Bondarev-Philosophy_of_Freedom_Intro

The subject is the being who possesses an ‘I’, and outside the ‘I’ one will only ever meet in our sense-world a Fata Morgana – the multiform, beguiling apparition of the great illusion.

<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Rudolf Steiner's 'Philosophie der Freiheit' as the Foundation for the Logic of Beholding Thinking. Religion of the Thinking Will. Organon of the New Cultural Epoch.</font></font>

2. Methodological Conceptions

It is no exaggeration to say that without methodology no scientific work, indeed no purposeful human activity, is possible. But a professionally conscious relation to methodology is not an indispensable condition for every person who seeks a place for himself in civilization. Here another principle is at work, whereby that which was at a given time the object of scientific research of individual thinkers, at a later time is taken up into the instinct of the masses and rules as an all-determining principle within the infinite multiplicity of cultural and historical phenomena.

Cultural-historical experience (including its supersensible component) and the thinking of the most advanced section of humanity find their synthesis in methodology. As a process that moves onward from century to century, it absorbs into itself the manifoldness of specific methods, procedures, principles and rules of the organization of human life in the spheres of culture, science, religion, rights relationships, economic activities etc. It is because of this that each civilization possesses a single, unified aspect within the framework of its genesis.

Let us now turn to the question: What is the source of the relativist spirit of our epoch? Did hundreds of millions of people assimilate the wisdom of relativity theory? Not at all! In countless ways – through ideology, via the mass-media, through the system of education and training, through every feature of social life – the entire epoch was imbued with an element that stemmed from the theories and conclusions of a by no means wide circle of people who, from the end of the 19th century, under the influence of the crisis of philosophy, relentlessly atomized all inner conceptions and thus dissolved their traditional ties without offering anything to replace them. Methodological thinking was atomized, and this exerted an influence on science too. This effect then manifested as all-determining factors of civilization and called forth in it a systemic crisis, which is now undermining the psychic foundation of the personality itself.

The general structural laws inherent in any civilization are grouped around the emergence of the human being as an individual, and from this arises the unique character of a civilization, which one must not extrapolate beyond its limits. It is founded on spiritual inequality. In the world there is no spiritual equality of human beings, and never will be. Where it is proclaimed as a fact the death of culture and the degeneration of the human race sets in.* For this reason a great ethical and historical responsibility is bound up with individual development. It does not rob the human being of the right to make mistakes, but it prohibits him from carrying principles belonging to lower stages onto the higher stages of his activity. Here, all that exists on a high level may only be directed towards what is still higher. For this reason it says in the Gospel very straightforwardly and clearly: “To whom much is given, from him much is demanded.” Also in other passages in the Gospels the ethic of spiritual inequality comes to expression.

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* In Western Europe today the spiritual equality of all human beings is proclaimed and in a number of states penal law is applied for the protection of this dogma. This is nothing less than a refined form of civilized barbarism.

Those spirits who exerted an influence on the development of civilization at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century failed to grasp that a new methodology must reflect the unusually rapid growth of the autonomy of the spiritual being of man which had then begun, his striving for free self-determination. For example, they neglected the fact that when reflection on social matters surged up for the first time, probing questions had to be asked about the source of the dogmas, the ethical, juristic and all the other imperatives, and also about the validity of the principles determining the human being. And it should be recognized that this phenomenon alone proved quite clearly the primacy of the thinking over the material activity of man.

The situation was further complicated by the fact that humanity showed itself unable to master the objective evolutionary processes (transcending the cultural-historical) that were pressing forward into the soul-spiritual sphere with their principles of super-consciousness, which could not be grasped on the level of intellectual understanding.

A way out of this difficult situation was to be sought through the attempt to understand the, in some sense, natural character of the dualism whose main advocate was Kant. Not through a mere arbitrary play of the philosophical intellect, but through the objective laws of the development of the world and man, a condition arose in the soul-experience of the human being in which reality, which formerly – due to other factors in sense and thought which in time ceased to be effective – had constituted a whole, fell apart into two mutually opposite parts. Thus arose epistemological dualism, which took over from metaphysical monism. This dualism led in practice to a situation where the human being was obliged from now on to seek the motives for his activity, whilst finding himself in a kind of empty space between two parts of reality. The factors which had once determined human actions in a non-personal way – via revelation or thanks to the unity of man with nature – ceased to be effective. This led to the need for a methodology in which everything would have an extremely personalistic character and would hold together through a connection of its parts that is without contradiction.

Pre-scientific – mythological, theological etc. – knowledge rested on the assumption that the human being receives the truth as a direct communication from God, and that the understanding only passes on to us what God reveals. But the creator of Scholasticism, Thomas Aquinas, taught that reason in the Aristotelian sense – i.e. a reason that endows the ideas within itself with an independent but non-substantial existence – can dive deeply into things and receive from them their ideal content. Thus within the Christian world-view a decisive step was taken towards the uniting of concept and percept (experience) in the ‘I’, in order to support the existence of ‘I’ consciousness on this activity.

At that time, in the period immediately before the consciousness-soul epoch, an attempt was made to connect on to the methodology of the ancient Mysteries. Rudolf Steiner said in his book on Goethe’s world-view and its historical-philosophical roots that Thomas Aquinas had taught that revelation had penetrated unusually far downwards and individual reason had acquired the capacity to raise itself up from the earthly plane, so that “the doctrine of salvation and human cognition interweave at a shared boundary” (GA 6, p 35).

In the further development of philosophy those elements which Thomas Aquinas wanted to bring together into a unity separated entirely, and each went its own way. Thus Francis Bacon resorted to analysis and the classifying of single items of experience, which replaced revelation, in the hope of uncovering in this way the universal laws of nature, although in his view these can only help us to gain knowledge of further isolated facts, but have no reality in themselves.

Spinoza on the other hand gave priority to the world of ideas, but only those which have arisen outside the realm of perception. Perceptions, so he believed – taking inspiration from Plato in this question – give rise to desires and thus enslave the spirit. Happiness consists in overcoming the world of perceptions. Descartes and the philosophical direction inspired by him hoped to discover the entire sum of knowledge, all truth, in the pure intellect (Verstand): inductively, on the path of reasoning from the simple to the ever more complex. A position opposite to this was taken by Hume, who saw reality only in perceptions.

The dualism of the world, which fell primarily into concepts and perceptions, was experienced acutely by Kant, a disciple of Hume. He subscribed to the view that the world of experience presents itself to us in the form of a mosaic of different impressions which reveal the effect that is exerted upon our sense-organs. The understanding (Verstand) brings order into the perceptions and creates out of them a wholeness, more or less. But its activity remains entirely subjective, as we only experience the way in which the outer influences affect our capacity to feel (sensations). But the true nature of the influences (inherent in the things of the world) remains enclosed within itself and is inaccessible to us. We are enclosed forever within the world of our subjectivity and experience only the changes undergone by us under the influence of an external, objective realm that is unknowable.

As to the thinking in concepts, which brings order to experience, Kant believed – with Hume – that it receives the ideas within its own sphere. The possibility of the existence of ideas that are pure and independent of experience is proved by mathematics and pure physics.

After Kant, philosophy struggled to find ways to overcome the dualism that had been seemingly eternalized by this thinker; ways in which a direct or indirect relation between the immanent and the transcendent could be established. Since the beginning of the 20th century an ever-growing role in this quest for a monistic world-picture has been played by natural science or, as one preferred to call it later so as to contrast it on the methodological level with philosophy: science. From this moment onwards scientific methodology in this sense is developed in a number of different directions, and in all these philosophy is forced into a secondary role; it becomes a plaything in the hands of experimental physics, of astronomy, even sociology does with it as it pleases. The pragmatic Zeitgeist gives priority to the methodology of the special sciences, so-called concrete scientific methodology.

But the same ‘Geist’ also dictates the need for a unified methodology of science. Therefore in the middle of the 20th century methodology assumed the character of a science in its own right. It is concerned with the problem of the mutual relations between philosophy and the special sciences, but also develops the methods and techniques of scientific research. It combines within itself a large number of different methodological conceptions and theories, which describe the development and structure of knowledge and its methods. The priority of theory of knowledge in the creation of a unified methodology is recognized by some scientists, but rejected by others. For example, the French physicist and philosopher P. Duhem, who was investigating the nature of scientific theory at the beginning of the 20th century, saw it as no more than an instrument for the classifying of empirical data, an assemblage of empirical laws possessing no epistemological value.12) This standpoint later found a good many adherents. Nevertheless, a dominant role was played by those methodological directions which did not question the necessity for epistemological research. Of these, two directions should be highlighted in which the philosophy of science plays the main part. To the first belong: logical positivism, a variant of which is empiricism; neo-positivism; and analytical philosophy. The second direction is called the historical and combines within it the relativistic and the historical evolutionary conceptions.

In special cases a division is made into methodology of content and formal methodology. The historical direction corresponds more to the first, and logical empiricism more to the second.

The methodological conceptions of neo-positivism need to be consigned to a special group. Its decisive feature is the absolutizing of natural science in methodology. To this group belong pragmatism and also epistemological scientism (which postulates that all problems of knowledge, social problems included, can be solved according to the model of natural science) but also methodological reductionism (not to be confused with phenomenological reductionism) which reduces theory to empirical fact and attempts to corroborate on this basis the standards of scientific objectivity.

In the manner of formal logic, neo-positivist methodology carries out an analysis of the structure of scientific knowledge and works out procedures for the testing of theories. It also sets out to uncover what is specific to the language of natural science, working on the assumption that the replacement of terms with an imprecise meaning by those with a precise meaning will, of itself, make possible the solution of complicated problems of the philosophy of science. A representative of logical positivism, the logician R. Carnap, asserted that: the conceptual meaning of a statement must be reduced to the observable; the logic of the meaning is superfluous; it is sufficient if the syntactical structure of a sentence or the direct spatio-temporal observability of the events or signs is given.

The creator of the neo-positivist methodological conception which has been given the name operationalism, the American physicist P. Bridgman, considered it indispensable for the understanding of a concept, whether it is being used in science or in everyday life, first to clarify what we do when we apply it. He said: “We cannot know the meaning of a concept until we have defined what operations we and those belonging to us carry out when we apply it in this or that situation.”13) A theoretical construction as such has, in Bridgman’s view, no meaning; the human being is bound up with the object of observation through operational rules: measurement operations; operations with instruments; verbal operations; manipulation of symbols. Thus the question: “Do worlds exist in which other rules apply which differ from our own?” cannot be answered; one cannot even understand the question until one has clarified the operations that need to be carried out in the attempt to answer a question of this kind.14)

The second of the two directions in methodology, the historical, began to emerge at the end of the twenties of the 20th century. Here, the historical aspect of science, the question regarding the building of scientific theories and conceptions in their historical perspective, serves as a basis for the method of research.

The main reasons for the emergence of the historical direction were presumably the following: the excessive complexity of the exact sciences; maturing awareness of the determining of knowledge by social factors; the impossibility of reducing it to logical formulae; the shift of emphasis from the method of cognition to the reliability of knowledge. We could add that, together with the historical direction, representatives of the neo-Hegelian and neo-Kantian directions in philosophy and sociology worked in their time in opposition to the dominance of neo- positivism. Thus Jürgen Habermas, regarded by some as the unofficial leader of the Frankfurt School, advocated in a polemical article against the scientific conception of knowledge which claims that the School is influenced by the achievements of science, the development of a philosophy of science on the basis of “a theory of cognition as a theory of (the development of) society”.15) After its two acts of mediation there is little left of Hegelianism here, since the goal envisaged by Habermas proves to be no more than the attempt to rehabilitate, in new conditions, the old dogmas of Marxism, already proclaimed in the 19th century. (See: ‘History of Ideologies’ by Karl Marx, and ‘The Dialectics of Nature’ by F. Engels.)

The neo-Kantians of the Marburg School – H. Cohen, P. Natorp, E. Cassirer – who also subscribed to the historical direction – adopted a different standpoint with respect to the methodology of science: namely, that philosophy investigates the structure of knowledge and not that of being. As a result scientific knowledge constitutes a system with its own immanent logic; it is a product of thinking, not of the empirical content. Through identifying the history of science with the history of logic and philosophy, the adherents of the Marburg School deepened a one-sidedness, albeit a different one from that of the Frankfurt School. In this question they were opposed by E. Husserl, K. Jaspers, M. Scheler and N. Losky. For example, Jaspers insisted that the history of ideas contains, to an almost decisive degree, also an existential ‘moment’, with regard to both the personality of the scholar and the Zeitgeist. This view of Jaspers is unquestionably in agreement with Spengler’s idea of a morphology of world history, a sequence of cultures, in which “there are .... many sculptures, paintings, mathematical and physical systems which differ from one another on the deepest level, each one limited in its duration, each contained within itself, just as every species of plant has its own flowers and fruit, its own type of growth and decline.... They belong, like plants and animals, to the living nature of Goethe, not to the dead nature of Newton.”16)

The ideas of Spengler, and to a still greater extent those of Husserl and Scheler, stood on fruitful soil thanks to their proximity to the views of Goethe. Even the convictions of the opponents of Spengler’s idea of the ‘organic’ nature of the cultures, the adherents of the concept of ‘internalism’, were characterized by the same proximity to Goethe. They raised the question as to the original driving force of the cultures. In their opinion this proves to be the human intellect. It is capable of undergoing certain mutations, after which a new world-view arises in the human being. This extends not only to the present, but also to the past. “Nothing changes more rapidly than what has become and belongs to the past,” said A. Koyré.17)

Academician V.I. Vernadski held similar views. He wrote: “Past forms of scientific thinking are seen in ever new and different perspectives. Every generation discovers new qualities in what is past.”18)

For at least half a century (until the beginning of the sixties) the historical direction fulfilled the role of a positive alternative to the formal-linguistic reductionism of positivism with its simplified picture of science, with the method of the artificial dissection of finished knowledge into single components, with the reduction of the process of the coming-into-being of living knowledge to the abstract logic of ideas – in short, to all that was proving to be the final stage of decline of the classical theory of knowledge and could only appear more or less credible to those who, in spiritual inertia, were still nostalgic for the battle with the old metaphysics. To others, however, who had the ability to keep pace spiritually with their own time, the working-out of all these conceptions could only seem a pointless waste of energy, since their abstract and not infrequently fictitious and playful models serve no scientific purposes that are directed to the real life of human beings. It is hard to understand how such a phenomenon was at all possible under the conditions of the rapidly-growing pragmatism of the sciences already noted by Bacon, and its all-inclusive socialization, a socialization which did not stop at the attempt to enrich science with the elements of art – even of religion (attempts in this direction were undertaken e.g. at the beginning of the 20th century by the leader of the Baden School, W. Windelband).

It must be acknowledged, however, that the neo-positivist directions, although not only unspiritual but unfruitful in practice, ‘blossom and thrive’, so to speak. From the seventies onwards the historical direction begins to go the same way, just at the moment when it seems to be setting off on its victorious march to the longed-for goal. At that time there appears within its own ranks a new variant, in which D. Worrel sees the ‘focal point’ of the entire methodology of science. Its most eminent representatives are S. Toulmin, T. Kuhn, P. Feyerabend, J. Lakatos, N. Hahnson and J. Agassiz. We must also regard as an adherent of this direction Karl Popper, who began his career as a neo-positivist. All these methodologists seem at first glance to have an anti-positivist thrust. This is reflected in the fact that they strive to pursue their research into scientific knowledge in a dynamic and ‘integrative’ manner by drawing their data from logic, psychology, sociology – even from metaphysics. They set themselves the goal of creating, at last, a unified methodology, if only for the natural sciences. In the history of natural science they select single episodes from the works of men of learning, and try with their help to formulate something which, in the conditions of the present day – i.e. post factum – bears the aspect of a ‘theory’ (Feyerabend, Hahnson), a ‘paradigm’ (according to Kuhn this word has the same meaning as ‘theory’), or ‘an intellectual strategy’ (Toulmin). Their methodological constructions are restricted to the creation of theoretical models of a development of knowledge of a kind that is understood by Popper to be a stream of permanent revolutions, or by Toulmin a process of the interaction of permanence and change, or by Feyerabend total, uninterrupted, continuous change in which nothing has duration.

It is not by chance that Feyerabend is regarded as the founder of methodological relativism or even anarchism. His attitude as a researcher is the following: “To create and elaborate theories which are incompatible with traditional standpoints.”19) Such a mood on the part of a learned academic calls to mind the Romantic period in German culture, namely ‘Sturm und Drang’ (storm and stress). Can such a mood be appropriate – i.e. fruitful – in contemporary science? If so, then only on condition that there lies behind it the intention to create a really pluralistic methodology which can provide the basis for a unified conception of nature which is not isolated from the general development of culture, science and civilization. In such a case even an anarchistic negation could become a dialectical ‘Aufhebung’ (cancellation and preservation). But no, what is decisive for Feyerabend is the data of physics, and then only that part of it which rests on relativist positions. Despite its independent status this part falls entirely under the definition given by the German physicist C.F. von Weizsäcker to this science as a whole. He takes its most essential character – the mode of thinking – and asks whether it has not always picked out “only those qualities of the living which it has in common with the dead”.20) How is this? We are being offered an anarchistic methodological conception of dead nature? Here we have the right to ask: What is this? Scientific boldness, or something unscientific?

To understand the natural-scientific sources of methodological relativism is not especially difficult. It had of necessity to appear because the discoveries of Maxwell, Planck, Einstein had destroyed the traditional picture of space and time and overturned the universal mechanical model of the universe which had been erected with such solidity by materialistic science. After the interpretations made by Einstein in the realm of theoretical physics even the concept of a ‘field’ no longer corresponded to material reality. But the constructions of Kuhn, Popper, show no way out of the rigid, immovable position; on the contrary, they erect a branch in the methodology of science which proves to be no more than a blind-alley. Their abstract constructions remained a mere intellectual game and they exerted not the slightest influence on the development of the empirical sciences. On the level of ‘Weltan-schauung’ they could contribute nothing for the simple reason that their thinking is flat and trivial. A few examples will suffice to make this clear. The French physicist Bachelard, who is regarded as one of the foremost thinkers of the historical direction, says: “Only one who has studied profoundly what is complex can describe what is simple.”21) But what is complex appears to him quite simple, when he declares: The world – that is “my verification”.22)

In Popper’s case, thinking boils down, not infrequently, to a generalization of the following kind: “I maintain that, for natural scientific knowledge which in its essential character is empirical, its unceasing growth is of especial significance.”23) But what serious academic would question this? And who would consider stating the opposite: namely, that if knowledge comes to a standstill, this can prove beneficial to it? Nevertheless, declarations of this kind become the object of discussions, of criticism from many angles, which in time turns into real thought-directions in their own right, where a revision of traditional concepts is carried out and questions such as: What is knowledge? – What is growth? – Is the criterion of rationality rational? – What is a criterion? etc. are tenaciously discussed. One cannot but concur with those who declare openly that the reduction of conceptions of development to Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend is no more than a fashion.* And, one must add, not just a fashion. As a consequence of the ever-increasing social significance of science in the world, its influence on all spheres of social life, an ideologizing of the methodology of science has taken place. In this sense the striving to impress a predetermined character on knowledge and scientific research is equivalent to the intention to subject social relations, even the personality itself, to a form of regimentation. With regard to the criteria of what is truly scientific, one finds in both the historical and the neo-positive camps the same epistemological (gnoseological) roots. Their source turns out to be nothing other than the arid scholasticism of empiriocriticism. None of the directions offer the slightest possibility of solving the problem of the antithesis between the two main factors of cognition: concept (thinking) and perception. They endow it (cognition) with a special quality, but do not overcome the antithesis between theory and object. They do not possess the concept of causality, which is also absent (superseded) in the philosophy of Mach. Historical relativism and logical-mathematical positivism are in agreement as to the relative character of concepts, and in this they adopt the epistemological position of the medieval nominalists – the true precursors of Mach and Avenarius.

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* Use of inflated and scientifically ungrounded terminology by the aforementioned writers is an unmistakable sign of mental weakness. To demonstrate a number of such ‘masterpieces’ at once, we might construct the following sentence: “Conventionalism and frictionalism in the interpretation of abstraction” do not reduce “in the process of prehension” “of perceptual knowledge” “the heuristic value of the method of extensive abstraction.”

Thus we have every reason to conclude that Machism in all its subsequent philosophical and methodological modifications has become the expression of the final stage in the crisis of knowledge. We have to do with a gigantic process of metamorphosis of the human spirit (mind). At its beginning we have (in Plato) the real beholding of the substantial, intelligible world (the world of the ideas); in the middle the experience accessible to the spirits of Scholasticism, of the possibility of uniting the conceptual, the abstract element arising from thinking consciousness, with the substantial, with revelation; in the final stage the subject becomes aware of the universal character of the phenomenology of thinking consciousness (spirit). And this whole process, which has wandered blindly into the impasse of empiriocriticism with its apparent idealism, lost its connection with sense-reality in cognition, which it failed at the same time to bring into connection with intelligible reality. The ‘I’-consciousness became enclosed in the world of flickering, shadowy, non-substantial ideas which one can arrange like small cubes in a children’s game; but from without this consciousness is attacked by a disconnected aggregate of sense-perceptions, whose real nature must apparently remain forever hidden from the human being.* 24)

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* Bachelard: “Knowledge will always be immanent for the idealists because it is closed off from everything external.” By this he means that sense- perception transcends the consciously perceiving subject.

The thinking spirit of our time proved in the end to be condemned to a fruitless vicious circle with a dual aspect. In the one case he is pursuing the shadow of his own subjectivity which (corresponding to the law of the shadow) inevitably slips away as the consciousness casting the shadow approaches. This is the outcome of the process, begun at the time of Socrates and Plato, of the objectification of the intelligible world in the individual human spirit, who thinks within the boundaries of sense-reality.

In the second closed circle the nature-philosophy beginning with Aristotle declares, through the fact that it is limited to a materialistic understanding of the human spirit (as a product of nature), that natural processes are the all-determining, the unconditioned (in Marxism), and leaves the theory of knowledge with no answer to the question what determines it. The nature of causality is understood here in the spirit of Baron von Münchhausen, who pulls himself out of the swamp by a tuft of his own hair.

To summarize what has been said so far: In the scientific methodology of the 20th century two main directions can be identified, which cannot in any circumstances be brought into a unity, thereby making impossible a true understanding of the world and man. One of them belongs to a spiritual stream whose beginnings lie in the old world of revelation. In the flow of this stream through the course of time, the cognizing spirit of man passed from metaphysics to the physics of the material world, but as it could not find a right relationship to this world, it turned to a subjective idealism and degenerated into solipsism and nominalism.

An idealism of this kind is confronted, from the earthly plane, by materialistic monism, a universal teaching which transfers the definition of the spirit to matter.

In the situation which thus arose, the leading of philosophy and science to a synthesis that corresponds to the reality of the world took on the character of an overriding problem on not only a scientific, but also a social level. And it needs to be recognized that this problem has already found a solution in Anthroposophy.

3. Science and Philosophy

In the confrontation between natural science and philosophy the dualism of percept(ion) and concept becomes manifest in a clear and decisive way. Attempts are made to overcome the dualism by means of a universalizing of one of the two sides, while in fact both form together a unified whole. In some cases philosophy (i.e. the realm of ideas, concepts) is assigned the role of a science of general methodology, in other cases the assumption is made that only the use of mathematical models will enable one to work out a unified theory of the systems, which can encompass methodologically all forms of science. In practice the latter standpoint prevails. The successes of natural scientific research and technical progress appear to give one every reason to share the view expressed by Jan Amos Komensky (Comenius) that “the study of philosophy at the present time is nothing more than a difficult and arduous form of idleness”.25)

G. Bachelard and J. Wilmot (a representative of operational rationalism or new realism) are of the opinion that traditional philosophy has neither an object of its own to research nor a research method; philosophical thinking, they say, has virtually no point of contact with science – i.e. natural science. The existing philosophy of science, so they claim, is not a philosophy of science itself.

That philosophy has an object of its own to research was disputed by Mach and Avenarius, who identified it with metaphysics. For this reason the adherents of scientism and neo-positivism reduced philosophy to logic, to mere operations with terms, and the physicalists, who draw on the theses of Hume, insist that any science whatever is only exact if it becomes mathematics of physics.

Such ideas can only be adopted by a person for whom the entire knowable world is a purely mechanical system. As a world-picture of this kind is by no means acceptable to everyone, sober voices are sometimes heard even among the hard-boiled materialists; for example: “The treatment of physics as the fundamental science is in a certain sense only a scientific varnish over the industrial orientation of today’s science.”26)

To find a compromise in the dispute concerning the relation be- tween philosophy and science in methodology, the adherents of the historical direction attempt to develop a special philosophy of science, since, as I. Latakos states: “Philosophy of science without history of science is empty, and the history of science without philosophy of science is blind.”27) Bachelard and Wilmot consider it indispensable to create a special theory of knowledge for natural science, as scientific (natural scientific) activity is “dialectical in principle” and does not take place in accordance with the principle of induction.28) For this reason the entire historical content of knowledge, so they believe, changes completely at certain intervals; new knowledge also reorganizes the old.

At the beginning of his scientific activity Bachelard was eager to at- tempt to bring theory of knowledge and the experience of perception together into a unified whole. It is true that at that time he adopted a naïve-realist position, but in this question this was especially fruitful as a starting-point. He said that any theory can justifiably be termed ‘realism’, if it engages in the interpretation of perceptions “on the level of the perceptions themselves”, and does not give the general the priority over the particular.* He confessed also to his belief in the “wealth of individual sensations that are given in the spatial world, and the systematic unity of thinking, which is abstract in its essential nature”.29)

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* Later he holds the view that scientific thinking does not move from the simple to the complicated.

For this reason the reader of his early works might ask the overriding question: Was not this methodologically-trained scientist attempting to build a bridge between Hegelian panlogism and Goethean phenomenalism? Not in the least; in Bachelard’s later works the naïve-realist element in his approach assumes the character of a rational materialism. The ray of true intuition which had once shone in his consciousness faded in the twilight of nominalistic constructions and his realism took on a materialistic colouring.

At first sight, dialectical materialism would appear to overcome, with a spark of thoroughness and consistency, the antithesis between a world based on perceptions and the world of thought, while avoiding at the same time all methodological radicalism. Its adherents subscribe to the view that science provides us with real knowledge, as the cognizing subject reflects objective reality in his thinking. The object of science is the whole of reality, including its reflection in the consciousness of man. Thus a monistic basis is created for the general methodology of science, where the question concerning the separation between natural science and philosophy is superseded (aufgehoben). Object and subject of cognition merge together into a unity – so much so, that the claim is put forward that the determining power of the categories consists in the mirroring in ‘universal characteristics’ of the fundamental contradiction between the material and the ideal elements; admittedly, cognition exerts no influence on the objects – the world is just the same after cognition as it was before. And yet all these assertions can sound highly seductive to someone who is looking for a unitary world-picture. Against the background of bloodless theories of the relativity of all that exists, one can to some degree feel enthusiasm when, without taking account of this world-view as a whole, one reads theses such as the following, with its breath of spiritual ‘stability’: “The laws of thinking and the laws of being are, with respect to their content, identical. The dialectic of concepts is a mirror-reflection of the dialectical movement of the real world. The categories of materialist dialectics have an ontological character and fulfill at the same time epistemological functions: Through reflecting the objective world, they serve as stages in the knowledge of it.”30)

We ask quite frankly: What are the thoughts of the exponents of scientism, of logical positivism and other nominalists of our time compared to the ‘fundamentality’ of such principles? Nevertheless, there is a direct affinity between them. This rests on the axiomatic recognition of one and the same outgoing premise: namely, that theory of knowledge is a synonym for the theory of mirroring (of reality in the human mind). But in this case, it no longer makes any fundamental difference whether the ideal is set aside in favour of the material or vice-versa. And the assertion that the gnoseology (epistemology) of the categories in dialectical materialism does not rob them of their ontological meaning is no more than a demagogical trick, if knowledge of the world does not enrich it in any way.

Regarding the identity of the laws of thinking and being, one should, before one talks about it, first clarify what content we are attaching to these two concepts. If we adopt the standpoint of Schelling, who supposed that genetically spirit proceeds from matter, but that spirit, once it has appeared, works back on it, this identity takes on the character of a polar inversion, which corresponds to its nature in the highest degree. In Marxism the inversion assumes the form of a movement that runs in a closed circle, with the result that both thinking and being are relativized. This has shown itself in practice with unmistakable clarity in the post-Soviet period, when the Marxist scholars started actively to combine materialism with experiments in parapsychology. These were previously forbidden, not because one was afraid of mysticism (this has nothing whatever to do with it). No methodological formula had been worked out by means of which one could have come to terms with the ‘counter-revolutionary’ radium* (B.P. Vysheslavtsev). Now the formula has been found, but it stands in contradiction to is own assumptions. For consciousness also mirrors the ‘reality’ that is modeled with the aid of psychotronic devices and electromagnetic fields, by means of which consciousness is influenced. But this will be a ‘reality’ that is not simply given to the sensory faculty, but which by means of sensory manipulation is directly aroused in the perceiving mind of the researcher himself. And yet it can still be worked upon by means of further scientific knowledge, just like ordinary reality. One can manipulate with its facts and, albeit indirectly, register its existence with the help of instruments. It is as though here one had found a sphere into which, after its decay, the radium ‘treasonously’ vanishes. But with this, all hope vanishes of ascertaining who, in the final analysis, is modelling what: is the laboratory experiment modelling the perceptions, or the perceptions the experiment? Is the model of being modelling its mirror-reflection, or is the mirror-reflection (thinking) modelling the model of being? This is the outcome to which the ingenuity and imprecision of the Marxist definition of the relation between consciousness and being has led. But the entire non-Marxist theory of knowledge and methodology of science has led to the same results, even its abstract-idealistic direction. Of course they were identical at their original source, or at least they belonged to the same direction of thought. This source must be sought in Mach and Avenarius.

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* The chemical element is meant.

Dialectical materialism combined Hegel’s dialectic eclectically with empiriocriticism, and although it eventually turned away from the latter, this did not alter anything fundamentally. They remained close relatives methodologically, and although they came before neo-positivism with its sign/symbol role of thinking in cognition they can both be seen as neo-positivist. They are all connected by a single epistemological standpoint, according to which thinking cannot be determined causally from within its own sphere, but is the outcome of various functional dependencies lying outside itself. This is how Mach sees it, and the same follows from the Marxistic mirroring theory. The Marxist has also nothing to object to “thinking the world according to the least expenditure of force” (Avenarius); nature remains rational even in its mirror-reflection. And as for the ‘ontological content’ of the categories, this is the ontology of existential nothingness.

Even the historical direction in methodology cannot deny its affinity with dialectical Marxism. For example, Popper states, despite the theses declaring that the world of cognition cannot be reduced to the world of material processes: “The weakness of subjectivism lies in the fact that it introduces a certain dependency of the world on us (as think- ers).”31) But Marxist gnoseology is of the same opinion.

To find approval in the world of ideas prevailing in science today, for the conclusions we draw, is extremely difficult. But it is gratifying that many people in that world are of the opinion that philosophy and, following it scientific methodology, having taken the human spirit as their starting-point, have arrived at a denial of the human being. There is a certain compelling force inherent in this antinomy.

The relativizing process affected all spheres of the spiritual life and the activity of the human being, and this led to his alienation from them. The criterion of scientific objectivity itself is put under review with the aim of eliminating the subjective factor. In practice this leads to a situation where, in place of science – with the exception of applied science – a pseudo-science arises, with the consequence that methodology and the real achievements of science are separated by a gulf that grows ever wider. The edifice of science that has been erected over the course of centuries thanks to human genius, is atomized, not merely because of errors in theory, but also as a result of the trivializing of the human spirit, the exhaustion of its earlier potential. New science and the old human being come into an objective contradiction to one another. And this will not turn out to the advantage of the human being, if he does not resolve the crisis within himself – and this will require that he finds new qualities in his own being. The relation between being and consciousness, where nature fills the role of being, has exhausted its metaphysical significance. The human being has now to do with his own gnoseological significance, where being proves to be the phenomenology of the spirit (the older one and the new), which creates culture out of nature. And if a crisis arises in culture, this crisis, determining consciousness, has its roots in the human being. We have in truth entered an epoch in which the downfall of civilization as a whole, but at the same time freedom of the spirit, is possible. We simply need to understand thoroughly the laws of development.

***

The initial impulse leading to the decline of science, in which philosophy and not technical progress plays the leading part, was given by the great figures of the past. They had in the end reached the correct conclusion that the solution of the fundamental question of theory of knowledge would require a change of consciousness. But these conclusions remained unnoticed, or were dismissed as the unavoidable ‘downside’ of philosophy, and people mainly focused their attention on the question how in the philosophical systems the one-sidedness had been deepened in the solution of the fundamental question. And this is easy to understand, because real genius was at work in this deepening process.

Let us take Fichte by way of example. In his polemical exchange with contemporaries who, as he said, were not able to raise philosophy “to the rank of a credible science”, he proposed to select as a basis for a comprehensive survey of the philosophy of science, philosophy in the actual sense of the word. This presupposes that it should be granted the right to be not just science, but higher science – ‘doctrine of science’ (Wissenschaftslehre), ‘science of the sciences’, which is in a position “to demonstrate the basic principle of all possible sciences which cannot be demonstrated within themselves”.32) The object of such a science, so he believes, is the system of human knowledge itself, since “beholding (Anschauen) without a concept is blind”.* 33) And what significance does beholding have for the concept? Fichte did not take up this question. He concludes: “The doctrine of science possesses absolute totality. Within it, One leads to All and All leads to One”, for “in the doctrine of science the ‘I’ is represented”.34)

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* We see that Lakatos cannot claim originality when he says that “the history of science is blind without the philosophy of science.”

The content of the doctrine of science is this: Reason is absolutely autonomous, it is only for itself, and for itself it is only it(self); all that it is can only be grounded within it, and only be explained from out of itself. This is the central principle of the ‘doctrine of science’. It is ‘certain through its own nature’. This means, so we would emphasize, that its transparent self-evidence is grounded in the absolutism of the triad: doctrine of science – reason – ‘I’. But how can the cognizing spirit approach this triad? Where must he begin? In the formulation of Fichte we have to do only with a kind of ideal. In order to find access to it, one must learn anew how to deal with the world of experience. In Fichte there occurs, parallel to his apologia of reason, a gradual setting aside of the world that is given in perception, in favour of the thinking spirit. In any case, it is well-known that, in drawing the ‘I’ out of an act of absolute positing, he was unable to bring it into connection with the world of experience, the Hegelian ‘otherness’, which would be, according to Goethe, the object of thinking, and not only of thinking: he also stated (and we allow ourselves here to partially paraphrase his line of thought) that the concept without beholding (Anschauen) is empty, abstract, dead.

Fichte called his doctrine of science transcendental idealism. In the subsequent history of philosophy it was relegated to the sphere of the unconscious and later demonized by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, banished into the sphere of psychology, where it assumed the character of transcendental materialism.

Such are the blind-alleys and even abysses in which theory of knowledge is trapped. To secure its release and make it fruitful again it is absolutely necessary to tread the path of that evolutionism which has to do with sensible-supersensible reality, and to form content-filled connections between theory of knowledge and the empirical sciences, so that in future no-one can permit himself to claim that the world is his ‘verification’.

These challenges can be met if one turns to Anthroposophy, where not only are the prior conditions laid down, but a general outline of a universal methodology already exists. Not through a vagary of chance, and not through any sort of mystical escape from the world, as its opponents like to claim, but thanks to its rejection of scientific dogmatism, false metaphysics, artificial premises in the theory of knowledge, it arrived at its results, which are able to lead mankind out of the crisis.

At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century there were a number of important directions of thought in the context of traditional philosophy which were in harmony with Anthroposophy. In a remarkable way they all show in how close a natural proximity to Goetheanism living scientific thinking stands – no matter when and in whom it may arise. Especially characteristic in this respect is Edmund Husserl. Regarding the question whether philosophy should be classified as a science, he described as its main feature the necessity for a fundamentally new approach to thinking. In a short study entitled ‘Philosophy as a Strict Science’, he says the following: “How philosophy is related to the natural sciences and the humanities (Geisteswissenschaften); whether the specifically philosophical element in its work – which is, after all, directed essentially towards nature and mind (Geist) – demands fundamentally new attitudes which will bring with them goals and methods that are entirely specific in philosophy; whether philosophical activity will lead us into, as it were, a new dimension, or will take its course on the same level as the empirical sciences of nature and mind (Geistesleben): this has remained a matter of controversy to this day. It shows that not even the actual meaning of philosophical problems has been brought to scientific clarity.”35)

Within the context of those directions of thought which we have analyzed, attempts were made, as we now see, to answer – either positively or negatively – the question posed by Husserl. But they proved unsatisfactory, firstly because of their extreme nominalism, and secondly because of their open or disguised materialism, which prevented them from remaining within the bounds of the real – or, according to N. Losky’s definition: in the bounds of ideal-realism.

The intrusion of materialistic natural science into philosophy did a disservice to both disciplines: it set up false goals for natural science, and in philosophy it distorted its method of cognition and precluded the possibility of its further development. In the very recognition of the fact we have just mentioned, Edmund Husserl sees the beginning of a process in which its sovereign rights were restored to philosophy. He says: “As in the most impressive sciences of modern times – those of mathematics and physics – the outwardly major part of the work is carried out according to indirect methods, we are only too inclined to overvalue indirect methods and fail to recognize the value of a direct approach. But it lies in the very nature of philosophy, to the extent that it returns to final origins, that its scientific work takes place in spheres of direct intuition (emphasis G.A.B.), and it is the most significant step that our age has to take to recognize that with philosophical intuition in the true sense, the phenomenological grasping of essential being, a boundless field of activity opens up, and a science attains, without all the indirect symbolizing and mathematizing methods, without the instrument of inferences and proofs, a wealth of knowledge that is both rigorous and of decisive importance for all subsequent philosophy.”36)

Somewhat more precise than this statement of Husserl is the following by Losky on the same theme; he writes in his ‘Foundations of Intuitivism’: “Intuitivism discloses and overcomes the false premise of the separation between the cognizing subject and the cognized object. Intuitivism with its thesis according to which knowledge is not a copy, a symbol or a manifestation of reality in the cognizing subject, but reality itself, life itself.... overcomes the dichotomy between knowing and being, without diminishing the rights of being in the slightest degree.”37)

Virtually the same as the thoughts of these two philosophers is said, described and proven by Anthroposophy, which rests on a broad basis in theory of knowledge, natural science and Goetheanism. ‘Direct intuition’ is here called ‘the power of judgment in beholding’ (anschauende Urteilskraft). To this power of judgment the ‘grounds of primal beginning’ – which are in fact archetypal (Ur-) phenomena – do indeed reveal themselves. The process of their intuitive – or beholding – cognition is the true form of being, higher than all others that are possible in sense-reality. It is the transitional form between the sense reality and the supersensible, and for this reason it has, as it were, two faces – but one centre: the human ‘I’. And in this sense Fichte is right when he says that in the doctrine of science the human ‘I’ itself is represented.

4. Science and the Study of Nature

We now turn to the concept of ‘science’ itself. Let us not be misled by the seeming multiplicity of its definitions, as we pick out its most salient characteristics of which – so we discover – there are not very many. They can be formulated as follows:

Science has reality as its object.
Science embodies a system of knowledge.
It is an activity.
It is determined to a greater or lesser extent by social factors.

These definitions which we have highlighted on a purely statistical basis may appear to some to be lacking in content, but few would question them, and if we do not use them we will have no basis whatever for a discussion of this theme.

If, merely from the standpoint of content, we analyse the full range of definitions of science, we have before us so broad a spectrum that we are forced to the following conclusion: “About science everything is known, yet no-one knows what science is.” Thus the British historian H. T. Buckle said in 1859 that science is “a codex of generalizations whose validity is indisputable to the extent that they can be covered by higher generalizations but not undermined by them.... They can be absorbed but not refuted by them”.38) In the middle of the 20th century Karl Jaspers firmly contradicts Buckle’s thesis and asks what irrefutability we can be speaking of, when science has no knowledge of its own meaning, when it is lacking in the ability to know the nature of being, to define the purpose of life etc.39)

It will do no harm to our investigation if we leave such views as the following outside the framework of the scientific context: Science is a generator of knowledge, or its ideal is technology, or it is the manifestation of a trans-individual subject that thirsts for the truth (Rickert); a merely personal quality that is lacking in universal relevance is what characterizes the views of academics for whom – to paraphrase an expression of Kant – the history of science is both its science and its philosophy. One will only find firm ground for an understanding of the meaning, the nature and purpose of science if the answer can be found to the question posed by Kant: Under what conditions is the existence of science as necessary and universal knowledge possible? The methodology of Anthroposophy maintains that the first of these conditions consists in establishing the object of science as a reality which falls into two parts: an object that is given in one’s perception and an ideal object that can be thought – which includes within its system, with inherent necessity, a third and all-important element: the cognizing subject.

Everywhere in non-Anthroposophical methodology we encounter conceptions which reject, with a greater or lesser degree of one-sidedness, this tri-une object of science. In some cases the importance of thinking is underestimated, in others that of experience is overestimated, and in nearly all of them one has no idea what to do with the cognizing subject. Treating the nature of the concept from a nominalist standpoint, the advocates of the positivist conception dismiss as meta-physical any methodological principle whatever which moves beyond the limits of a simple description of experience, and thereby reduce theory to the gathering of empirical data. An extreme advocate of such views was Max Planck. He says, for example, that the totality of human beings together with the whole of their sense-world and their planet “are no more than an infinitesimal nothing within the vastness and unfathomable sublimity of nature”. It would follow from this that we have behind the sense-world the ‘world of reality’, whose existence is independent of the human being. In the quest for knowledge of this real world physics pursues research into the physical world and, the closer it approaches the real world, the more it is forced to exclude sense-perceptions from the world-picture of physics and free it of anthropo-morphic elements. In the final analysis “a progressive departure from the physical world-picture of the sense-world means no less than growing proximity to the real world.”40)

For this reason Planck saw the ideal of experimental physics in as complete a removal as possible of the human being from experimental procedures. This position of Planck is not new. It has its source in the principle of scientific truth postulated by Francis Bacon, who maintained that, because “often enough our feelings deceive us”41), correcting them is one of the tasks of experiment.

We do not exaggerate the significance of the methodological direction which began with Bacon and plays a dominant role in the world today, if we say that thanks to it our entire civilization is given a direction which will lead the human being sooner or later to a symbiosis with the machine. Successful developments that have already taken place in the fields of psychotronics, genetic manipulation etc. bear witness to this with the utmost clarity. Here we must recognize that it is not the scientific and technical results arrived at by the experts that are leading to the decadence of civilization or something worse, but those consequences which exert their influence on the human factor in science.

The exclusion of the thinking and perceiving human being from the process of scientific cognition, the reduction of his role and function to that of a mere operative of this process, leads inevitably to the thesis that the world made manifest in the experiments of physics has a prior credibility. In this case physics opens up to us the ‘true’ picture of the world through overcoming the (human) subject within it! This would be the ultimate consequence of materialistic monism.

This form of neopositivism (which is entirely consistent within itself) does arouse considerable opposition in scientific circles, but of this it must be said that it arises as a consequence of its own inconsistency, its departure from its own criteria of scientific truth. But such is the nature of the thinking and feeling scientist. To eliminate it is not at all easy. Albert Einstein, who in his youth had subscribed to the philosophy of Mach, but later rejected it, perceptively called its creator “a good mechanic”, but “a lamentable philosopher”. In Einstein’s opinion “the edifice of our science” rests unavoidably “on principles which themselves do not stem from experience”.42) Even Heisenberg confessed that in his own works an important part is played by the stand-point of Einstein, according to which “every theory also contains within it unobservable quantities”. He says that the principle stating that only observable quantities should be used “cannot be applied consistently”; theory determines what can be observed.43)

No doubt all this sounds more sensational and more alive than many a schematic formula of eminent methodologists, but how can such views be reconciled with the demand of Planck, a fervent disciple of Einstein, that the picture of the world should be freed “from the individuality of the creative mind (spirit)”44) – (a demand already put forward by Newton)? As the emphasis in methodological research shifted away from philosophy and over to natural science, human thinking moved in a kind of circle. Through renouncing the possibility of knowing the essential nature of things with the help of philosophy, it arrived by way of natural science to the metaphysics of theory in the Kantian sense – the metaphysics of pure thinking. Was there anything fruitful in this movement in a closed circle? Yes, there definitely was. Thanks to it the futility of a one-sided appeal – either to thinking or to the experience of perception – became evident, in the first instance. And secondly, it proved how little justification there is in placing the question of the pure criteria of science exclusively in the realm of natural science, and thus laid the ground for the extension of the object of science to include art, ethics, sociology – i.e. intrinsically subjective forms of human activity, which are able not only to enrich our understanding of nature, but to grasp its essential being even more exactly than is possible for natural science – especially on its contemporary level – and, most crucially of all, the process of cognition itself became its object. A science that is limited to the investigation of nature has no organ, as Berdyaev rightly observes, “to perceive the freedom in the world”.45) But even in the realm of physics itself, the if not all-determining yet in no circumstances dispensable presence of the human subject is felt, in a unified picture of the world, to be an integral part of this world. B. Rieman, for example, bears witness to this. He was no metaphysician, yet he came to the conclusion that the system of space-time coordinates is, on the one hand, a mathematical assumption, while on the other it is “determined by the events occurring within it”.46)

The methodology of Anthroposophy goes far beyond foreshadowings of this kind, and in its normative procedure regards the human factor as system-forming, both in the realm of theory and of scientific experiment, whereby the last remaining forms of metaphysics (of theory) are overcome and the foundation is laid for a real monism and for freedom of the spirit, which is diametrically opposed to the freedom that can be offered to the human being by relativism or naïve anarchism.

5. Percept and Concept

In a letter to his friend Solowin written on 7 May 1952 Einstein tried to explain by means of a diagram (see Fig. 1) a special method of scientific inquiry to which he resorted when the principle of the observability of phenomena – which he acknowledged – and the traditional method of induction proved inadequate. With the line or surface E in the diagram the totality of sense-experience is represented, “the labyrinth” of sense impressions including hallucinations, in a word – “all the direct, given elements of our experience”. In the field marked with the number 2 we have the judgments “arising from axioms”, made on the basis of the different elements given to us in experience. Higher up, in point A we have the system of axioms. How does it arise? – Not by way of induction, says Einstein. Sphere A, or 1, determines sphere 2 logically, but deductively, and the special judgments arising further from axioms are brought into relation to sphere 3. Between levels E and S there is no logical connection moving in an upward direction.47)

In other words, Einstein stands here in contradiction to the general principle of scientific truth as originally formulated by Bacon. He claims that “an inductive method that is able to lead to the fundamental concepts of physics”, simply “does not exist” (!).48)

The scientist is led from E to S by a certain curve, a leap, a creative effort, which is accomplished ‘blindly’; the two spheres stand, according to Einstein, in an “intuitive connection” that is rooted in the human psyche. Their mutual relation is revealed through a process of illumination the nature of which was unknown to Einstein, and for this reason he only conveyed his secret thoughts to a friend.

From the standpoint of spiritual science there is no secret involved in what Einstein touched upon instinctively. It is the phenomenon of what is known as direct knowledge, which is the foundation for Goethean ‘ideal perception’, the power of judgment in beholding. To summon it into action, a special attitude of soul is required. Einstein to some degree called it forth in himself when he was imbued with the “passionate wish to comprehend” the fragmented and “chaotic” world of perceptions. But whoever feels the wish to master a cognitive method of this kind should not, in undue haste, dispense with induction, that alma mater of genuine, not mysteriously enlightening but individually guided and – albeit in its own way – normative deduction, whose by-product is the heuristic models of methodology.

In his best-known works Einstein offers a clear and popular description of the inductive method of scientific cognition. “Science,” he says, “is concerned with the totality of primary concepts, i.e. the concepts that are directly related to sense-perceptions, and with the theorems which form a connection between them. In the initial phase of its development this is all that is contained in science. But.... the totality of concepts and mutual relations arrived at in this way is lacking in any logical unity. In order to make good this deficiency, one invents a system with fewer concepts and interrelations – a system in which the original concepts and interrelations which belong to the ‘first layer’, are now retained as derivative concepts and interrelations. This new, ‘secondary system’ is characterized by greater logical unity, with the disadvantage that it contains only elementary concepts, ‘second layer concepts’, of the kind that are not directly connected with the complex of sense-perceptions.”49) Then we ascend to the third system, with its still greater poverty of primary concepts, and so on “until we reach the greatest conceivable unity and the lowest number of concepts in the logical foundation that is still compatible with our sense perceptions”.

This stage of the ‘greatest possible unity’ is basically identical with point A in Fig. 1. It is thus accessible from both directions: by way of scientific induction and also by way of ‘beholding’ in the Goethean sense, which means that the latter, no less than induction, is rooted in the reality of the world, but demonstrates a higher level of the individual spirit, which is especially important if science is to be for us more than an end in itself; but here there are important consequences for science, too.

Let us consider in more detail this meeting-point of the two methods of cognition. We begin by looking again at Einstein’s surface E, on which there is spread out before us a disconnected aggregate of sense- impressions, which includes the data of experiment. The primary activity with which we approach an experience from a scientific, cognitive standpoint consists in the process whereby the single percepts call forth in us their correspondences, the concepts: defining, quantitative etc., and we bring the concepts into relation with the percepts. Thus a second, ideal reality emerges above the reality of the percepts. The phenomena or facts of cognition which are composed out of elements of both realities form an already consciously apprehended but still disconnected conglomerate of experience. Our system of knowledge at this stage only takes up complex elements. Now begins the abstract work of the spirit. It finds connections between the elements (Fig. 2) and one can elaborate them with the help of mathematical logic, according to the method of logical positivism, linguistic analysis etc. But in most cases there will be a mechanical processing of the experimental data, consisting in the solving of the system of equations with a certain number of unknowns. In the course of this work, as we ascend from one stage to the next, we become ever further removed from surface E where we started, which has a certain ‘thickness’, because the reality cognized by us has been taken hold of in consciousness. On the higher levels of mathematical abstraction, elements and connections assume a purely ideal character and they begin to determine one another reciprocally. There is within them less and less of the sense-perceptible element we started out with, just as is the case with the homeopathic dilution of substances in medicine. We must therefore ask the question: What kind of reality do we have before us in point A? It stands without any doubt whatever (and it could be, for example, a newly-discovered particle), owing to the many levels of abstraction, in contradiction with one of the fundamental principles of natural science: namely the principle of observability. Natural science ought here to dispense with the results gained in this way or, alternatively, it should abandon the criterion of scientific truth it postulates. It cannot do the first, for perfectly understandable reasons; the second drives it, so long as this criterion remains in force, into the abyss of materialistic metaphysics. It therefore takes refuge in a third possibility – irrationalism; it adopts the standpoint of Planck, according to which the human being is no more than a hindrance in experiment. And why – we would remark parenthetically – should science not proceed in this way when, given the present – continually advancing – level of computer technology, the discovery by inductive means of point A mentioned by Einstein is only a matter of time and the funding of scientific research? Science has gained the capacity to forcibly wrest from nature her secrets. But once we acknowledge that both – nature and science – are without soul, we are signalizing the beginning of a metaphysics such as the world has never seen before.

We then arrive at something that is half fantastic in nature, but which nevertheless assumes entirely real features. Sooner or later it will force everyone to recognize the correctness of materialism and of the conclusion it draws; namely, that the reality known to us is identical to the reality unknown to us. We think of the path followed by applied science, where the aim is to create self-instructing and self-regulating, ‘thinking’ cybernetic systems. The illusory character of their world must not be confused with the illusionism in theory of knowledge; when the time comes it can become objectively real in the future. And in order, when this happens, to answer the question: Why will this still be an illusory world? – the task will be to prove convincingly that in the universe only the ‘I’ is real, and that in the physical-material world only the human being has an ‘I’. When we exclude him from science or lose him within it, we deprive science of reality. To discuss this on the level of his concepts with a materialist who contradicts his own principles, has no sense at all. At the same time no-one, in the age in which we live, has the right to ignore the arguments of the materialists. Anthroposophy meets these demands through maintaining in its dialogue with opponents the position of evolutionism. This is a constructive attitude; instead of the empty abstraction of definitions it considers both the phenomena and the concepts in their development and thus reveals their meaning. It takes time to follow this path, admittedly, and for this reason the entire content of the present book is needed to give to the question posed above an answer that is fully grounded in every detail or, to express it more precisely, to show how Anthroposophy answers it. We would point out in particular that the answer to the question is of decisive importance for the fate of civilization. If humanity fails to find this answer or tries to evade it, then, as Rudolf Steiner says, materialism will become real. And then the human being proves, in reality, to be superfluous on the Earth. Far behind materialism there are beings of the spiritual, sensible-supersensible world who are waging a battle in the universe for the realization of their own special goals. These spirits have remained behind in their development and are striving to make up for what they have missed by using the human being as an instrument and completely ignoring his own evolutionary tasks. For this reason our present activity – cognition – is not useless, and the socializing of science on a colossal scale has not come about by chance – but more of this later. It seems to us that scientific illusionism started to take hold from the moment when neo-positivism began to regard theory of knowledge and ontology as metaphysics. Thus the initial grounds were laid for irrationalism, which destroyed a proper relation to experience. Parallel to the strengthening of the neo-positivist position the development of the empirical sciences was taking place, and this seemed to be showing that even the activity of perception is metaphysical. In order to remove this characteristic one started to ‘build over’ the organs of perception, ‘to put them in touch with reality’ by means of measuring instruments, pickup apparatus. But in doing this, one achieved the opposite of what was intended. On this question we would quote the opinion of Einstein, who is held in high regard in the scientific world. He says: “An observed phenomenon gives rise to certain occurrences in the measuring apparatus; it is their cause. Thus we have to do with processes in the apparatus which work upon our sense-organs and thereby impress themselves in our consciousness.”50)

Operating with experience in this way has the result that the reflective activity of the experimenting scientist gains the upper hand over perception, and the whole thing is reduced, as Bachelard acknowledges, to “the noumenal* (i.e. conceptual) preparation of the phenomena, which are technically constructed”. This is what the outcome is like, just to give an example: When in the research on protons we speak of the path they follow in a mass spectrograph, they show themselves to have been prepared by technical means and do not exist in nature.51) Indeed, even Planck refused to regard the quantum as anything more than the formal mathematical procedure. Einstein concurred with the view that multi-dimensional spaces, the wave-function in quantum mechanics, are ultimately nothing more than formalized concepts of theoretical physics.

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* In the sense of Bachelard – preparation on the thought level only. 58

This is what the most recent physics looks like in reality, and Popper and Lakatos had simply no right in their methodological conceptions to draw from it logical conclusions which justify the separation of knowledge from the cognizing subject in experimental science. Popper maintains that knowledge in the usual sense exists “independently of the knower – outside the cognizing subject”; it moves, he says, within some kind of “third” world which reminds one half of the intelligible world of the Platonic ideas and half of that of the Hegelian objective spirit.52) We are seriously mistaken if we think that Popper is speaking here of ideal beings. No, we have here to do with the usual metaphysics of nominalist theory. These are the fruits of natural scientific illusionism which wishes on the one hand to build up everything on a normative approach to methodology, but on the other hand reduces theory of knowledge to the metaphysical part of scientific theory. And so, when observability is also eliminated as a criterion of scientific truth, scientific theory in its entirety acquires a metaphysical character – i.e. we end up in the realm of the absurd.

All the elements of the structure of the atom are unobservable as objects of experimental science. The philosophy of science has the task of constructing out of them a world which resembles the world of perceptible objects. There emerges something like an inside-out Kantianism: The thing-in-itself that is known, but not given to us in our sensations!

The building-up of models, mathematical formalism, the creating of theories – all these are products of the human intellect, which gives science a ‘face’, and determines the way in which the material world is interpreted. The method of cognition and the content of science are unthinkable outside the cognizing subject for the simple reason that their relationship is, from the outset, a contradictory one. In the triad: idea, perception, subject one of the elements can never replace another. If one neglects this initial position, which makes methodology and knowledge possible, then irrationalism arises as an antithesis to the real which, taken as a whole, also contains within it the idea.

This is the mistake that is made by Bachelard when he asserts that scientific observation “transcends what is immediately given” and “reconstructs reality”.53) To interpret observation in this way is just as unscientific as the theological conception of spiritual beings who have the ability to intervene directly in the world of earthly experience. It is given to the world of experience to do no more than determine the world of our concepts in accordance with law (and not arbitrarily). And the world of concepts, for its part, is not allowed to alter the objective character of experience. Goethe says the senses do not deceive; we fall into error when we interpret experience wrongly.

The task of science, of knowledge, consists in connecting the experience of perceptions with thinking, in such a way that we do justice to the essential nature of both. Science itself is a system of knowledge and of methodology; these two constitute a dialectical pair, i.e. they stand in permanent contradiction to one another and at every stage of the development of knowledge they reach a synthesis in the cognizing subject (science is an activity), on which his (the subject’s) progress depends. Human activity, on both the material and the higher, spiritual level, is motivated by this antithesis and receives through it its impulses. Thus is brought about the unity of ‘I’-consciousness: first the gnoseological and then also the substantial. The ‘I’-consciousness of the human being, once it has come into existence, becomes a part of nature, i.e. of the objective world. It is manifestly clear that, once it has come into being, not only the composition of nature, but also the connections between its parts are changed; and because its character is of an ideal nature it forms a part of the world of natural law. It follows from this that nature that is known is different from the nature that was there before the act of knowing took place. A further conclusion arises from this: namely, that knowledge of nature is an integral part of its process of development. Living nature, which has a holistic character, develops by virtue of the fact that there is present within it a supernatural (not extra-natural) system-forming principle; consequently, human cognition, being organized in this or that way, must have its own system-forming principle, and this can be nothing other than the cognizing subject. His ‘I’-consciousness is for the system of knowledge the fundamental law. An organic world-view is therefore always personalistic.

In the science of the 20th century, parallel to the attempt to play down the significance of thinking consciousness and its organizing creative function, a direction of thought was developed with the quite contrary aim of connecting the methodology of science with the system-forming activity of thinking. This is what is known as systems analysis, within the context of which a systems theory is emerging which, it is claimed, could become the general methodology of the special sciences. This direction arose in the thirties, and in the fifties when the ‘Association for Research in the Field of General Systems Theory’ was founded in the U.S.A. as an initiative of the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, it began to function independently. In the 60’s and 70’s the work of the Association became known throughout the world. Systems research was begun in all the developed countries. Attempts were made to extend it into the sphere of the humanities, but gradually these activities were restricted to economics and leadership in industry – due mainly to the inability to break free from a materialistic and neo-positivist way of thinking. On the basis of a non-organic world-view one can do no more than bring to light the functional connection of the elements, and the system-forming principle remains an unknowable ‘thing in itself’. For this reason there is no way of divining what a system, as an object of research, actually is.

Fear of the metaphysics of the thinking spirit narrowed and weakened systems research. One could also imagine that it was deliberately narrowed down when the great potential inherent in it became evident and one noticed that it was leading science to the boundaries of the supersensible. Here we would merely point to the fact that Nikolai Losky developed, with the help of the systems method, the, in its own way, spiritual-scientific idea of ‘hierarchical personalism’ and laid the ground conceptually for the thinking subject’s ability to penetrate into the sphere of the transcendent, absolute principle.54) The tremendous wealth of possibilities inherent in the systems method is opened up in spiritual science, in the methodology of which it constitutes an essential element. We will be returning to this repeatedly in future chapters.

6. Directions of Thought which accompany Anthroposophy

The alienation of the subject of cognition from perception, and then from knowledge of the cognizing subject himself, had the consequence that rational science – as it is in its true nature – finally became caught in a metaphysical materialism, and philosophy in an absolute illusionism. In social life this development led to a growth in irrational tendencies. This is convincing proof of the fact that the crisis of culture and civilization has its roots in the crisis of knowledge. But we understand the working of this law wrongly if we adopt the standpoint of the founder of the logistics school, A. N. Whitehead, when he delivers the following emotional appeal: “To set limits to (abstract) speculation is to betray the future!”55) For speculation itself betrays the future if it rejects the need to overcome its limits in the only possible way; by qualitatively transforming consciousness in strict accordance with the laws of development.

When at the close of the 19th century philosophy had exhausted its possibilities on the paths of abstract thought, it turned its attention to the sphere of the unconscious. As a result, the traditional view of the unconscious as a lower form of soul activity lying behind the threshold of conscious mental representations (Leibniz) was finally demolished by Eduard von Hartmann, who treated the unconscious as a universal principle, as a foundation of all that is. Thus in theory of knowledge a step was taken beyond the limits of pure reflection, and this pushed back the limits which it had set to knowledge. The unconscious became a synonym for the super-conscious. There was a sense – albeit very vague to begin with – that within it there was a certain connection, governed by the laws of evolution, of the individual will dwelling in the unconscious, with the chain of causality which can be made conscious and which opens up to speculation the path towards reunion with the world-will on a conscious (or super-conscious) level.* The first to experience this was Goethe, who, as an empirical realist, was not only a phenomenalist but also a voluntarist where the experience of thinking was concerned.

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*Mendeleev discovered his periodic law of the elements – a tremendous achievement of rational science – in dream. Lorenz was unaware of the implications of his discovery: of the principal equation of the special theory of relativity.

If one is to realize this reunion in practice, one must not dispense with the formal-logical foundations of thought. On the contrary, one must strengthen them, in order then to transform them in a definite way and raise them onto a higher level. In other words, the task that arises on this path is that of gaining normative control of the unconscious, which manifests as the irrational only if it remains unknown. At the same time, the question arises: What does it mean to know the unconscious? One cannot unite with it either in the element of the concept or in that of perception. When we unite thinking with the percept, we must direct our attention to the will activity carried out by us in that moment. For in this activity the human unconscious can be seen to stand particularly close to the process of becoming conscious. As we bring order, concentration and autonomy into this will-activity, we create the pre-conditions for its ‘Aufhebung’ (superseding and preserving) in the thinking, in order to find ourselves again within its pure element – the superconscious. Then the door is opened for us to direct knowledge – in ‘beholding’ – and this is at the same time the condition of human freedom. Such are the highest elements of the Goethean theory of knowledge and of that unified methodology of science which exists already in the spiritual heritage of Rudolf Steiner. A right relation to it can, of course, not be found if one cannot grasp the character of its connections with the spiritual heritage of culture through which it is determined, but not predetermined. To give outer expression to it was an especially difficult task, just as it is difficult to create great poetic works even if one has a talent for poetry. The laws of true cognition are the laws of creative activity. While they possess the character of the universal, they nevertheless take on an individual form of expression. Thus the culture of antiquity and the culture of the Renaissance, which have so great an affinity with one another as regards their cultural canon, constitute two quite different cultural phenomena, because their creators were personalities of different soul types.

Something similar occurs in the history of philosophy and the natural sciences. Within the context of its structural universality numerous thinkers and men of learning were active, but only few of them, who were creative and at the same time artistically gifted in their field, were able to bring new impulses to philosophy or science. What they created, forms within cultural history a unified whole of which it can be said that it is intimately related to the Anthroposophical impulse and stands in harmony with it. The peculiar feature of this whole consists in the fact that the chronological sequence of the development of the ideas does not play a decisive role within it. It is always characteristic of their creators that they break with tradition. They stand, as it were, above their time and are, although most intimately connected with it, not determined by it. They appear as though ‘from above’ and bring with them the task of renewing their epoch when it is ripe for a new metamorphosis. It is always agonizingly difficult for them to be understood by their contemporaries. We find a first example of this in Socrates and his death sentence. Such personalities, who lived in the past, in some cases thousands of years ago, seem in other epochs like contemporaries, but even then they are not understood completely. In their work is hidden the mystery of the creation of new things. And this mystery is, so to speak, ‘not of this world’; whoever undertakes to investigate it must do so with care and sensitivity, in order not to hinder its emergence and its growth, upon which the spiritual progress of entire cultures can sometimes depend.

These special impulses of spiritual development need, in order to enter the stream of life and to be born in the world of culture, certain factors and conditions which lie in the temporal stream of the development of views on life and the world where structural laws of a universal nature are at work. When one thing finally unites with the other, one can have the impression that there is simply one single, general stream of cultural development. But this impression is deceptive. If it were true, the ‘ideal state’ of Plato would long have triumphed on Earth, in which the conditions for the emergence of the new would have been eradicated. The cultural process is two-dimensional; its real ‘curve’ shows itself to be at every one of its points the resultant of two kinds of forces: those which move along the horizontal of time, and those which activate this horizontal from above. The second kind of force is always coloured by the special characteristics of the age, which sometimes modify very strongly the nature of its activity, but not its essential content, because this remains in its most varied aspects one and the same.

Anthroposophy possesses precisely this quality. It is simultaneously new and old. The epistemological doctrine of ‘beholding’, which represents the central core of its methodology, can be found, albeit in a quite different form, not only in the history of philosophy, but also in the Mysteries of antiquity, in mythology. Plato and Aristotle, Kant, Schelling and Fichte wrote about it. But only thanks to Goethe and Rudolf Steiner did it become a phenomenon of science in the full sense of the word, new and in its form unrepeatable, a phenomenon of the spiritual life of the new cultural epoch. The individual development of these creators was ahead of its time. With regard to Rudolf Steiner, a special account would be necessary, to convey an idea of how outstanding this personality is. But if the full potential of the spiritual creativity of these personalities was to be realized in the cultural life, a deeply-felt need for it would have to arise. And in fact it did arise. At the beginning of the 20th century it became more necessary than ever in all spheres of human life, as the crisis of civilization bears very eloquent witness.

Of course the extent of the crisis need not have been so catastrophic, but it is invariably the case that a need for renewal goes hand in hand with a crisis of what went before. Crisis is a structurally necessary part of development. For this reason, when we discuss the methodological directions which have led the culture of thinking into a complete impasse, we are not in any way challenging their right to exist. They are indispensable to development, but in another sense. They belong to its temporal axis, where development takes place at the price of countless attempts on the basis of trial and error; here even the most trivial phenomena of the spirit play their necessary part, and crises constitute an antithesis that is indispensable for development. In this sense the neo-positivist and abstract-idealistic methodological doctrines we have discussed bear witness through their decadence, but at the same time through their sophisticated intellectuality, to the fact that our epoch is ripe for qualitative, radical metamorphoses of the thinking spirit. This old rationality in its lapses and digressions asked very important questions of cognition.* It was in order to answer these questions that Anthroposophy came into the world. Already at the beginning of the 20th century these questions pervaded, so to speak, the entire intellectual aura of Europe. The ideas of Anthroposophy were, one can truly say, ‘in the air’ at that time. A remarkable phenomenon in philosophy testifies to this fact. After Rudolf Steiner had published independently his epistemological works, written in connection with the natural-scientific studies of Goethe, a number of important, independent philosophical directions emerged, which could quite justifiably be described as direct forerunners of his philosophy, indeed of Anthroposophy in its entirety. They are all Goetheanistic in spirit as to the method and the spirit of the ‘I’ which lives in them and lends them a particularly living and awakening quality, distinguishing them very strongly from the lifeless constructions of positivism. One must count among these directions first and foremost the phenomenology of Husserl and two of its offshoots, which then became directions in their own right: the existentialist philosophy of Heidegger and the philosophical anthropology of Scheler.

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*We need but recall the German physicist and philosopher Du Bois-Reymond, who spoke about the, in his view, insoluble problems of cognition, and wrote about the way psychic processes are causally determined by material processes, etc.

If we do not dwell on a number of one-sided qualities of Husserl’s philosophical system which crept in under the influence of the historical-philosophical inheritance – we could mention for example the assertion of the priority of consciousness over against reality (when in fact the two are identical) – but crystallize out what is new and centrally important, then we find that his demonstration of the immanent nature of thinking consciousness meets this description. Generally speaking, philosophy is mainly concerned with the problem of the objective nature of all that is not consciousness but is only cognized by it. Husserl is concerned with the activity of consciousness itself in the process of thought-formation, but within it the thoughts that bring consciousness into movement – i.e. the nature of selfhood and the self- movement of consciousness. In this way consciousness is viewed by Husserl not as a means but as an object of philosophical analysis, which leads this philosopher (via Franz Brentano) to a certain agreement with the doctrine of Scholasticism regarding the intentionality of consciousness.

Fundamentally speaking, there is already contained in the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas (disregarding here the interpretation given by the Church to his teaching) of the two intentions (‘intentio prima’ and ‘intentio secunda’), the origin of the principal question of philosophy as it was formulated in modern times, beginning with Kant – the question as to the relation of consciousness and being.

Kant attempted, in his critique of the old dogmatic metaphysics, to provide a rational foundation to the concept of the objective (world) as a product of the activity directed by the intellectual understanding to- wards (both factual and possible) experience. The unsatisfactory results of his philosophy are well-known. For this reason Fichte and Hegel, in contrast to Kant, sought to demonstrate the identity of being and consciousness by way of pure theory of knowledge. Looking at the system of Kant on the one hand, and those of Fichte and Hegel on the other in their relation to the cognizing subject, we see how they complement one another in the sense that in their totality they formulate with the necessary thoroughness the question as to the origins of the autonomous self-movement of consciousness, on the level of two intentions: that intention which is rooted in the experience of the perceptions, and that which works in pure thinking. Extremely favourable conditions were created by these philosophers for the overcoming of the dualism which had emerged in the course of 25 centuries of the history of philosophy as a result of the divergence of the intentions of empirical thinking and pure thinking in the human soul. The solution could have been found in that form of monism which shows how, through the force of evolution, the unity of the intentions is reconstituted in the existence of the individual spirit as a second entelechy. The Holy Scriptures themselves speak of the significance and the truth of this monism. We refer to the words of Christ spoken to his guest Nicodemus who came “by night”: “Verily, verily I say unto thee, except a man be born again (i.e. from above, from cosmic heights – G.A.B.) he cannot see (i.e. behold – G.A.B.) the Kingdom of God .... Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God (into the world of imaginative and still higher forms of consciousness – G.A.B.). That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3, 3-6). It need hardly be emphasized that Christ, when He speaks of the birth “of the flesh”, is not stating that the human being of the Old Testament had no soul. The Bible says: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him.... and man became a living soul” (Genesis 1, 27; 2,7). This means that the immortal soul, the first entelechy of which Aristotle speaks, is ‘being’. In the course of the evolutionary process it unites with the consciousness in the ‘other’. In order that they may become a unity here it is necessary to be born again – “of the spirit”, which expressed in the concepts of philosophy would mean: Beginning on the level of individ- ual perception, to bring order to their experience through the abstract understanding, the lesser ‘I’, and to ascend to the experience of the being of selfhood in pure thinking, and then – in the beholding of the ideas – to the world of thought-beings. In other words it is necessary in the end to return to the starting-point, to perception, but to ideal and then supersensible perception, but on a completely individual basis. Thus the second entelechy is attained; and this is the third intention: ‘ich’ = ICH (lesser ‘I’ = greater ‘I’).

This is how we should understand Husserl when he advances the thesis that the world is the product of an unfolding of the human subjectivity which the human being can never transcend; or when he poses the question: “How can the pure phenomenon of cognition meet up with something that is not immanent to it; how can the absolute givenness of cognition to the self meet up with a non-givenness to the self?”56)

The identity of consciousness and being can only be deduced on the basis of a system-analysis of the holistic structure of the self-conscious and cognizing subject which at no point has absolute limits. Whoever speaks of the limits of knowability, mostly has the abstract in mind; a breakthrough beyond these limits presupposes a qualitative change of consciousness. This is why Husserl resorts to a radical reductionism of consciousness (which, so he believes, corresponds to the spirit of the approaching epoch of phenomenology), and this, so he writes, “has the mission to bring about an entirely personal transformation, comparable in the first instance to a religious conversion, but bearing within it, over and above this, the greatest existential transformation that humanity as humanity is given the task to accomplish”.57) Thus the task is to create a state of consciousness with the immanent characteristics of being, which also means to be born “of the spirit” and “enter into the Kingdom of God”.

Husserl came thus far in his thinking, but in the end found himself in a state of isolation in the scientific world – a fate that had also befallen Goethe in his time. Husserl’s call – and it had also been the call of Goethe – to raise oneself to a beholding of ‘the pure phenomena’ through the ‘pure consciousness’ of the ‘pure I’ was considered unfulfillable, even unscientific. Exactly the same objection is raised against the spiritual science of Rudolf Steiner. The fault lies in the inconsistency and the disloyalty with respect to experience which are characteristic of the scientific views prevailing today, their fixation on the quantitative principle in development. For this reason Einstein remained silent about his experience of spontaneous deduction, which Goethe, Rudolf Steiner, Husserl and a number of other thinkers had provided with a strictly scientific foundation with the help of natural-scientific, philosophical and philosophic-esoteric methodology. The esoteric aspect became indispensable, because it had become necessary to find a relation to the emergent new attribute of the individual spirit which was leading it across the boundary of the sense-perceptible world.

Someone who has already studied the spiritual-scientific system of Rudolf Steiner and then becomes acquainted with the works of Husserl, might very well suppose – if Husserl were not a fully autonomous and independent thinker – that he had worked within the context of the further development of the philosophical and Goetheanistic ideas of Rudolf Steiner, or rather that he had been their forerunner. The root of the problem – “How can consciousness be metamorphosed so as to become conscious of the unconscious – of what, from the abstract standpoint, is the irrational?” – is found in ‘beholding’, in Rudolf Steiner’s understanding of the process. And do we not, in the final analysis, also find it in Husserl when he says that “only through a return to the original sources of ‘beholding’ .... Can the concepts (of philosophy – G.A.B.) be intuitively clarified, the problems (of philosophy) be newly formulated on an intuitive basis, and then also be resolved in principle”?58) In ‘beholding’ is made manifest the source of transcendental subjectivity which is, basically, a higher unconscious (super-conscious) – “pure subjectivity”, as Husserl calls it. It can be attained as a result of a complex procedure, whose first stage consists in ceasing altogether to posit the reality of the world that is given in sense-perception. One of Husserl’s critics, F. Austeda, says for this reason that his philosophy is “actually no more than a refined form of psychic self-observation”.59)

But this is not by any means a weakness. Here we need only register the fact that, in the 20th century, philosophy merges with psychology to form a unified whole. Rudolf Steiner, who showed why and how this unavoidably takes place, wrote straightforwardly on the title page of the ‘Philosophy of Freedom’: “Results of Soul Observation according to Natural-Scientific Method.” But a ‘total collapse of philosophy’ such as his critic Eduard von Hartmann had feared, did not occur and cannot occur if we do not wish to deprive philosophy of its practical value.* For when consciousness really attains to being, ‘the living soul’, theory of knowledge as immanent to the (human) subject merges with psychology, or rather with psychosophy, for the soul of the human being, independently of any teachings about it on the earthly plane, expands into supersensible reality.

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* Its ‘collapse’ takes place when it is combined with parapsychology, which Hartmann rightly feared, and Sigmund Freud and, still more, Carl Jung were those who were to justify these fears.

This is how the existence of the individual spirit is made known in its new form. On the world-historical level its first appearance was marked by the famous conversation between Goethe and Schiller, in which Goethe attempted to explain the nature of the archetypal plant which he experienced in ‘beholding’, in ideal perception. Schiller objected that it was only an idea, and Goethe replied as follows: “I am only too glad to have ideas without realizing it, and to even see them with my own eyes.”60)

Husserl speaks of the need to train one’s thinking so that it acquires the capacity of ‘intellectual beholding’; Goethe speaks of the ‘power of judgment in beholding’; Fichte and Schelling of the ‘organ of beholding’ of the spirit. Thus emerges that mighty phenomenology of the spirit which is finally crowned by Anthroposophy.

Amongst the creations of the human spirit which, as we have characterized them, stand close to Anthroposophy, accompany it and, as in this case the time factor plays no part, provide a frame for it, there is yet another which confirms our idea of the difference between the ‘vertical’ of the spirit and the ‘horizontal’ of its becoming in time. We refer to the philosophical system of Nikolai O. Losky.

Of Losky another Russian philosopher, V.V. Zenkovsky said that he was “almost the only Russian philosopher who built up a system of philosophy in the truest sense of the word”.61) And this is really the case. In Losky’s system there are no special sections devoted to the philosophy of history or law, and he only touches briefly on questions of aesthetics. But he develops his own theory of knowledge, an ontology, an ethics; he made an important contribution to Russian sophiology. All this entitles us to classify the system of his views as a system of philosophy in the truest sense of this word. The affinity of his system to Anthroposophy could be characterized in the following way. Rudolf Steiner said that if he had followed only his personal inclination he would have devoted his entire life to philosophy. If we ask what kind of philosophy he might have developed instead of Anthroposophy, then the philosophy of Losky could provide us with an answer.

And, incidentally, if Losky’s philosophy had been taught at Russian universities in the way that, until recently, the philosophical classics were taught at German universities, this would have been a great achievement of Russian culture on the path to Anthroposophy.

From the purely philosophical standpoint Losky thought through in great depth a wide range of concepts which proved to be key elements in Anthroposophy. In a similar spirit to the Goethean studies of Rudolf Steiner, he attempted to solve the main question of philosophy. In his ontology he created a philosophical foundation for what Rudolf Steiner developed as a doctrine of the sensible-supersensible nature of evolution, of the highest creative beings – the Divine hierarchies – and of much more, right up to the teaching of reincarnation.

Following the basic principle of his philosophy: “All is immanent to all”, Losky gave an ontological foundation to theory of knowledge, thereby enabling it to flow in the direction of Goethe’s and Steiner’s thought. Characteristic of this direction is the striving for immediate knowledge, which is expressed in philosophy, in its special, scientifically justified freedom from prejudice, its renunciation of dogma, its ability to overcome unfounded conventions of indirect knowledge, of which Mach said at the end of his life that they seemed to him like an evil spirit which leads the thinker round and round in a vicious circle.

Losky’s system of philosophy is monistic. He gave his monism the name “concrete organic ideal-realism”. In it he developed the idea that “the reality which one cognizes cannot be copied or reproduced by the subject who makes thought-judgments, but is itself present in the act of judgment, is itself a component of this act; this direct presence of being is also that which compels the cognizing subject to acknowledge being”.62) Such an act of acknowledgement has two sides. One of them is the general-philosophical, where Losky shows himself to be a traditionalist when he says: “.... Ontology must receive its orientation from epistemology, and not vice-versa”.63) The second side represents what is peculiar to Losky’s philosophy; it is new, and to express it openly required great courage in the philosopher. Defining his realism, he says: “.... From time immemorial the view has prevailed that the supersensible simultaneously and of necessity also stands above experience. If this were true, we, more than anyone, would protest against realism, since it would lead to a rejection of empiricism and to admission of the possibility of transcendental knowledge.... (but) the non-sense-perceptible is not something that stands outside experience.”64)

In order to find a conscious relation to the non-sense-perceptible as something that is given in experience, one must consider the nature of thinking in a new light. In its essential nature it is always intuitive. Losky explains: “With the word ‘intuition’ I mean this direct seeing, immediate beholding of an object by the cognizing subject.... The word ‘intuition’ does not refer in my system to the irrationality of the object that is to be beheld (the intuition of Bergson) ....even discursive, abstract knowing can mean the seeing of the aspects of most authentic being when there are disjunctions and coalescences in being.... It is certain that, when this theory maintains that knowing is an immediate beholding of authentic, trans-subjective being itself by the subject, even when it is removed from the body of the subject in space (and sometimes also in time), it puts even the most ordinary sense-perception, for example the seeing of a tree at ten metres’ distance from me, on a level with clairvoyance.”65)

It need hardly be emphasized how closely all this harmonizes with the basic ideas of the ‘Philosophy of Freedom’ and also of its Prologue ‘Truth and Science’. We have, instead, every reason to be amazed at the immense variety of ways in which related ideas can be expressed by different thinkers.

Losky calls his system metaphysics, but gives this concept a new meaning. For him metaphysics is a “science which forms a part of every world-view”. He explains further: “If our theory of knowledge, intuitivism, is accepted, then one must acknowledge at the same time that this science.... bears witness to authentic being (the ‘things in themselves’) and reaches into its very foundations.... As it pursues its research into the elements of being, metaphysics seeks in the multiplicity of objects, in the sheer manifoldness, their identical central core.... As it has as the object of its research the world-whole and not some part of it, it is not content with what is relatively fundamental, but seeks what is absolutely fundamental (truth).”66) If one understands metaphysics in this sense, then Anthroposophy can also be regarded as a metaphysical system.*

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* Husserl was of the view that metaphysics is “the science of being in an absolute sense”. Husserliana, Vol II, p.23.

Only once did Losky allow himself to make a direct reference to Rudolf Steiner: namely to two of his works which are devoted to Goethe’s world-view (GA 2 and 6). The reason for this is not difficult to grasp. The Russian intelligentsia at the beginning of the 20th century, which set the tone in cultural life, were in many cases hostile to Anthroposophy, and so anyone who displayed an open interest in it risked ostracism by these circles. Both before the Revolution and after it, in emigration, Rudolf Steiner was vigorously attacked by the educated élite, who mostly charged him with ‘sins’ which had been fabricated by the critics themselves. No proof is needed here; if one knows Steiner’s works, a glance at the writings of his critics is enough. One of them was entitled ‘Reflections on Goethe’, written by E. Metner.* Andrei Beliy gave Metner the treatment he deserved, in a book written in 1915 with the title ‘Rudolf Steiner and Goethe in the World-View of the Present Day’, in which he exposed the lack of substance and reflection in Metner’s arguments. Subsequently Beliy was to recall that a circle of known and respected Symbolists and philosophers had acted as jury in his quarrel with Metner and, after a study of the books of both authors, had decided in favour of Beliy. But this lesson made the critics none the wiser; their relation to Anthroposophy remained prejudiced and hostile.

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* A brother of the pianist and composer N. Metner. He was head of the publishing house of the Symbolists, ‘Musaget’. As an émigré he published the works of C.G. Jung in Russian.

Like Husserl, Losky was charged with an ‘illegitimate’ encroachment into the sphere of ontology, and particularly with an attempt to teach ‘metempsychosis’, as ‘sober-minded’ Russian theologians and philosophers sarcastically expressed it. Neither Losky’s serious philosophical treatises helped, nor his reference to the ideas of Leibniz on recreationism. And one must give the philosopher the full respect he deserves for having had the courage to write openly about the conclusions he had reached in his gnoseology: namely, that the substantial ‘I’ of the human being (‘the substantially creative’), as the fruit of evolution, cannot emerge in the course of a single lifetime and, once it has come into being, cannot leave evolution at its present, imperfect stage and enter the eternity of the spirit without having developed a relation to it. The substantial ‘I’ must pass through a series of metamorphoses (not ‘metempsychoses’) in order to transform not only itself but also its corporeality through the spirit, as this was revealed in the highest sense to the world by Christ, the Word-‘I’, in the body of Jesus of Nazareth.

This is how Losky thought, but in the defence of his views he could not refer openly to Rudolf Steiner as he realized that this would merely have provoked new attacks against Anthroposophy; then, as also later in Soviet Russia, there was a special fear of ‘group heresy’. Losky decided to repeat the deed of Galileo. He faced, alone, the judgment of a philosophical-theological inquisition. But times had changed, particu- larly in the emigration, and Losky was treated leniently. A not inconsiderable role was played here by his universal erudition. But there remained as a sad fact in the history of Russian culture, the unanimity with which those émigrés disapproved of Losky: N. Berdyaev, V. Zen- kovsky, S. Bulgakov etc.,* and their Soviet persecutors defended the abstract emptiness of consciousness and rejected Anthroposophy. This situation has remained unchanged in post-Soviet times, which is a very bad omen for the future of the country and its people. In the characterization of N. Losky’s philosophical system as a whole, we would not be wrong to define it as religious-philosophical. One of the contemporary reviewers of Losky’s works in Russia accurately described it as “onto-logizing ethics”. The prevailing spirit of Russian philosophy as a whole is religious-philosophical when it can summon sufficient strength to be independent and not imitative. The Russian thinker is, first and fore- most, in quest of the path to God. This was true also of Nikolai Losky. In him there lived a soul that was Christian through and through, a soul which not only sought the solution to the Mysteries of being, but also strove to share the joy of its discoveries with others, as it profoundly felt and understood the unity of all men in God. For this reason Losky developed his theory of knowledge in a form suited to the teaching of beginners. It stimulates the reader’s own thinking, reveals the riddles of philosophy as riddles of the spirit. Losky’s passionate striving was to help the Russian school of thought to take the necessary step that would have led it into the sphere of spiritual science, since this school, in the form of its sophiologists – first and foremost V. Soloviev – had already come in close proximity to it.

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* It is interesting to follow the fate of some of the critics of Anthroposophy. The theological views of S. Bulgakov proved to be so strange that he was dismissed from the priesthood. N. Berdyaev, who fought fiercely for the sectarianizing of knowledge compromised himself at the end of his life through his open sympathy for Bolshevism.

We would note by way of conclusion that Rudolf Steiner knew of this Russian thinker through his book ‘The Foundation of Intuitivism’, which had been published in German (English edition ‘The Intuitive Basis of Knowledge’, London 1919). In one of his lectures given in 1908 he said: “In what is, from a certain aspect, a fundamental way ....the Russian psychologist Losky, in his book entitled ‘The Foundation of Intuitivism’, has pointed to the will direction in human soul life” (GA 57 p.58). The characterization ‘Russian psychologist’ and the formulation ‘will direction of the soul life’ is somewhat mystifying. If we reflect upon the question: To what Russian type do such qualities belong? – then we think of the picture of the ‘starets’ (an old monk or hermit). And Losky was a starets, even in his appearance. But he was a special kind of starets. Losky combined within himself the type of the starets with what Rudolf Steiner spoke of as a peculiarity of the Russian spirit: “intellectualized mysticism” – he was a starets philosopher in the modern sense of this word. Such a figure is still unique to the spiritual life of Russia. It came, as it were, out of the future. And this future of Russia turned to Anthroposophy.

7. The Subject of Cognition in the Methodology of Science

Science as a system of knowledge arises and exists only in the thinking subject. For this reason, all sciences are directly or in the final analysis sciences of man. Anthroposophy – even anthropomorphism – is fully intrinsic to them, and not even the boldest science fiction can rid itself of them. It is simply not possible for us to know how science might appear from a non-human standpoint. Methodology must therefore not evade the question how the soul-spiritual characteristics and the needs of the human being can, without contradiction, be included among the criteria of scientific truth.

But the adherents of pure physics will ask: Is it at all thinkable that views regarding the nature of the world could be identifiable with natural law? World-views and theories are replaced by new ones just like articles of faith, so they will object. Even the scientific revolution can be equated with “Gestalt transformation” (Kuhn, Koyré). Nevertheless, there are voices among the scientists who say such things as: “Consciousness is an entirely real entity that is not observable by physical-chemical means”. 67) There are even those who try through the means of materialistic natural science to pose the question as to the ideal source of the material world.

In 1993 in Moscow the physicist G. I. Shipov published a book in which he concluded, from the results he had gained in his research into the physical vacuum, that he had succeeded in solving the problem of the creation of a unified field theory. In the book he describes what are known as the “primary fields of torsion”, which are the “simplest disturbances that take place within a vacuum”. They cannot be regarded as any kind of matter, “because they are lacking in energy. For this reason one cannot look upon them as zero-vibrations of the vacuum in the modern quantum field-theory”.68) They arise, says Shipov, as it were out of absolute “nothingness”, and conform to the law of conservation of information and not of energy.* They “direct the birth of matter out of the vacuum, its development in the form that has arisen, and also the reciprocal influence of information field and matter. One has the impression”, the physicist concludes, “that these fields appear in the role of the super-conscious”.69)

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* They and the material objects work upon one another, but they transmit no energy.

In this way a Russian physicist came via experimental physics to that argument with which Faust fends off the sophistry of Mephistopheles: “In your nothingness I hope to find the All”. But here one should be extremely cautious in one’s optimism. The new materialism is fundamentally different from the vulgar materialism of the 19th century. To all intents and purposes it combines consciousness with the finer forms of material existence – the energy fields – whereby, as can be demonstrated, the boundaries of consciousness are radically shifted, without any need being felt to refer to the spiritual world. For even in this case the phenomenon can be observed as before, if only indirectly, and the empirical data can be worked upon intellectually. A materialist of the latest school of thought could ask us: Are we not dealing here with the possibility, provided thanks to the latest achievements of science, of entering into relation with that nature (and will this not be ‘natura naturans’?), of which Max Scheler says that it is located “beyond all science of a formal mechanical character, and also beyond all philosophy and knowledge of nature”?70) And are there any important reasons why that nature should be called ‘spirit’?

Idealism often loses out against materialism because it does not react to such questions in a responsible way. The spiritual, says Rudolf Steiner, expresses itself of necessity somewhere in the physical. Latent within consciousness there are forces with the capacity to direct matter. And one can follow to infinity two lines whose paths never cross: the primacy of matter over spirit and of the spirit over matter. The only thing that can help here is a transformation of the cognitive principle and a synthesis of what is of man and what is of nature. Precisely this is the concern of the methodology of spiritual science, in which the results of science become factors of consciousness. Rudolf Steiner made a noteworthy statement on this question in an article he published in 1899 entitled ‘Ernst Haeckel and the World Riddles’: “In the different branches of science the human being confronts nature, he separates himself from her and observes her; he alienates himself from her. In philosophy he strives to reunite with her. He strives to make the abstract relation that has come about in scientific observation into a real, concrete, living relation. The scientific researcher wishes to acquire by means of knowledge a consciousness of the world and its workings; the philosopher’s aim is to make himself, with the help of this consciousness, into a life-imbued member of the world whole. In this sense a particular science is a preparatory stage of philosophy.” Moreover, “all true philosophers were ....free artists in concepts. They made human ideas into an artistic material and scientific method into artistic technique. In this way the abstract scientific consciousness was raised to concrete life. Our ideas become forces of life. We do not merely have knowledge of things, but we have made knowledge into a real, self-governing organism (i.e. of truth – G.A.B.); our real, active conscious- ness has raised itself above a mere passive receiving of truths.” (GA 30, p.392).

A man of science, if in his soul he is also an artist, is always an ethical being too; and in this case he is a born methodologist. The ideal element in the world he also finds within himself and comes to knowledge of it in this way, and he does not try to derive it from matter. Galileo could not come to terms with the discovery that the planets move in so-called ‘mixed ellipses’ – this fact diminished, in his opinion, the perfection of the heavenly Creator. And Kepler was convinced that harmony must be a hallmark of experiment. During his investigation of the harmony and geometry in the reciprocal relations between the planets he wrote the following: “We see here how God, like a human architect, in accordance with rule and order, lays the foundation of the world and has measured out everything in such a way that one could believe it is not art which takes nature as its model, but God himself who, in the act of creation, considers how the future human being will be structured.”71)

It would be a mistake to suppose that Kepler’s religious views diminish his significance as a man of science. In this connection Koyré remarks with great insight: “The interesting identification of the cosmic sphere with the Divine Trinity.... The mythical speculations led him (Kepler) to the idea of placing the sun at the centre of the cosmos, and thanks to this the Copernican system underwent fundamental modifications.”72)

In order to satisfy the man-centered criterion of scientific truth, speculation must acquire a logical conscience, because the source of morality lies in “good thinking” (Pascal). As real life has already shown, speculations in the manner of logical construction or of hermeneutics with their methodological claims to universality without logical conscience, only lead to the alienation of thinking from the real perso- nality. For this reason science in its striving for objectivity outside the human being became anti-human. H. Marcuse rightly remarks: “Scientific method, which led to an increasingly effective control of nature, then provided the pure concepts as instruments for the increasingly effective control of man by man via the medium of the control of nature.”73)

The ethical element is also inherent in empirical research. In Goetheanism it is expressed as love for the object of cognition. Phenomenological reductionism is here extended to the complete setting aside of the egocentrically thinking subject, whereby only the pure actuality of consciousness is preserved, thanks to which its metamorphosis – but only on this condition – is possible. It is accomplished in the act of complete identification with the object of perception. And as “all is immanent to all” (Losky) an act of self-knowledge is also accomplished in this way.

If we do not wish always to begin with Plato, it is among representatives of Scholasticism at the very latest that a clear consciousness emerges of the fact that the world of revelation has reached full identity with the world of creation and that there is no God existing outside the world. The universals of the cosmic thought-beings do not, therefore, cause the thinking subject to enter into a transcendental mutual relation with them, and they change their character when, after their union with things, they free themselves from them again. Such a process can obviously not take place without a thinking subject. It follows from this: firstly, that the cognized world is not identical with the world prior to cognition, and secondly, that the human being who cognizes the world becomes, as a soul-spiritual being, an integral part of it: a personified part of that universal cosmic force whose immanence in the world works within him as the laws of his spirit. Thus the laws of nature and the laws of the thinking spirit are on the same level of being, and differ only with respect to the form in which they come to expression.

As Spinoza stated, we know God when we know the world. Other paths to Him do not exist. The process of cognition must be built up in such a way that in every part of the world a part of God is revealed to us, that knowledge is knowledge of God. The things of the world are emanations of the Godhead; in the laws according to which they exist and which science gains knowledge of, God himself is revealed. Therefore, says Spinoza, “there is a form of knowing in which the thing is comprehended out of its essential being alone”, and not “through the knowledge of its proximate ground”.74) What is this form of knowing?

Goethe answered this question in the most definitive way. It is attained with the help of the power of judgment in beholding, through which the ideal, essential nature of things is revealed, in the act of direct knowing. This is the reason why the ‘atheist’ Spinoza stood in a closer affinity to Goethe than the metaphysician Friedrich Jacobi.

Natural science, which has come to assume a dominant position in the world, recognized its objective character indirectly. In this case the world is given in a twofold way: in perceptions and in thinking. When we surrender ourselves to the percepts, we drown in simple details: the world of experience is differentiated to an infinite degree. Through thinking we strive to lead the world to a unity, but we find ourselves in an abstract element. This is why Kant called the connections we make between things subjective. And in so doing he did not notice that the activity whereby experience is differentiated also belongs to us.

Kant felt that he occupied a position between Hume and Leibniz/Wolf. Hume proves in fact to be the precursor of positivism. For him, cognition can only provide us with experience, but not with objects of philosophy; the latter, so he thought, can only be objects of belief. The direction taken by Leibniz and Wolf, which dominated at the time of Kant, hoped to comprehend the essential nature of things by means of conceptual thinking alone. They regarded as accidental the knowledge that is provided by way of experience. And for this reason Kant asked himself the question: How can one arrive at judgments of truth in the sense put forward by Leibniz and Wolf, but by way of a cognition that is based on experience? If Kant, in his attempt to resolve this question, had conceded to experience the ability to provide us with knowledge, he would also have had to admit that experience contains within itself universal, real judgment. And in his own way, through carrying out an artificial intellectual operation, he did acknowledge this; he acknowledged that the laws of the world of experience are prescribed by the life of our sense-perceptions and our understanding; the laws exist there, too, in precisely this form; we can make for ourselves a concept of them, but this will be the concept of what we ourselves have placed into the world of experience. For example, existence in space is not a property of the things, but the form in which our sense-organs are able to perceive them. It is quite clear that Kant robs himself in this way of the possibility of cognizing the essential nature of things.

In order not to have to remain satisfied with this result of Kant’s philosophy, Nikolai Losky advises us to recognize in it the following: “Kant is right when he says that the cognizing subject cannot copy (as the rationalists wanted to do) the world of the things-in-themselves through the autonomous activity of his own individual thinking, but he neglected the possibility that the cognizing subject might be able within experience intuitively (i.e. in the experience of thinking, which is always intuitive in its essential nature - G.A.B.) to follow the individual activity of the things themselves, and in this way to move infinitely far beyond the limits of one’s own ‘I’.”75)

The question lies solely in the degree of trust that is placed in experience. Kant recognizes that there are no boundaries between the sub- ject of cognition and the thing as it appears to the subject. Consequently, the entire problem of dualism lies only in the interpretation of (what) experience (is). A fundamental thesis in the phenomenology of Losky states that the things are given to us in perception as they are in reality. And if this is so, then the next step which must necessarily be taken away from Kant leads us to the monism of universalistic empiricism, the foundation for which is given by Rudolf Steiner. Losky calls it intuitivism. Kant himself, so he believes, “sometimes describes, when he distinguishes transcendental from empirical consciousness, the processes of cognition in the way required by the doctrine of intuitive perception: In Kant’s view, the empirical consciousness finds the syntheses already present in the perceptions; the categories of causality etc. are as it were wrested away from the cognizing subject and work independently within the sphere of given phenomena.*

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* This was remarked upon by Volkelt in his study entitled ‘Kant’s Theory of Knowledge’ (Losky’s own comment).

If transcendental consciousness is separated still further from empirical consciousness, through the interpretation of transcendental unity of apperception as a trans-individual consciousness that is identical in all empirical subjects, then we have before us the doctrine of the direct perception of the outer world (i.e. of its essential being – G.A.B.), in the full sense of the word.”76) And this doctrine will be – so we can carry Losky’s thought further in the spirit of Rudolf Steiner – that of immediate cognition of the world through perception of the idea.

Pure concepts are without question necessary for science, but in the absence of ‘beholding’, they are empty (in this Goethe and Kant are in agreement). They are needed in order to determine the value of the act of beholding for the world-view as a whole. “If now the understanding, with this intention,” says Rudolf Steiner, “approaches nature and draws together those factual elements which belong together according to an inner necessity, then it is raising itself from the consideration of the simple phenomenon to the rational experiment, which is an immediate expression of objective natural law. Goethe’s empiricism draws everything that it brings forward to explain the phenomena, from experience; only the way in which it is drawn (from experience) is determined by its mode of ‘beholding’” (GA 30, p.287). For this reason Goethe called his morphology of plants “a new science”, meaning not its object (botany), but the method of thinking through which he created it. He united the morphology of thinking with the morphology of plants, and this was new in science and remains so today. Rudolf Steiner provided this method with a systematic epistemological, and then also a spiritual-scientific, foundation. He wrote the ‘Philosophy of Freedom’ (Spiritual Activity) at the crossing-point of the philosophy of pure thinking and the esotericism of thinking; it is, one could say, written with morphological thinking. This phenomenon is quite unique and it is so difficult, for this reason, to find a relation to it. The present work is an attempt to remove some of the difficulties on the path to a mastery of this qualitatively new thinking, which forms the central core of Anthroposophical methodology.