, better than anyone else, illumined this reciprocal relationship in his dialectical deduction of the categories. The beginning of the theory of knowledge in Hegel differs from that in Rudolf Steiner, but what is important in Hegel is that in his logic method and content merge into one. Every part of his philosophical system is developed according to the method of the triads, whose elements are thesis, antithesis and synthesis. He sub-divides the whole of science dialectically into three parts: logic, the “science of the idea in itself and for itself”; natural philosophy, which is the “science of the idea in its otherness-of-being” (Anderssein); and the philosophy of spirit “as the idea which returns from its otherness-of-being, back into itself”.81) In this case science is transformed into an objective process of the self-revelation of the ideas (Panlogism), which only has to be given conceptual, philosophical expression by the human being. This is pure thinking, and is in itself almost ideal ‘beholding’.

The same three stages of the movement of the ideas as in Hegel*  are also distinguished by Rudolf Steiner in his work ‘Truth and Science’, but as he describes the phenomenology of the spirit as the phenomenology of the ‘I’ they are all, as it were, pressed together in a single moment of time**, whereby the idea in itself (an sich) and for itself, in the process of returning into itself (in sich) actively posits (setzt) the being of ‘I’- consciousness.

* One could also say: as in Thomas Aquinas, if one thinks of his doctrine of the universals.

** We accomplish something similar when we hear the sound of a word. Rudolf Steiner says in one of his lectures, that if we were to make the subconscious conscious in our sense of spoken sound, we would receive, not a sense- perception, but a judgement, a formation of the concept. If it were possible to draw together in time the tones in a melody and perceive the melody as a whole in a single moment, transfer its future into the present, then we would consciously make a harmony out of the melody. But what we are unable to do consciously with the musical tone, we do unconsciously in our sense of spoken sound. When we hear spoken sounds we transform through an unconscious activity the melody into a harmony (24.10.1909). This mystery has a relation to the riddles of the ‘Philosophy of Freedom’, a book written according to the laws of the sounding word; the latter determine in it the character of thinking, of the development of the ideas. Consequently, they have in the book their ‘melodies’ and ‘harmonies’, which one can raise into the light of consciousness. All this must be borne in mind from the beginning if we are to be able to experience with our sense of thought the character of the thinking in the ‘Philosophy of Freedom’, when we begin to regard the work as a collection of practical exercises which contribute to the development of the power of judgement in beholding.
________

In this way Hegel’s phenomenology of the thinking spirit and Fichte’s phenomenology of the ‘I’ gain in Rudolf Steiner the completion they seek, which is at the same time their new beginning, placed on a qualitatively different level. Here it is important to observe that, despite the unmistakable continuity in the development of thought in the above-mentioned philosophers, this is nevertheless secondary relative to the determination of the thinking of each one of them within the real ‘I’. These and related world-views arise and undergo development in a manner similar to the evolution of species; their ‘evolution as a species’ is realized within the ‘nature’ of the human spirit. Despite the fact that they appear to follow one another in temporal sequence (the history of philosophy), there is an absence in them of any kind of teleologism. But developing parallel to them there are world-views of a different sort, which are bound up with the given character of science; features of predestination are clearly visible in them: predetermination through the givenness of what has completed a process of becoming (the logical, abstract, material etc.), i.e. of the spirit that is dying, formal, that is losing its organic character.

Anyone familiar with the positivism of Auguste Comte can have an inkling, in broad terms, of the development that his system was to undergo in the conceptions of neo-positivism. One can foresee the further movement of the monistic tendencies in materialism etc. World-views of this kind are conditioned by the general course of spiritual phylogenesis where, in the case of a considerable portion of humanity, intellectual capacities are already transmitted via heredity. But, in contrast to the biological, this kind of phylogenesis is doomed to self-destruction owing to the fundamental contradiction inherent in it (between what is of nature and determined by the species, and what is of the spirit and individual), and for this reason it will continually lead the thinking spirit into blind alleys. How difficult – indeed, how impossible – it is to find one’s way to the idea of human freedom within the circle of ‘predetermined’ world-views, is convincingly demonstrated in the ‘Philosophy of Freedom’ (Spiritual Activity).

World-views of the first kind are created by the highest individual element in the human being, within which the single human being is a species in his own right. They describe the character of the cultural and historical incarnation of that higher being which represents the higher ‘I’ of the human being: – his most important ‘species-characteristic’. In every such incarnation (through a world-view) he has the tendency to reveal himself in his entirety: to lead what in him is universal and essential down into the particular. Therefore, when we have recognized this character of their manifestation in one epoch, we can recognize it again in any other, in the phenomena of the spirit of leading individualities through whom the character of entire cultural epochs is imprinted and determined. Their creative activity is always unrepeatable, individual, but at the same time it has universal human significance; it is well-nigh inexhaustible. We find this in the leading philosophers of ancient Greece, in the leading Scholastics, in the classical philosophers of the 18th and 19th centuries. Indeed we find, regardless of the uniqueness of such figures and the enormous differences between them, a deep affinity (in the spirit of the ‘I’) between the three stages of the movement of ideas in science (through science) illustrated by Hegel and Thomas Aquinas’ doctrine of the three universals. The ideas of Rudolf Steiner’s ‘Truth and Science’ also reach back to these.

The particular and characteristic feature of all phenomena of this kind is the by no means insignificant relation they bear to the historical conditions obtaining in the philosophical epochs. It is, as we have mentioned, determined by the qualities of the individual manifestation of the highest spirit in the thinker. We recognize in the light of this fact that Thomas Aquinas’ way of thinking is, let us say, ‘positively metaphysical’. Its character is such that its appeal to the authority of Aristotle goes hand in hand with the theosophical quality in the Platonic way of thinking. As a result of this, Thomas Aquinas is able to reestablish in his own epoch the true spirit of Aristotelianism, which its Arabian apologists with their disregard for the individual spirit were not able to do.

Thomas Aquinas unites within himself on an individual basis the dialectician and the ‘beholder’ of the idea; though to a lesser degree than the Greeks, it was given to him to perceive ideally what he had developed logically. It is just the same activity of the cognizing spirit which we find, though in a different form, in Goethe. And Rudolf Steiner, who developed it in a new way, elaborated it methodologically from many different aspects, and demonstrated its logic in accordance with the special qualities of the thinking of Hegel, for whom the dialectical classification of (cognitive) science springs from the fact that “the idea” shows itself to be “.... thinking that is without qualification identical with itself”.82) Rudolf Steiner gives this identity a substantial content, whereby in his theory of knowledge the phenomenon of intuitive ‘beholding’ is very close to the stream of esoteric philosophy represented by Jakob Boehme and Saint Martin and reaches back to that form of spiritual creative activity characteristic of the second pillar of Scholasticism: Albertus Magnus.

This is the nature, to continue our analogy, of the ‘selectionism’ inherent in that unique ontogenesis in which the spiritually creative activity of Rudolf Steiner takes its course. If this were purely abstract, we would probably be justified in accusing Anthroposophy of eclecticism. But in the sphere of living thinking we have to do with the birth of the living out of the living. In the history of philosophy this phenomenon is unique and can therefore be grasped only with the greatest difficulty. We can make it easier to understand if we distinguish two fundamentally different human viewpoints. Then we will comprehend first of all the nature of creation out of nothing, and secondly, that of the unity of philosophy, esotericism and natural science. This unity comes to expression in the world-views of the first type. Its essential being, which remains unchanging, reveals itself in one epoch as the esoteric philosophy of the Pythagorean school of thought, in another as Theosophy, in the third it speaks the language of alchemy etc. And it is impossible to define conclusively in which of these languages more is communicated, or in a better way; everything here depends upon the (human) subject of cognition.

Anthroposophy showed itself to be the first phenomenon of the human spirit in which universal wisdom spoke at once in all the languages known hitherto, whereby it became a new ‘word’ in the spiritual development of mankind. When we come to know it in several different languages at once we draw close to the greatest, long-sought-after synthesis of the views of life and the world; we begin – to state it in simple terms – to experience directly what remained for centuries a secret (or mystery) of spiritual cognition – for a single reason, namely, the self-restriction of science to one language; this was later called ‘the limits of knowledge’. Whoever finds a relation to this peculiarity of the phenomenology of the spirit begins to recognize that the problem of the boundaries between the sciences, between the exoteric and the esoteric in them, is due not to the problem of ‘knowability’, but to that of ‘translation’.

Let us try, with the help of a concrete example, to show that this is the case. Saint-Martin wrote a book of no more than ten pages entitled ‘Errors and Truth’. The first page deals with the “universal principle, or the central point from which all central points flow without ceasing”. On the second page we read of the twofold nature of all things and actions, and on the third “of the solid foundations of bodies; of all the results and productions of all species; and here is to be found the number of the immaterial beings who do not think”83); they begin to think on the fourth page, which we will not consider for the moment.

In his commentary on the first page of this book Rudolf Steiner speaks of the principles of the connections between thinking and being, by virtue of which every existence which is subject to coming into being and passing away possesses the quality of extension and contraction to a point. It is possible “to experience inwardly a point which contains everything and from which everything flows, which is nothing and all; which contains the unity of being and forces” (B. 32, p.8). If we proceed in this way to the Hegelian identity of being and nothing we are carrying out, not an act of reflection, but a meditative exercise, and we gain the experience of thinking.

The second page of Saint-Martin’s book encourages us to think in dualities, in antitheses, i.e. dialectically (dualistically). And on the third page we return to the monism of the first, but this time it assumes the form of a trinity. Its highest archetype is the Divine Trinity. Rudolf Steiner continues in his commentary to the book: “Whoever grows accustomed to translate the twofoldness into the threefoldness, deepens his insight. To think the world through in its threefoldness means: to think it through with wisdom” (ibid., p.9).

Thus the existence of the dialectical principle is potentized in esoteric philosophy, to which Hegel’s dialectic has a direct connection even if we find there no open reference to it. In his search for the ‘beginning’, Hegel is trying, like Saint-Martin, to find the central point of genesis of the world totality, from which one could deduce dialectically knowledge of the world as a whole. As the principal quality of the beginning sought by him, Hegel sees that of ‘not being posited’. In this he reaches through to the starting-point of freedom.

For Hegel all the definitions of the understanding are secondary, with the help of which reflective thinking describes its source and origin, as – so he feels – such a thought-process is involutive. ‘I’ = ‘I’, the concept of God etc. – all these, he believes, are inner representations. He seeks for that initial idea ‘in itself and for itself’, with which the evolution of the individual spirit begins, its ‘self-being’ (Selbstsein). The concept of this idea only has a solid foundation if it is deducible from itself, whereby the principle of the non-finite nature of the Divine as such is not questioned in any way – Hegel, it should be borne in mind, is seeking the beginning, not of the Divine principle, but of the human ‘I’. Hegel begins his theory of knowledge with the category of being, of pure being, which “cannot be felt, cannot be seen and cannot be imagined, but it is the pure thought, and as such it constitutes the beginning”.84) This thought is completely undefined and is not distinguishable from anything, hence pure being and nothingness are identical. If we consider the whole world, we say: Everything is – and nothing else, we leave all definitions behind and obtain “instead of absolute fullness, only absolute emptiness”.85) This, so Hegel remarks, is the Buddhists’ definition of God. In this nothingness which he postulates, Hegel hopes, like Goethe’s Faust, to find the All. He polemicises with the ancients, who declared that “from nothing arises nothing” or “nothing arises, unless it be from something”, because he finds that in this way becoming is eliminated, “For, that from which it becomes and that which becomes, are one and the same....”86) Admittedly, Hegel has in mind here only the abstract positing of identity, but through this is posited a development (a becoming) and this development is involution. For this reason Rudolf Steiner takes as the beginning of the theory of knowledge, not ‘being’, but ‘thinking about thinking’. The question here, is to find the absolute in the ‘other’.

Hegel is, of course, concerned with this problem too, as he is seeking the beginning of the self-determination and self- autonomous) movement of the human thinking spirit, the ‘I’. He therefore combines his research into the categories of being with an investigation into the triad: absolute – being – essence, whereby the absolute is ‘absolute identity’: “Within it (itself) there is no becoming, as it is not Being.... it is not Essence which merely determines itself within itself ....”, “it is the object of an external reflection ....the identity of Being and Essence, or the identity of the inner and the outer.”87) In this absolute Hegel unquestionably sees the Divine principle. In its reciprocal relation with the potentially absolute nature of human consciousness reflection also arises; this is the involution of the individual spirit, as an antithesis to the Divine universal consciousness, whose first revelation is Being. Therefore the becoming of ‘I’-consciousness is not to be sought in this Being, but in another which is only in a certain sense ‘empty’: as abstraction.

What can be the nature of this becoming which we are seeking? Anthroposophy distinguishes two sorts of becoming. It speaks a) of the becoming of existence (Dasein), which is the visible universe with its life and its forms, with its (according to Hegel) determinate characteristics: quality, quantity, measure; b) of the becoming of the individual spirit in its involutive-evolutive essential nature (Wesen), in its identity with the absolute ‘I’. Viewed as a whole, we have before us a hierarchical, spiral-formed cycle of becoming, in which, out of the existence (Dasein) of the world of nature, the nothingness (Nichts) of the human abstract(ing) understanding arises, the being in itself and for itself of human thought. It is the new given reality (Gegebenheit) whose creator is shown to be, not nature, but the human being. He is the principle of the being of the absolute in the ‘other’: the absolute unity of being and essence (Sein und Wesen), their absolute identity – the form of the individual existence of the World-‘I’ in the other.

Essence arises from the being of the absolute. Its revelation in thinking consciousness is reflection – the nothing of being –, which is the centre, or to express it with Fichte, “the basis enabling a relation to exist”, between the being of the absolute, its (according to Hegel) outer aspect (here we may think of revelation) and the concept. It is in this sense that we could understand the statement of Hegel: “The essence stands between Being and Concept and constitutes the middle between them, and its movement constitutes the transition from being into the concept”88); therefore it also becomes the first negation of Being. When we think, so Rudolf Steiner responds to Descartes’ cogito, we do not exist.

Thus we arrive at the phenomenon of the self-determination of consciousness in the human form. “The form”, says Hegel, “is the absolute negativity itself, or the negative absolute identity with (it)self.”89) Such is the absolute within the ‘other’. The power of negation inherent in the human spirit that is identical with itself is so obvious, that the thinking activity leads to a death process in the organic realm – in the nervous system. Thus the abstract principle of the nothing(ness) becomes a fact of organic life.

* * *

The reality of the primary Hegelian triad (the absolute – being – essence) is confirmed by the Christian gnosis, in the spirit of which the beginning of the St John’s Gospel is written, or rather it has its source there. In the Gospel we read: “In the beginning was the Word .... In him was life; and the life was the light of men.” The life in this sense is a manifestation of the Word, of the absolute; it has essential being, but is at the same time appearance (Schein): as the life of reflection. The latter must become the light of cognition, but its original form is ‘dark’ (– If it undergoes a metamorphosis it can acquire the nature of being). Reflective thinking is the form in which the Word appears in the ‘other’. This thinking is lacking in essential being, it is nothingness and the negation of the Word, of creative universal consciousness, of the World-‘I’; it denies the being of what is, and exists thus: It comes to its positivity.

We repeat the words of Hegel: “....the movement of reflection stands ....over against the absolute identity (of the absolute)”. Its movement is external with respect to this identity.90) But it is just for this reason that – as a result of becoming – the absolute self-identity of the human I, not-‘I’ = ‘I’, is possible. This self-identity is what Hegel seeks (and Fichte also). But it does not begin with the concept (Hegel’s ‘pure Being’ is a concept); it begins with the phenomenon of thinking consciousness. Hegel, too, acknowledges this, but in a general sense. He says that philosophy must “make thinking into an object of thinking (itself)”.91) But he himself takes as his object the results, the fruit of thinking activity.

Rudolf Steiner filled the epistemological gap in Hegel’s philosophy, and in addition to this brought philosophy into agreement with natural science; he introduced into the theory of knowledge the principle of evolutionism. And this is not eclecticism, for the simple reason that the evolution of nature is the evolution of the spirit. Contemporary thinkers are unable to develop a unified methodology because they divide the world-whole into two parts and try to recognize one of them as the whole. In Anthroposophical methodology the absolute is the principle of conscious all-unity. It can only be cognized by the understanding up to that limit to which reflection can ascend; the faculty of intuitive ‘beholding’ can lead us further, but a limit is set to it also; the imaginative, inspirative and intuitive consciousness reach still further towards cognition of the absolute. The revelation of the absolute is evolution and being. In this sense, the absolute, being and evolution are identical. Interestingly enough, Hegel says in relation to this: “The beginning itself is also becoming ....”92)

Evolution calls forth the being of the Beings (das Sein der Wesen). They are its involution. As the highest achievement of the unified stream of becoming of consciousness and life in the ‘other’, a unique form arises, whose content is the ‘I’. Thus another phenomenonology of the spirit is posited: on its return to the absolute. Here, to express it in Hegel’s words, the being of consciousness and its nothing merge completely and cancel one another. Becoming shows itself in this way to be ceaseless transformation; it continually vanishes into itself as it consumes its own material. In the concepts of Anthroposophy evolution represents the phenomenology of the Divine Trinity, which is the reality of the three categories of development we have described. The mutual relationships are as follows:

1. Logos: God-Father – Conscious All-consciousness. World-Body.
2. Logos: God-Son – Macrocosm. Life. World-Soul.
3. Logos: God-Spirit – Being (Form). Human spirit. Microcosm.

To begin with, the becoming of the world follows Divine predestination which, as it connects with the world, works within it in the form of the laws of development. By virtue of predestination and in accordance with the laws of development, the human being receives as a gift of the Father principle the body, as a gift of the Son the soul and the life, and as a gift of the Holy Spirit self-consciousness, spirit. As the system-building principle there works in this lower tri-unity – this we are fully justified in asserting – the highest unity of the triune Divinity, the God of three hypostases, who constitutes the primal beginning and is thus in a certain sense the fourth hypostasis – the World-‘I’.*  For within him the human being involutes as a complete, encompassing form, as the image of God. Then he “moves on to evolution in the ‘I’” (B. 67/68, p.26); we can also say: in ‘I’-consciousness, in order to come in possession of the true ‘I’. On this path, self-consciousness rises from the abstract to ‘beholding’, i.e. to ideal perception, to life in the spirit, and finally it possesses the form of All-consciousness as life.

* For the earthly human being, Jesus Christ – who passed through the Mystery of Golgatha – becomes such a hypostasis.
_______

To avoid the abstract, means, for the human being, to renounce his future. The (evolutionary) becoming of the abstract is unthinkable outside logic, although this limits our spirit and does not free us from error. In order not to ‘calcify’ in the logical, one must become a true dialectician. In one of his lectures Rudolf Steiner formulates this in an especially significant way: “In order to come to knowledge of the truth, the human being must dogmatize, but he must never see the truth in dogma. And here we have the life of the truth-seeking human being, who can melt down and transform dogma in the fire of the concept. Thus the occultist can operate with dogma in the freest way. This form of cognition, this blow in the world of the concept followed by a counter-blow – is called dialectics, while one calls a holding fast to the concept – logic. Thus dialectics is the life of logic, and whoever understands the spirit of dialectics will, when he reaches the higher realms of cognition, transform the rigid, dead concepts into living ones, sharing them among certain people. He transforms logic into a conversation. Hence Plato changed logic into dialectic, turned it into a conversation” (ibid., p.32).

Thomas Aquinas attempted (differently from Plato, of course) to develop the qualities of such a dialectic in his works. However, it was not these strivings of his which prevailed in the history of philosophy, but dogmatism and logical formalism. Kant was quite determined to declare war on these, but he too, in his quest for the ‘unconditioned’ being, decided in favour of a number of dogmas. When he erected above the sphere of the understanding, which can only ‘understand’ sense-perceptions, a higher sphere of concepts of pure reason which are not limited by the world of experience and contain within them something ‘unconditioned’, he held to the opinion that even the faculty of reason stretches “its wings in vain, in order to reach beyond the sense-world through the mere power of speculation”.93) And Kant failed to grasp that this is only right in part – if one considers the nature of cognition solely with respect to content, in isolation from the method. Whether the reason or the understanding is drawing the conclusions is not the main point; what is far more important to grasp is how the human being draws conclusions. Dialectics can only be limited artificially through the abstract. In reality, even its abstract element actualizes the sphere of ‘beholding’ – i.e. it appeals to a contradiction of a higher order, where not the thesis but the conceptually thinking subject needs to be overcome or set aside. So Kant actually came up against the dogma of his own thinking spirit and thereby set limits to it. Kant’s failure had far-reaching negative consequences, stretching far beyond the realm of pure philosophy, but at the same time it awakened the critical consciousness of his epoch and contributed, by acting according to the principle of antithesis, to the scientific quest which reached from Goethe through to Rudolf Steiner. In the lecture quoted above, Rudolf Steiner describes the law of transformation at work in the cognitive process, which the thinking subject must put into effect if he is to make cognition evolutive within himself. When this has happened, all limits of cognition prove to be temporal and relative. Rudolf Steiner says: “To see in any form of comprehension only a sheath for the (essential) being, this is an important occult principle. The being must live within us. We must continually make garments and sheaths of the essential being or nature of a thing, but we must be aware that the essential being of the thing is not in any way contained in these garments and sheaths. At the moment when we have found a form of expression for the inner, essential nature of the thing, we have made the esoteric exoteric. Never, therefore, can the esoteric (i.e. the intelligible – G.A.B.) be communicated in any other than an exoteric (i.e. conceptual or symbolic – G.A.B.) form. Create, continually, forms of comprehension, but overcome at the same time these forms of comprehension you have yourself created. First, there is you yourself; then in the second place there are the forms of comprehension you have created; and, thirdly, you are there again, having received the forms into yourself and overcome them. That is to say: you are first Being, then Life in the forms you have created, and thirdly you are Consciousness in the life-forms you have assimilated into yourself. Or alternatively: you are yourself, and you must evolve in your forms, in order then to involute the evoluted forms again within yourself. Thus the human act of comprehension is also Being, Life and Consciousness” (ibid.).

These thoughts of Rudolf Steiner are programmatic for our research into his methodology. In the chapters to come we will be working through them from the most varied points of view. But for the present let us summarize what we have discussed so far and draw from it the following main conclusions:

The Anthroposophical theory of knowledge comes to realization in a unity of method and content and therefore makes the transition in an organic way to the science of the ascent to higher states of consciousness; it differs from the Hegelian theory in that it begins less with the ‘unconditioned’ than with the ‘self-conditioned’ being (Wesen).

We recall that in Hegel the second part of (cognitive) science is natural philosophy. In Anthroposophy the latter is developed in the spirit of that approach already spoken of in the 15th century by Raimund of Sabunde, who asked that we should “read in the book of nature”. This means that in Anthroposophy we are no longer dealing with nature philosophy in the strict sense of the word, but with ideal perception, the ‘beholding’ of nature, to which her ideal essential being is directly revealed.

With regard to the third part of the Hegelian classification of (cognitive) science, namely, the phenomenology of the spirit, this Anthroposophy gains knowledge of in development, by way of the method of personalistic empiricism.

These, one could say, are the three structural components of the method of Anthroposophy.

Introduction

Contents

Chapter 2