IV Survey of the Literature

As we are engaged in considerations of methodology and in practical exercises on the basis of the text of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’, it is not without value for us to know of the – if we may use the expression – literary ‘ecology’ within which our work is placed.

On the theme of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ a significant number of books and articles have already appeared. Most of them have the intention in common of resolving the mystery or mysteries of this book. Its riddling nature is felt by many; many, simply by reading it without entering deeply into the text or its spiritual-scientific mysteries, experience a wholesome, ordering effect upon the soul. But where there is a striving to discover the method of approaching the book, people come together in study-groups.

The first experiment of this kind took place already at the end of the 1920’s. Carl Unger, a pupil of Rudolf Steiner’s, organized at that time a small circle of philosophically-thinking anthroposophists and in their work together they succeeded establishing that the book has substance and that when one applies certain procedures in the study of it, it contributes to practical development of the power of judgment in beholding. Carl Unger sensed yet another peculiarity of the book: that it has an ethical effect on the reader and stands in some way in harmony with the Holy Scriptures. Heinrich Leiste, a pupil of Unger’s, wrote about the primary goal that the study group led by Unger had set itself. It was, by working with certain philosophical and Anthroposophical insights of Rudolf Steiner, to reach through to an epistemology of imaginative consciousness.116

As a result of his premature, tragic death, Carl Unger was not able to develop his direction of spiritual-scientific research and unfortunately, as time when on, it simply faded from view. It was all the more satisfying to discover one day that the chief questions of our own research, which were formulated at another time and in an entirely different cultural, social and even ethnic environment are, in essence, a direct continuation of the intentions of many decades ago.

In Middle Europe in the work on the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ the intellectual direction has gained the upper hand. This is due, above all, to the permanent neglect of the methodology of spiritual science; in such a case, thought begins unavoidably to revolve in a closed circle of the reflective mode of thinking, which was already completely exhausted by the end of the 19th century. In Anthroposophy this is told of in the most comprehensive way, yet, nonetheless, attempts to cross the boundaries of the intellect with the help of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ are undertaken merely intellectually. With this we do not at all intend to challenge anyone’s right to a formal-logical or historical-philosophical approach to this book. We merely stress the primary importance of the transformation of the quality of consciousness, without which the book will always remain an ‘open secret’. We fully share the concern expressed by Otto Palmer in his book in which he gathered together most of the statements Rudolf Steiner himself made about the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’. He writes that “this book is in danger of being treated in the same way as one treats other philosophies. In this sense academic philosophy demonstrates a much sounder instinct by not paying any attention to this book at all. For, in a certain sense, it represents the end of philosophy and creates the transition to something completely new.”117

How and to what it builds this transition cannot be recognized with- out a systematic study of the methodology of Anthroposophy. But as very few people wish to apply themselves to this work, the results of the search for this transition are modest to say the least; the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ continues to be studied like “other philosophies”. A certain service, it is true, is also provided by this – as can be seen, for example, in the book by Michael Kirn, which he conceived as a many-volume work, in which he systematically analyzes, chapter by chapter, the entire ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’. He sees it as his own task to place its content within a broader historical-philosophical context, the necessity of which was not questioned by Rudolf Steiner. According to Kirn, such an “expansion” of the content of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ uncovers the universality of its content.118 In reading Kirn’s book we are given the possibility not only to extend our knowledge of philosophy, but also to experience how broad and significant is the philosophical context out of which the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ grows and how all-encompassing is the arena of the battle of human concepts in the question of defining the truly human principle within the human being. To our own undoubted benefit we exercise in this our capacity for intellectual concentration, as we prepare our mind for beholding.

Regarding Kirn’s attempts to bring the content of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ into connection with the latest scientific theories and discoveries – with the theory of information science, with atomic theory – this in no way contradicts its organic wholeness, which is open to the surrounding world, and yet is subject to the laws of its ‘ur’- phenomenon. If the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ is not a single case of the elaboration of scientific ideas of a particular kind, but rather the foundation of the methodology of science, then its realization in practice will advance in step with the progressive development not only of science, but of civilization as a whole.

Similar in intention as well as in content to Kirn’s book is a many-volume monograph written by a collective of authors and published under the editorship of Thomas Kracht. It is called ‘The Experience of Thinking’.119 Its merit lies in the fact that it places the fruits of group work with the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ before the judgment of the wider Anthroposophical community. In it one can discern the spirit of the intentions of Carl Unger: to ponder the composition of the chapters, to reformulate the content in brief summaries, etc.

As the most significant of all that has so far been written about the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’, one must acknowledge Herbert Witzenmann’s book ‘‘Die Philosophie der Freiheit’ as a Basis of Artistic Creation.’ 120 The question of the freedom of the human spirit is doubtlessly conditioned by the capacity for free creation in thought, for which reason Witzenmann’s intention to present the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ as the fruit of a thinking that is rooted in the artistic-creative foundations of the soul, is fully justified. In his book he devotes much attention to the style and composition of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’, to its permeation with the aesthetic element. A number of attempts are made to carry his analysis across into the realm of esotericism and to point to its roots in Christianity. The many-membered human being and the Goethean principle of metamorphosis are also not forgotten. But in all of this Witzenmann unfortunately does not advance beyond conjectures – albeit extremely interesting ones which stimulate us to deepen our work with the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’. The fault is due to Witzenmann’s failure to take account of the methodology of spiritual science. He unquestionably possessed a philosophically-trained thinking and had the potential for independent philosophical creation. But work with what Rudolf Steiner achieved requires deep penetration of the methodology of his creation, if we wish to understand it.

In Witzenmann’s book we find no system; its theses, even when correct, lack systematic spiritual-scientific substantiation, and therefore it is difficult to distinguish in them between the objectively true and mere opinion. The philosopher’s followers might object, saying that even if Herbert Witzenmann did not work with the methodology of Anthroposophy, at least its cognitivie methods were of prime importance to him; he writes in the introduction to the book under consideration:

“Our procedure in this book rests upon the method applied by Rudolf Steiner...” (p.25).

In our turn we must say in response to this objection, that a whole system of methods lies at the foundation of the “Philosophie der Freiheit”. Indeed it constitutes the fundamental work on the methodology of Anthroposophy. Witzenmann refers to what stands on the title page of the book, namely, that in it “results of soul observations according to the method of natural science” are given. The method itself however, in Witzenmann’s opinion, consists in the fact that “the formation of inner representations ... takes place not through the judging subject, but only through the perceived object” (p.44). That this definition does not completely correspond to the principles of spiritual science is a separate matter. But even if it is taken as given, it is utterly inadequate for such a task as a structural analysis which aims to penetrate to the central core of the book. The definition of the method given by Witzenmann in the form of a passing reference to his other works robs the work discussed here of its foundation. This mistake rebounds upon the author soon enough: in his analysis of the structure of the book, Witzenmann comes several times to judgements (inner representations) that have, indeed, been formed “through the judging subject”, as we will shortly show.

Anthroposophy as a science finds itself in a special position. Its methods are inseparably bound up with its content, and they have not yet been identified or acknowledged by its adherents as a system that is complete within itself. Sporadic remarks on method have nothing to offer where the attempt is being made to study Anthroposophy as spiritual science. Judgments are drawn from the object in other sciences, too; a natural-scientific method is also used by materialists, including psychologists. Besides, it is not entirely true that the formation of a mental representation is possible without “the judging subject”, but only “through perception” and, moreover, “in the form of acceptance – i.e. the individualization of the concept offered to it [the percept]”! (p.44) Such formulations arouse nothing but questions and a certain perplexity. And in no way do they enable one to begin cognitive-practical work with the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’. We state this not groundlessly, but with factual support provided by the whole content of our book, which is able, in our opinion, to prove the thesis that without a systematic study of the methodology of spiritual science, one cannot grasp the essence of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’; the book remains, in such a case, a mystery with seven seals.*

* Yet to anyone who has grasped the methodological basis of this book it becomes absolutely clear that in the formation of inner representations the subject cannot be done away with. It remains even in the cancelling (Aufhebung) of the lower ‘I’ in beholding, it remains when thinking becomes imaginative etc. The individualization of thought-perceptions is a fruit of its efforts, it is its creation.
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Yet we are prepared in advance for the discovery that there are many who do not reckon with all that we are setting out in our book. It should be pointed out to these readers that we are not alone in our conclusions. Here, for example, in the opinion of Andrei Beliy – a personal student of Rudolf Steiner, a brilliant artist of the word, a man of broad philosophical erudition who has shown his capacity for independent philosophical thinking – on the problem being discussed.†  At the end of his life, when he was already summing up the meaning of his experience with Rudolf Steiner and was reflecting upon his system of knowledge, he wrote: “I have studied the material of his texts; and I know: to work with them is an immense labour which requires one clearly to lay open his methodology (emphasis G.A.B.), his epistemology; in them has been given to us with unexampled, logically unassailable boldness the basis (emphasis G.A.B.) of a mighty system.” And further: “A new page of his activity: even the theosophical scheme in its classical sevenfoldedness becomes in the interpretation of Steiner’s ideas the foundation of a philosophy of history and culture of unparalleled originality, within which we find the same gnoseological frame- work. ... And in it Hegel resurrects anew and on a critical level with his dialectical method; he (R. Steiner) reveals the dialectic of the number three in the number seven, for his number seven consists of two threes which adhere together in an unrepeatable, fourth whole – whatever one may call this whole: philosophical, Pythagorean, arithmological, or theosophical; the theological microcosmic triangle ‘plus’ the dialectical number three, in the point of uniqueness within the whole which connects them, and which is revealed as the ‘I’ of man and in the Anthroposophical conception constitutes a new doctrine of man, of the synthesis, in the Hegelian sense, as a symbol of the whole and, in the theological sense, a doctrine of, as it were, the fourth hypostasis of Divinity, as the ‘Divinity’ of man, and not only ‘God-man’ (in the rhythm of eternity as Logos), or only ‘man-God’* which is set over against the Divinity; from this, Anthroposophy arises – as an original theology, history, phenomenology of spirit, anthropology, philosophy of culture, the root of which is at once a logically irrefutable theory of knowing and agreement with all its conclusions (of the theory of perception, of meaning, of reality). ... The special characteristic of Rudolf Steiner’s doctrine of the ‘I’ consists in the fact that on the one hand it cannot be separated from the biogenetic triad (mineral, plant and animal nature), from the historical triad (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) or from the triad of capacities (reason, feeling and will); yet on the other hand it cannot be separated from the theological and gnoseological eternal triads; both triads intersect in the ‘I’ and are reversible in the ‘I’: 3+3+1=7. And this doctrine is revealed in culture as a doctrine of the seven stages... All historical and angelological right and left number threes of the number seven (3+1+3) are deducible a priori from the doctrine of the ‘I’ which is revealed as a theory of knowledge never before seen in history.”121

* This term used as a borrowing from Ludwig Feuerbach in e.g. ‘Das Wesen den Christentums’, 1845.

† See his work ‘Rudolf Steiner and Goethe in the Contemporary Worldview’, ‘The History of the Consciousness-Soul’, and others.
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Thus, a rigorous spiritual-methodological ordered structure distinguishes Anthroposophy from the other, known sciences. And this ordered structure has so far been fully recognized by no-one, and this demands of anyone who wishes to work scientifically at this or that question of Anthroposophy, that he begin his research with an exposition of the methological presuppositions and conditions. Otherwise he risks ending up in the world of arbitrary judgments.

Witzenmann would like to demonstrate that the symmetry principle is present in the structure of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’. He believes that the first and second Parts of the book stand over against one another in mirror-reflection, i.e., that between them runs an axis (or plane) of symmetry and that in relation to this the chapters are not merely “mirrored”: the 1st in the 14th, the 2nd in the 13th, etc., but “turn inside out” with regard to content. Whether metamorphosis is taking place here Witzenmann does not say, but what else could it be?

Thus Witzenmann attempts to base his research upon the laws of symmetry and metamorphosis. The intention in itself is justified, but in order to realize it one must explain one’s own view of the nature and working of these laws. Metamorphosis in the Goethean sense is a system, a wholeness which possesses a number of elements and connections, but also a system-forming principle. The elements in such a system should be no more than seven. If one accepts Witzenmann’s position that the first part of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ metamorphoses into the second, then we have before us a system of 14 elements, and with the axis of symmetry (which does, after all, participate in the metamorphosis) – 15. Whether such systems of metamorphosis are possible and how they come to be we do not yet know; one would need to investigate, and Witzenmann would prefer not to do this. He undertakes an analysis of the content of the chapters and in this way hopes to prove that they are symmetrical and “turn inside out” but his entire analysis is far-fetched. In such a manner the opposite can also be demonstrated.*  Moreover, his analysis suggests that metamorphosis is not a law of nature and thought, but something similar to the patterns left by damp on a wall: one person sees them one way, another sees them differently.

* We cannot even be sure that Witzenmann, in his search for symmetry be- tween the parts, regarded the parts as wholenesses.
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But no, metamorphosis is a lawful and living whole, that is rooted in the wholeness of the evolutionary cycle. It is not only seven-membered, but also rigorously structured in a three-membered fashion and possesses a tri-unity of parts: a point of departure, the new formation and a transitional part; the latter realises the principle of symmetry. In the cycle of metamorphosis the phenomenon changes: it is negated, cancelled, and, yes, turned inside out, but in correspondence with a series of laws, each one of which one needs to know. There is nothing of this in Witzenmann’s book. He simply assumes that there is a parallelism of meaning between the Foreword to the second edition of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ and its first Appendix, and thus feels justified in speaking of a symmetry of the two first Parts (p.31 f.).† In addition, he asserts that the two Parts are “in an inside-out relation” to one another. And in what way? “The first part describes the emergence of man from existent reality, the second, of a new reality from the human being” (p.33).

† Would this imply that in the first edition of the book there was no such symmetry?
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Does one really need to prove that in the first Part the “new reality” arises from the human being – from the author of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ and also from the reader? And that in the second Part man, as he ascends to intuition, emerges “from existent reality”? Incidentally, Witzenmann gives one page later a definition of the Parts which cancels out the first. He says that the first Part is “a path of exercise of the meditative culture of spiritual activity”, and the second “addresses the cognizing human being” (p.35 f.). That these two statements are irreconcilable, that the path of exercise is also given in the second Part, and that the first Part is addressed to “the cognizing human being” to the same degree – all these things are obvious to anyone who has studied the text of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’.

Finally, as regards the “turning inside-out”: if we are speaking not of the content of the chapters, but of the human being, it would be no bad thing to point to what Rudolf Steiner says in this connection: “Man continually sends his moral, intellectual and aesthetic aura into the world...” (GA 155, 7.16.1914). Such is the reality that radiates from the human being. The ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ in both its Parts shows how one can learn to direct this reality and why one can become free within it. For this purpose the book offers not so much a “path of exercise of meditative culture”, as a method, with the help of which it is possible to metamorphose consciousness, ascend from reflection to beholding, i.e., develop the power of judgment in beholding, which Witzenmann for some reason does not mention in his book. When we read: “If thinking activity is exercised, but only in order to hold oneself back within oneself, i.e. to abstain from the transition into thought content and the world of perception that can be permeated by it, then there appears what one may call “seeing with thought” (Gedankenblick), observation or attention, i.e. a consciousness that is reflected into itself” (p.43), then we don’t know what we should think of this. Is he describing here the transition to beholding of ideas, or something else? If it is the transition to beholding, than there cannot be a “reflection into one-self”. “Reflection into oneself” is introspection; but beholding means the canceling of reflection, which Witzenmann himself admits, when he shortly thereafter says: “Soul observation is ‘looking thinking’” (p.43).*

* That the ‘looking’ thinking is not communicative, as he asserts, is also highly questionable.
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H. Witzenmann believes the two Parts of the “Philosophie der Freiheit” are connected with the human being of body, soul and spirit: the first Part corresponds to the body and the second to the spirit while the soul stands between them. It follows from this that the body is symmetrical to the spirit thanks to the presence of the soul between them, but in the book what corresponds to this is the blank page between the two parts.†   As no real, i.e. spiritual-scientific, grounds are given for such connections, we could just as well, and even with some justification, state, for example, that the intellectual soul corresponds to the first Part, and the consciousness-soul to the second, and the symmetry between them is formed by the ‘I’. But all these versions have no right to exist so long as we define the object of cognition, starting out, not from it, but from ourselves. Witzenmann declared such an approach unacceptable, and acted according to it, nevertheless.

† Would one not, in this case, need to regard the soul as the 15th member in the fourteen-membered metamorphosis of the parts? There is no answer to this question in the book.
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Beyond any doubt the understanding of monism which he gives in the book we are analyzing here also proves to be superficial. He says: “... the world is a spiritual unity, therefore the world-conception that proceeds from true cognition is monism” (p.56). No, the monism of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ is the world-view of ideal-realism, and the unity of the world is sensible-supersensible. But we have already had and will again have occasion to speak of this, and will therefore not stop here to clarify this concept.

The artificial complexity of terminology to which H. Witzenmann resorts – “copulate” (Kopulieren), “inherence” (Inhärenz), “evocation” (Evozierung), “transgredience” etc. – which is not justified by the tasks of the research – contradicts the Goetheanistic character. All this un- necessarily burdens thinking with an intellectualism and abstractness which we must – in the very process of working with the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ – overcome, metamorphose.

And Witzenmann’s declaration that he would consider contradictory to his work the “eager search for further compositional elements of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’”, in which one risks harming “the spiritually living structure” through intellectualism, and losing the capacity to “see in soul-observation” (p.206), is illogical and unacceptable. To seek out further compositional elements is not harmful at all, if they have to do with elements of the living spiritual organism which was not recognized by H. Witzenmann; also not recognized by him was the essence of ideal perception, i.e., beholding. However, this misfortune is not a tragedy. It is a legitimate step on the path of further scientific inquiry. 122

We got to know the work of H. Witzenmann only after the first draft of our book was already written. And then it became evident that all that we had discovered and described in the field of the methodology of spiritual science constitutes a wide-ranging antithesis to Witzenmann’s book – if this is subjected to a full critical analysis. So work the – not outwardly visible – mutual spiritual relations in the cognitive process.

The complex of problems raised by H. Witzenmann in his book in the attempt to penetrate to the inner core of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ was decisive for other researchers who came after him. But because they also took over the inadequacies of the procedures chosen by Witzenmann, none of them was able to move beyond him. On the contrary, we observe only retrograde steps, to which for example the book by Frank Teichmann bears witness, which appeared under the high-sounding title ‘Resurrection in Thinking’.123 It represents a kind of offshoot of the group work whose fruits appear in the book published by T. Kracht.

F. Teichmann weighed up and set out all the preliminary conditions that are necessary for the solution of his stated task. Practical work with the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’, he says, “can never be replaced by mere intellectual insight”; here one needs “with the help of preparatory exercises to be made attentive to the inner movements and configurations” (p.12). He also quotes a series of key statements of Rudolf Steiner about the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’, which help one to look for a qualitatively different approach to it. Teichmann rightly remarks that the morphological character of thinking is unavoidably bound up with the law of the organic world and with world evolution as a whole; that, for example, the laws of number – in the first place sevenfoldedness – determine the development of the world, of man, and of thinking. “The memberment into seven is a noticeable, dominant formative principle” (p.68) – he rightly says. Also noteworthy is his conclusion that the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ is “an organism of thought, a spiritual work of art with the greatest beauty of form” (p.110).

Such is, so to speak, the preamble of F. Teichmann’s work, but he evidently forgets all about it as he launches into an analysis of the structure of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’. He applies the sevenfoldness principle mechanically and abstractly and makes a completely artificially division of each chapter of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ into seven parts. He briefly formulates seven theses which allegedly every chapter contains, but when you read them you conclude that one could equally well set up five, or ten, or twelve theses. Teichmann appears not to know at all that the number seven is the structure of the system, and a system has elements, connections and a system-forming principle. To speak of sevenfoldness when one has not ascertained this, is pointless. Thus Teichmann’s statement – that each of the seven parts which he has defined in the third chapter corresponds to one of the seven chapters of the first part of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’, as well as the seven chapters of the second part to the seven parts of the ninth chapter – is without any basis whatever. All of it, we are forced to say, is no more than an arbitrary thought-game.

With regard to the sevenfold structure of thinking, one must also be careful when making analogies to other spheres of existence. Yes, the sevenfold being of man can be surmised behind the seven chapters of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’, but only in the sense of certain laws, and for this reason one cannot directly assert that the fundamental idea of the third chapter – “the understanding of the concept”, as Teichmann succinctly defines it – is connected with the astral body, and the basic idea of the fifth chapter, “the truth of the concept”, with the Spirit-self, etc. (p.95). In each case, also where the essence of the content of the chapters is determined, we are justified in asking: Why? And an argumentation of the type, “the reader will have noticed” does not satisfy us at all.

The chief inadequacy of Teichmann’s book lies in what one may justly call its anti-methodological approach. He asserts: “The ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ is neither a ‘doctrine of science’ (Wissenschaftslehre), nor a ‘theory of knowledge’; it is a work concerning the nature of thinking” (p.67). But alas, the exact opposite is the case, as Teichmann himself admits, at least partially, in the second part of his statement. And we would also ask the author: What is one to do with, for example, the following theses of Rudolf Steiner: “But one will be unable to understand anything about the possibility of cognition so long as one has not answered the question about the what of cognition itself. Thus, the question: what is cognition? becomes the first in the theory of knowledge”; cognition can “find no being outside thinking...”; “our theory of knowledge is the science of the determining of all other sciences” (GA 1, p.143, 157, 165)? It follows from this, that the doctrine of the “nature of thinking” is conceivable outside of epistemology, but only in the aspect of the physiology of thinking, though it is hardly possible that F. Teichmann is considering the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ solely from this point of view. Apart from this, if we agreed with Teichmann the question would immediately arise: and what is one to do with ‘Truth and Science’? Deny this work the right to function as the prologue to the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’? No, these two books contain both a doctrine of science and a theory of knowledge, only the boundaries of these disciplines are extended to an unusual degree, as compared with those traditionally assigned to them.

* * *

To speak pictorially, one could compare the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ to a kind of fortress with vertical, glass-smooth and steel-hard walls. Newly-arrived “paladins” of intellectualism sharpen the spears of their understanding faculty, make a short charge and rush into battle in the hope of breaching the walls in this way. Other than broken spears and bruised intellects,124 nothing can come of this approach. One needs here to develop a very special ability to walk on the vertical, smooth (like the mirror of our brain for the intellect) walls. The method for the development of such a skill is given, but the “paladins” prefer not to believe in it. They approach it, stab at it once or twice with their spears, then walk off, shrugging their iron-clad shoulders. This is why setbacks and stagnation have appeared in their midst. But there should not be setbacks in such matters, as they stand in a relation to the core of world-becoming. This is why an “Egyptian darkness” has descended on them.

We will now move on to a discussion of the book entitled ‘Awakening Heart Thinking’.125 Florin Lowndes is the author named on the title page. However, he himself says in the Foreword that the “heart of the work presented here” is “the fruit” of the work of the American anthroposophist George O’Neil, who did not succeed in publishing his work by reason of his “temperament”, and because of a lack of interest in it in Anthroposophical circles. This task was taken up by his student of many years (i.e. Lowndes), since, as he says further, “through my own life’s destiny I recognized his achievement very quickly from the depths of my heart” (p.9). When, after O’Neil’s (and his wife’s) death, he took over the archive, Lowndes launched into the work in which he, “like a dwarf on the shoulders of a giant... uncovered” a number of “hitherto invisible areas”. And yet, he stresses, “actually, O’Neil ought to have written this book.... The task of putting it down in writing was passed on to me after his death”.

Such being the preamble, which raises a series of perplexing questions. First of all, what does it mean to produce a “written elaboration” of the views of another person? Secondly, what good can come of this, when one of the two involved is a “dwarf” and the other is a “giant”? Assuming for a moment that Hegel had left behind in writing a mere outline of his system and, say, Paul Rée had produced a “written elaboration” of it, what would have been the outcome? Morover, if O’Neil himself did not publish his work, could this not mean that he considered it incomplete? Is it not possible that he felt he had only got halfway to his destination? “Lack of interest” in serious research is endemic in Anthroposophical circles, but anyone who achieves important results in his scientific work does not write his books for the sake of the trend that is fashionable at the time. And finally, if one person describes the views of another, then the book is normally given a different title – in this case, for example: ‘The Views of G. O’Neil on the Problem of the Awakening of Heart-Thinking’, and then the author in question is quoted in full, with the quotations in inverted commas. These are the elementary rules of scientific propriety.

Such are the reactions and doubts awakened by first contact with Lowndes’s book, and they grow as one reads further. The book contains a series of fragments where a thought is presented coherently, logically and supported by numerous quotations from Steiner’s works. But around these fragments reigns a chaos of arbitrary thoughts which condense as into a fog – which would disperse at once with the first ray of spiritual-scientific investigation. In many places in the book, quotes from Rudolf Steiner are heaped together without being subject to analysis or at least ordering by the author. And at every step it becomes apparent that in the quotations one thing is discussed and, in the author’s text, something different – not infrequently the very opposite. And so one cannot but ask oneself: In this book, what comes from O’Neil and what from Lowndes?

In the larger part of this book – where the chaos reigns – the style of presentation recalls the writings of parapsychologists. The fact that there is a book published by George O’Neil126 allows us to conclude that the source of the parapsychological chaos is Lowndes. For para-psychological writers and pseudo-occultists of the old persuasion it is characteristic to strive, through the heaping together of all kinds of information and absurdities, to create the impression of great erudition, to suppress the reader’s critical thinking and thus lay him under their spell. We find the same with Lowndes. Through a deluge of quotations, he hopes to persuade us that he has a fundamental mastery of Anthroposophy, and parallel to this he offers, for example, a formula (which for some reason he calls a “symbol”) concerning the arithmetic multiplication and division of laws (!) (p.60). The formula says:

Continuing in this vein, we could add the law of gravity to extension in space, divide by 2 or by 20 and thus create an upheaval in physics – or, to be more precise, in physicists.

Many such attempts to lead the reader astray are made by Lowndes, but the most outrageous thing lies elsewhere, namely, in the wish to turn the fundamental truths of Anthroposophy upside down. He states – and this is the grossest absurdity in the book – that Rudolf Steiner’s “central discovery” was “heart-thinking”. As proof of this he quotes the Rudolf Steiner verse, which says: “In the heart the loom of feeling / In the head the light of thinking” (GA 40, p.21). As we see, the logic is in this case the same as the formula above. Concerning the discovery – made not by Rudolf Steiner, but by Lowndes – of “heart-thinking”, he says that “as a basis it does not have the brain at all, but rather the heart as its physiological (emphasis G.A.B.) organ” (p.79). And we are led to believe that the method of such a “heart-thinking”, which is presented in the book and is brought into connection with the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’, is not an invention of the author, but is rather “Rudolf Steiner’s method” and was discovered by O’Neil (p.124 f.). And Lowndes goes even further: “Living thinking (requires) quite different thought-processes – physiologically speaking – ... it (uses) the heart as its actual organ” (p.72 f.).

However, the method and communications of Rudolf Steiner both contain something entirely different. Let us start with the fact that he speaks in one of his lectures about the very special relationship between the physical and etheric bodies in the chest region of the human being. Here a kind on inversion takes place, and the etheric heart is located to the right in the human being, while the etheric body of the brain penetrates the physical brain (see GA 109/111, 6.5.1909). Thus, even if we approach the question merely externally, is there no contradiction in speaking about “living” thinking, as distinct from “dead”, head thinking, and connecting it with the material heart?*   Yet it is also said of head-thinking in the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’, that the entire human organization [the human psycho-physical – G.A.B.] “For it does not affect in any way the essential nature of thinking, but withdraws when the activity of thinking begins; it sets aside its own activity and makes a space free; and in this vacated space thinking arises” (GA 4, Ch. IX, para. 4, in Volume III of this work).

* If someone raises the objection that the heart as the “physiological organ” of thinking and the material heart are different things, then he should prove that physiological processes do not have a material character.
_____

In one of his lectures, Rudolf Steiner explains what pure thinking is, that it still preserves a connection with conceptual activity, that already in this case a will-nature is inherent to it, but nowhere does he state that a will lives in the human heart. When we work with the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ we develop the will-nature first in pure thinking and then in beholding thinking. And already the will-nature “wrests itself free, first from the chest and then from the whole human body... It is as if you were drawing this thinking out of the last cell fibre of your big toe.† ... you feel that a new inner human being has been born in you, that can engender an unfolding of the will out of the spirit” (GA 217, 10.12.1922).

† Does this not imply (if we continue in the style of Lowndes) that we are given the incentive to develop a method of thinking whose “physiological organ” is the big toe?
_____

It is true, that one can find in Rudolf Steiner’s indications of the etheric heart as an organ of thinking. He says that, in the process of the new initiation, when one advances to the opening of the lotus-flowers, there develops outside the human heart “something similar ... to a kind of etheric heart.... but one must not expect the human being with, so to speak, the heart that he has in his body, (emphasis G.A.B.) to be present in spiritual-scientific cognition ...” (GA 161, 5.1.1915).

It should be pointed out that F. Lowndes’ entire way of thinking inclines to materialism and materialistic occultism (which is again a feature of the parapsychologists). On the philosophical level one could count him among the formal-linguistic reductionists of positivism, although they themselves would probably object that he merely parodies and distorts their views. In his practical recommendations for meditative work with the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’, he says: “Meditative work should lead to a first result, namely, that the text on the pages of Rudolf Steiner’s book in question, printed in black printer’s ink, should be- come a picture that one beholds, and in which every sentence, every paragraph, every passage and so forth are all equal in importance” (p.138).

We would like to raise an objection here straight away, and ask the author: What will happen to the meditative process if the text is printed, not in black, but green ink, or if it is read from a computer screen? But, quite frankly, we are not in a laughing mood because, with the help of such techniques, Lowndes wishes to bring people directly to the opening of the “heart chakra”.*   But we know, that the principle distinction of the path of initiation which Rudolf Steiner gave precisely for the modern human being, from the old and even traditional paths consists in the fact, that first the two-petalled lotus in the region of the forehead should be developed. If, however, the twelve-petalled (heart) lotus is opened first, this leads to misfortune, as it turns the human being into a visionary, an occult fantasist.

* Use of the word “chakra” is also current in parapsychology. R. Steiner speaks of “lotus flowers” and (less often) of “chakrams”.
_____

In his book ‘How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds’ (GA 10) Rudolf Steiner writes of the need to form and develop, with the help of the appropriate exercises, a centre in the etheric body. Although it lies close to the physical heart, it is not the repetition of this in the etheric body. The twelve-petalled lotus-flower stands in “particularly close relation” to it (p.141). But what is especially important for us to know is this: One should begin to develop this etheric center not in the region of the heart, “but in the head. It reveals itself to the clairvoyant as a point of origin for movements” (ibid., p.142). For this it is necessary to practise thinking in a special way, to free it from all impressions of the external senses, to develop the power of judgment in beholding, and not to meditate on printer’s ink.

The clairvoyant must not lose control of supersensible perceptions, and for this reason he must first learn to gain mastery with his ‘I’ over the experience of thinking and perception. If in our time the opening of the lotus flowers proceeds, not from above (from the head) downwards (to the kundalini), but the reverse, he is in danger of drowning in the unconscious and simply going mad, which will still affect his karma in a thousand years. But it is to precisely this, that Lowndes is calling us. He refers to the complex of six exercises given by Rudolf Steiner (Nebenübungen). However, they were given by him not for the opening of the “heart chakra”, but for the necessary preparation of the twelve-petalled lotus for its opening when the time comes: after the opening of the two-petaled and the sixteen-petaled lotuses. And Rudolf Steiner speaks of this quite unambiguously.

Specifically for the development of the two-petaled lotus and also for what follows after this on the path of initiation, it is necessary to form an etheric center, an “etheric heart”, but in the region of the head. This thought is clarified by Rudolf Steiner with the help of a drawing (Fig.45), and he says that when thinking (thanks to beholding) begins to support itself in the etheric body, the latter will expand in the head region (within the astral aura). And the special thing here is that the human being grows out in this way from his own body, develops “a kind of etheric heart” outside himself (GA 161, 1.5.1915).

This clarification alone suffices to bring all of Lowndes’ fabrications to fall like a house of cards. But, amazingly enough, he includes – admittedly, in a different book – this diagram! However, he will have done this in the context of a general torrent of quotations, and will not have remembered what it is all about – or was he perhaps speculating on the stupidity of the reader?

Rudolf Steiner develops his thought further and says: “In clairvoyance we fashion for ourselves ... a higher organ than our brain. Just as our ordinary brain is connected with our physical heart (through blood circulation, and not through “thinking” with the physical heart – G.A.B.), so is what is developing as thought outside, in the astral body, connected with the etheric heart (in the region of the head – G.A.B.) That is higher clairvoyance: head-clairvoyance” (!) (ibid.). It is fundamentally distinct from visionary clairvoyance, which arises due to various anomalies of development, among them the premature “awakening” of the “chakra of the heart”.

F. Lowndes develops his conjectures further and recommends the following: look upon a printed page of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ as a garden, the paragraphs as flower beds, the sentences as flowers, and your thinking will become “alive”, your “heart chakra” will open up. – Pure nonsense, complete lunacy!

Maybe a serious reader will ask us, not without a note of impatience, why we are commenting in such detail on obvious foolishness. We could not ignore Lowndes’s book, because it is successful in Anthroposophical circles, and groups already exist in which its author helps “esoteric kamikazes” to set the “heart chakra” working, whereby they use for this purpose the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ (and also eurythmy). In the Anthroposophical press positive, even ecstatic, reviews appear. Thus writes former general secretary of the Finnish Anthroposophical Society R. Vilenius in the central weekly paper of the AAG: “This book is a trailblazer in the field of central Anthroposophical research.” 127 Well, a “trailblazer”, maybe – to voluntary feeblemindedness.

Anthroposophy does not insist at all that, while thinking, a human being has to deaden his heart. On the contrary, the participation of the heart in thinking is given special importance. Rudolf Steiner says: “Intellect and reason are mere intermediaries for the understanding of the heart.” And to clarify what he means by this, he continues*:  “Through intellect and reason one reaches through to the Divine thoughts. But when one has taken hold of thought in this way, one must learn to love it. Man learns step by step to love all things. This does not mean that he should, without judgement, bind his heart to everything that comes to meet him. But when one strives to research a being or thing down to its spiritual foundation, one begins to love it. And if the heart seeks the love of truth in all beings, then the ‘spirit’ lives ‘in the heart.’ Such love is the garment that the soul should always wear. Then she herself weaves the Divine into the things” (GA 266/1, p.61).

* Lowndes gives the beginning of this quote, but then says nothing about what follows – i.e. the essence of the matter.
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Activity of the heart creates the necessary conditions for beholding of the object of cognition. Perception of ideas through beholding presupposes an identification, a total merging, of the subject with the object. Such an identification is only possible where there is love for the object of cognition. Then “in the things” are revealed the Divine ideas that were “before the things”; truth is revealed – but in and through the subject. This is what the methodology of spiritual science understands by the participation of the heart in the process of cognition. In the first chapter of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ it says that the way to the heart goes “through the head”, that there is no love in those who “lack the inner representation”. The “etheric heart” in the head region is something quite different. With the development of the lotus flowers, i.e. man’s attainment of higher levels of consciousness, it descends to the region of the twelve-petalled lotus. This process takes place in the safest and most harmonious way if it has been prepared through work of the consciousness on the basis of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’. Indeed, we actually have to do here with the “central Anthroposophical field of research”, and for this reason no-one is permitted to distort, falsify or parody it.

One question still remains unanswered: What are we to say of the research of George O’Neil himself? We had the opportunity to read a typewritten copy of one of his manuscripts, with coloured illustrations that he had drawn by hand. It is entitled: ‘A work-book on Rudolf Steiner’s ‘The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity’’. We did not find a single word on the opening of the “heart chakra”, on thinking through the physiology of the heart. On the contrary, in him one has the feeling of a serious, responsible relation to the concepts of spiritual science. As distinct from Lowndes, no assertion is made to the effect that the thought-structure of thinking in the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ is not seven, but nine-membered. O’Neil characterizes “living” thinking as follows: “... thinking becomes a seeing, a seeing that at the same time is thinking.” 128 As to his structural analysis of the text of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ – this is divided into four stages, resulting in a sevenfoldness – it deserves serious study, but if we are using Lowndes’ muddled version such a thing is nigh-on impossible, because he is unreliable as an author.

* * *

In the history of 20th century philosophy of the twentieth century there are two cases where philosophers were inspired by Rudolf Steiner’s ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ to write works on this theme. One of these attempts was made by Nikolai Berdyaev, the other by Nikolai Losky.

Berdyaev’s book also has the title ‘The Philosophy of Freedom’. 129 Its writing was due to the fact that Berdyaev, who regarded himself as the true philosopher of freedom, saw in Rudolf Steiner’s book a kind of personal challenge. He thought that with his book he would put things right, which Rudolf Steiner was not able to do. But Berdyaev’s conception of freedom suffers from two serious shortcomings, which make it subject to criticism. The first is his categorical conviction that epistemology “cannot be constructed without presuppositions”, it is “secondary” in character (p.46). He says: “From the very beginning I break off any conversation having a purely gnoseological basis because I reject this basis itself. The very first word of gnoseology I regard as already a lie...” (p.45). In this sense N. Berdyaev’s conception is in fact the radical antithesis to what Rudolf Steiner takes as the foundation of freedom, and thus Rudolf Steiner’s conception of freedom wins, the more that of Nikolai Berdyaev loses. A fruitful dialogue would only have been possible between them if Berdyaev had been able to read Rudolf Steiner’s epistemological works without prejudice, first and foremost ‘Truth and Science’. But Berdyaev suffered from a peculiar form of subjectivism (characteristic of members of the Russian intelligentsia) accompanied by a hefty dose of fanaticism, which makes a thinking person blind with regard to ideas he does not wish to accept.

The fanaticism of the philosopher Berdyaev was rooted in his view of the relation between occultism and religion. It was the latter which he laid as the foundation of his conception of freedom – and this was his second basic error. He rejected Anthroposophy, giving as his reason the generalization that, so he thought, “in modern ‘theosophy’ there is the same rational impotence as in the old heresies ... for ‘theosophy’ there is no belief, there are no miracles, no reunion and transubstantiation; for it everything is rational and naturalistic, everything is divided and not full” (p.228). And, in any case, occultism altogether is “sectarianism in an intellectual guise” (p.232). But the philosophy of freedom is the “philosophy of the miracle, freedom is miraculous; it is not naturalistic, it is not the result of a development” (p.233-234).

Berdyaev, despite his familiarity with a number of Rudolf Steiner’s books in which the fundamentals of his system of knowledge are given, and although he had attended several of his lectures and, finally, knew the book of Andrei Beliy in which he defended Rudolf Steiner’s epistemology and Goetheanistic works against attacks of E. Metner (‘Rudolf Steiner and Goethe in the Contemporary World-View’), proved unable to entertain even for one moment the thought of how different the theosophy of Rudolf Steiner is from the theosophy of, say, Leadbeater and company, that in it there is all that, in his conception of freedom, he attributed to the Church, which “demands the transubstantiation of the whole world, of all flesh” (p.288), and that in it there is nothing he has accused it of, that represented an accusation of Rudolf Steiner.

Berdyaev says: “The remarkable contempory theosophist and occultist R. Steiner” “dismembers the human being into a series of shells lying on top of one another, and derives all these shells from the evolution of other planetary worlds. The mystery of the personality that is unique and unrepeatable in the world, the integral personality in which nothing can be torn apart, drowns in the naturalistic evolution of the universe, as expressed in the terminology of planetary theosophy. The entire theosophical teaching of the migration of souls is a logical continuation of naturalistic evolutionism, which knows no overcoming of nature through miracle and grace. The destiny of the personality is ... super-rational, super-natural, catastrophic” (p.233).

We will waste no time refuting Berdyaev’s empty and even foolish accusations. They crumble into dust if one merely reads one or two books of Rudolf Steiner. Then it becomes perfectly clear that Berdyaev is sending his reproaches to “the wrong address”, slandering Anthroposophy and its philosophy of freedom. The only thing Berdyaev is right about is that there is, indeed, no“catastrophic mentality” in it, with which, as a child of the “silver age”, he tormented himself. And these very torments of his are of interest to us. They were the torments of hopelessness in face of total spiritual crisis, the way out of which was shown by Rudolf Steiner: on the path of the “transformation of the whole world, of all flesh”.

In contrast to Berdyaev, Nikolai Losky had a wonderful understanding of this. In his “Freedom of the Will” he finds a way, thinking as he does in the spirit of Rudolf Steiner’s ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’, of creating an original, self-contained work in which he establishes the monistic position of his “concrete”, “organic” ideal-realism as the synthesis of the polar opposition of determinism and absolute indeterminism (the position advocated by N. Berdyaev).

For the reason explained above, Losky did not declare himself openly an adherent of Anthroposophy. In those circles of the Russian intelligentsia which he frequented as an émigré, one could only keep silent about Anthroposophy, or speak of it disparagingly. As a good psychologist, he understood how futile it is to provoke fanaticized subjectivism and a Luciferized, ecstatic relationship to ecclesiasticism. Yet for those who “know” and “understand”, he gave an original mark of recognition in his ‘Freedom of the Will’. To decipher it, one must compare the beginning of the first chapters of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ with that of Losky’s book. They are amazingly similar. We already know the beginning of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’. Losky’s book begins thus: “The problem of freedom has been discussed in European philosophy, broadly speaking, from the times of Aristotle. A grandiose literature has been devoted to it, perhaps more extensive than that applied to any other philosophical question. And this is not surprising: the destiny of the higher values and objects of veneration is closely bound up with such a principle as freedom. Thus there are philosophers who fight passionately against the teaching of the freedom of the will because, in their opinion, freedom is incompatible with the conditions of the possibility of science. While in contrast, other philosophers defend freedom of the will with no less ardour, on the basis that, without freedom morality, rights, the religious idea of sin, the explanation of evil, etc., would not be impossible.” 130

Such a similarity of style and content can in no way be accidental. Losky did this deliberately. At the same time, in his book Losky shows himself to be an independent thinker of high stature who is able to pursue a fruitful dialogue with the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ and find new approaches to it. Of this, one grows more and more convinced as one studies his book more deeply, and eventually the thought arises that it is a splendid propaedeutic prologue to the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’.

‘Beholding’ raises us above all particulars to the ultimate antithesis: namely, that of ‘I’ and world.

5.            Nowhere are we satisfied with what Nature shows us in sense-experience. We seek all the time for what
            we call an explanation of the facts.
               The extent of what we seek for in things, over and above and in excess of what in them is immediately
            given to us, severs our entire being into two parts; we become conscious of our antithesis to the world. We
            place ourselves over against the world as an independent being. The universe appears to us in the two
            opposites: I and World.

And if the idea is individualized, we need only grasp the fact that we ourselves are the “fathers” of dualism. Our life itself, which places us in the material world, is a dialectical process in which it is the task of the spirit to ‘cancel and preserve’ (aufheben) matter, and much more besides, in order to ascend to a higher unity.

6.               We erect this barrier between ourselves and the world as soon as consciousness lights up in us. But
              we never lose the feeling that we belong to the world all the same, that there is a bond connecting us with
              it, that we are, as a being, not outside but inside the universe.

7.               This feeling awakens in us the striving to build a bridge between the opposites. And in the final analysis
              the entire spiritual striving of mankind consists in the bridging of this antithesis.

We are prepared for Cycle II by our general cognitive task, which is: to build bridges between all kinds of dualism. This task of construction has, however, been led up a blind alley by the philosophical work carried out on a colossal scale in the outer academic world. At the end of the 19th century there was no way out of the blind alley, because it had even been scientifically “proven”. To view it with the eye of ‘beholding’ gives us cause for the deepest concern – since we have in reality to behold the world-wide, all-embracing struggle that is being fought in the world of universally-human culture and civilization. At the present time it has led to a disturbing outcome not only in the realm of ideas, but in the social sphere it has culminated in the crisis of personality.

But let us, to begin with, look at the structure of the Cycle in its overall aspect (Table 2). As we can see, there are in it several levels of development. The main current of thought is divided into two sub-cycles, which also reflects as to content the twofold character of Cycle II (it is twofold in a different sense than the two parts of the lemniscate – i.e. structurally). The second sub-cycle (II-B) is also complex in structure; its elements 5 and 6 are built up out of the sub-cycles of the third level.

The dialectical triad of Cycle II is, because of the structure of its content, dualistic. In it, thesis and antithesis confront one another a number of times in the course of the discussion. Content-wise they are concerned with three things: religion, art and science – the main constituents of the spiritual life of man – and these in two projections: onto the ‘I’ and onto the world. As a result of this two threefoldnesses emerge: that of the subject and that of the object (Fig.46).

The contradiction contained in the dialectical triad can be regarded as universal; it arises through the encounter of Monism and Dualism. The opposition between them has world-historical significance.

The entire content of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ as the book proceeds is imbued with the contrast between these two world-views, until Monism gains the decisive victory, and this has fundamental significance for the creation of a solid basis for the possibility of spiritual freedom.

The antithesis between the ‘I’ and the world is the primary source of dualism, which human thinking struggles to overcome. It has its roots in man himself; it is therefore within him that its conquest must be sought. This is the theme discussed in the whole of Cycle II, and even beyond, but the central ‘knot’ of the problem is tied in the dialectical triad of the Cycle. The question was first posed, however, in element 5 of the first Cycle.

CYCLE II*
1-2.         Sub-cycle II-A The history of the spiritual life is a continuous quest for the unity between        (1-2.)
               ourselves and the world. ‡ This aim is pursued equally by religion, art and science. ‡               (3.)
               The religious believer seeks in the revelation imparted to him by God, the solution to the          (4.)
               world-riddle which his ‘I’ confronts him with in its dissatisfaction with the world of mere
               appearances. The artist seeks to impress upon the material world the ideas of his ‘I’ in
               order to reconcile what lives in his inner being with the outer world. He, too, feels dissatisfied
               with the world of mere appearance and seeks to embody in it that extra content which the ‘I’,
               transcending the outer world, bears within itself. The thinker seeks for the laws at work in the
               world of phenomena; he strives to penetrate in thinking, what he experiences in observation.

3.                  ‡ Only when we have made the world-content into our thought-content, do we find again      (5.)
               the connection from which we have severed ourselves. ‡ But we will see later that this goal       (6.)
               can only be attained if the task of the scientific researcher is understood on a deeper level
               than is often the case. ‡ The whole of what I have described here comes to meet us in               (7.)
               a world-historical phenomenon: the contrast between the unitary world-view or Monism and
               the two-world theory or Dualism.

* Let us bear in mind that in chapter 2 elements 1 and 2 very often merge together. This is a typical feature of the Antithesis chapter.

As we recall, Jakob Boehme says of the antithesis that in it are revealed life and strength. We were able to experience this with particular clarity in the dialectical triad presented above, which is developed as a seven-membered cycle. Here, the threefold is metamorphosed parallel to the sevenfold. This is undoubtedly the dialectic of the alchemical art, transposed into the sphere of thinking. This corresponds in music to a complicated duet of, say, piano and violin.

Countless battles have been fought in the philosophical conflict of world-views between monism and the theory of two worlds, but with no tangible result. Rudolf Steiner, who has made his own contribution in this struggle, chooses a different and completely new approach: a beholding of the multiplicity of forms of the dualistic and monistic outlooks. The play of the various stages of the elements in this great act of beholding is complicated, but interesting. We experience the viewpoints in a certain “sublimation”, until the ardently-sought “philosopher’s stone”, which they conceal in the murky medium of their one-sidednesses, is finally deposited at the bottom of the retort. We have already pointed out that all the elements of chapter 2 have the colouring of a conflict of the opposites; consequently, the ‘beholding’ that lies before us also has heightened activity; however, our task remains the same: to let all this unfold in our soul, but without active participation of the intellect.

4.           Sub-cycle II-B ‡ Dualism only directs its gaze to the separation between ‘I’ and world                   (1.)
              brought about by man’s consciousness. Its whole striving amounts to a powerless struggle
              to reconcile these opposites, which it calls spirit (or mind) and matter, or subject and object,
              or thinking and appearance. It has the feeling that there must be a bridge between the two
              worlds, but it is not able to find it. The human being, in experiencing himself as an ‘I’, cannot
              but place, in his thinking, this ‘I’ on the side of spirit; and when, over against this ‘I’, he sets
              the world, he cannot but include in this the world given to sense-perception, the material world.
              The human being thereby places himself right into the spirit-matter antithesis. He is all the
              more obliged to do so, insofar as his own body belongs to the material world. Thus the ‘I’
              constitutes a part of the realm of spirit; and the material things and processes perceived by
              the senses belong to the ‘world’. All the riddles that relate to spirit and matter must be recognized
              by the human being in the fundamental riddle of his own nature. ‡ Monism directs its gaze only      (2.)
              to the unity and tries to deny or gloss over the existing differences. ‡ Neither of these viewpoints    (3.)
              can satisfy us, as both fail to do justice to the facts. ‡ Dualism sees spirit (‘I’) and matter                  (4.)
              (world) as two fundamentally different entities and can therefore not understand how the
              two can work upon one another. How can spirit know what is hap- pening in the material
              world when the peculiar nature of the latter is entirely foreign to it? Or how in these circumstances
              is spirit to work upon it, so that its intentions are realized in practice? The most ingenious and
              the most absurd hypotheses have been put forward to resolve these questions. But up to the
              present time the situation of monism has not been much better. It has tried to help itself out in
              three different ways: either it denies spirit and turns into materialism; or it denies matter in order
              to take refuge in spiritualism; or it maintains that even in the world’s simplest entities matter and
              spirit are inseparably united, and that consequently we need not be surprised to find present in
              the human being these two forms of existence, which are nowhere separate from one another.

              Sub-cycle II-B-1 ‡ Materialism can never provide a satisfactory explanation of the world, since       (5.)
              any attempt at an explanation has to take its start through our forming thoughts about the                [1-2.]
              phenomena of the world. Thus materialism begins with the thought of matter or material
              processes. ‡ In this way it has before it two distinct realms of facts: the material world and               [3.]
              the thoughts about it. ‡ It tries to understand the latter by regarding them as a purely material          [4.]
              process. It believes that thinking arises in the brain in roughly the same way as digestion takes
              place in the animal organs. Just as it ascribes mechanical and organic effects to matter, so it
              also attributes to it the capacity, under certain conditions, to think. ‡ It fails to see that it has now     [5.]
              merely shifted the problem from one place to another. It is ascribing the faculty of thinking to
              matter instead of to itself. And thus it is back again at the point where it started. ‡ How does            [6.]
              matter come to reflect upon its own nature? Why is it not simply content to be the way it is and
              accept its own existence? The materialist has turned his gaze away from the identifiable subject,
              from our own ‘I’, and has arrived at something of a nebulous and indeterminate nature. And here
              he is confronted by the same riddle. ‡ The materialistic viewpoint cannot solve the problem,            [7]
              it can only shift it to another place.

              Sub-cycle II-B-2 ‡ And how is it with the spiritualist point of view? The pure spiritualist denies         [1-2.]
              matter in its independent existence and regards it simply as a product of spirit. ‡ If it applies            [3.]
              this world-view to the riddle of man’s own being it finds itself driven into a corner. ‡ Immediately
              confronting the ‘I’, which can be placed under the category of spirit, stands the world of the              [4.]
              senses. To this world, no access of a spiritual kind seems to present itself – it has to be
              perceived and experienced by the ‘I’ by way of material processes. The ‘I’ does not find such
              material processes within itself, if it wishes to regard itself only as a spiritual being. In what it
              produces through spiritual activity, nothing of the sense-world can ever be found. The ‘I’ seems
              to have no choice but to admit that the world would remain shut off from it if, as an ‘I’, it did not
              enter into a connection with the world in a non-spiritual way. Similarly, when we carry out actions
              we have to realize our intentions on the real, practical level with the help of material substances       [5.]
              and forces. ‡ Thus we are dependent on the world that is external to us. ‡ The most extreme           [6.]
              spiritualist, or rather the thinker who, by way of absolute idealism, manifests as an extreme
              spiritualist, is Johann Gottlieb Fichte. He tried to deduce the entire edifice of the world from the
              ‘I’. What he actually succeeded in doing, was to create a stupendous thought-picture of the world,
              devoid of all experiential content. ‡ Just as little as the materialist can eliminate the spirit, so             [7.]
              is it equally impossible for the spiritualist to argue away the external, material world.

              Sub-cycle II-B-3 ‡ Because the human being, when he enquires into the nature of the ‘I’,                [1-2.]
              perceives at first the working of this ‘I’ in the elaboration of the world of ideas in thought,
              the spiritually-oriented world-view can, in its considerations of man’s own nature, be tempted
              to recognize as spirit, only this world of ideas. ‡ In this way, spiritualism turns into one-sided             [3.]
              idealism. It does not take the step of seeking, through the world of ideas, a spiritual world; ‡ it          [4.]
              sees the spiritual world in the ideal world itself. ‡ In this way it is forced to remain caught, as if          [5.]
              spellbound, with its world-view within the active element of the ‘I’ itself.
                    ‡ A remarkable variant of idealism is the world-view of Friedrich Albert Lange as put                    [6.]
              forward by him in his widely-read ‘History of Materialism’. He accepts that materialism is
              quite right in asserting that all phenomena in the world, including our thinking, are the product
              of purely material processes; however, matter and its processes are, conversely, a product of
              our thought. “The senses give us...effects of things, not faithful images, and certainly not the
              things themselves. But we must see as belonging to these effects the senses themselves
              together with the brain and the molecular movements thought to be taking place in it.” In other
              words, our thinking is brought about by the material processes, and these are the product of
              the thinking of our ‘I’. ‡ Thus, Lange’s philosophy is nothing other than the tale, translated                 [7.]
              into concepts, of the bold Baron Münchhausen who holds himself up in the air by a tuft of his
              own hair.

              Sub-cycle II-B-4 ‡ The third form of monism is the one that sees the two entities, matter and           [1-2.]
              spirit, already united at the simplest level of the atom. ‡ However, nothing is achieved in this            [3.]
              way, ‡ [3.] beyond the shifting to another place, of the question that actually arises within our           [4.]
              consciousness. ‡ How does the simple entity come [5-7.] to express itself in two different
              ways when it is an indivisible unity?

Yes, the ‘polyphony’ of Cycle II is complicated, especially that of its fourth element. To help to realize its quality of ‘beholding’ one can try to experience it in the activity of listening, because in the phenomenon of beholding, the same principle is at work as that by which in the sound of a word we experience its meaning. We may find it easier, in reading element 4 aloud, to draw together its “melodies” (themes) in time, to transform it into a harmony and thus perceive it in a single moment. What we perceive in this case is element 5 – that fundamental, ‘ur’-phenomenal idea which, contained within the object of beholding, was hidden to the speculative activity of the spirit. Enjoyment of the melodious interplay of the world-views – i.e. their purely philosophical aspect – if too much indulged in, does not enable the fundamental idea of monism to be brought to light. This is why, at a given moment, Rudolf Steiner changes the method of cognition. Then we are able, in our listening, to clearly pinpoint the one who bears the prime responsibility for the dualistic constructions – the thinking subject. Admittedly, we have discovered him before, but on a purely theoretical level, a priori. It is quite a different matter when he is revealed by the manifoldness of human world-views.

5.          Sub-cycle II-B-5 ‡ Over against these standpoints it must be made clear that the fundamental          [6.]
             and primary antithesis first comes to meet us within our own consciousness. ‡ It is we ourselves,      [1-2.]
             who sever ourselves from the maternal ground of nature and set ourselves as ‘I’ over against the      [3.]
            ‘world’.

The ideally perceived conclusion we have succeeded in drawing from this is highly personalistic; it therefore has its correspondence in Sub-Cycle II-B, with element 6. So precise is the ‘counterpoint’ of thought creation in the Cycle. The individualized character of element 5 is further underlined by the triad of elements [1-3] of sub-Cycle II-B-5. But when we come to element 6, the already individualized idea of element 5 is given personified expression in the words of Goethe.

6.         ‡ This is expressed in classical form by Goethe in his essay ‘Nature’, even though his way of           [4.]
            speaking may sound at first completely unscientific. “We live within her (within Nature) and are
            estranged from her. She speaks unceasingly with us and does not betray to us her secret.” But
            the reverse side is also known to Goethe: “Human beings are all within her, and she in all of them.”

As Goethe’s thinking is a ‘beholding’ there is a correspondence in sub-Cycle II-B-5 between element [4] and element 6. Thinking as ‘beholding’ appeals to the highest principle in the human being.

Cycle II in all its subordinate themes finally ascends to its All-unity. The long and arduous struggle of forces and substances now comes to an end. In our own chapter III we spoke of the triune God, who reveals Himself within the universal unity. This is, ultimately, also unitary Nature which, in the self-conscious subject, has divided itself into the world of his thinking and the world of perceptions. The human being needs only to understand how this came about in him.

           ‡ True as it may be that we have alienated ourselves from nature, so it is equally true that we           [7.]
           feel: we exist within her and belong to her. It can only be her own working that lives in us too.           [5.]

          ‡ We must find the way back to her. A simple reflection can point out the path to us. We have,           [6.]
          indeed, severed our connection with nature; but we must have brought something across with
          us into our own being. We must seek within ourselves for this natural element, and then we will
          find the connection again. Dualism fails to do this. It regards man’s inner being as a spiritual
          entity that is entirely foreign to nature and tries to join it on to nature. No wonder it cannot find
          the connecting link. We can only find the nature outside ourselves if we first get to know her within
          us. Her own counterpart within our inner being will serve us as a guide. The way ahead is now clear.
          Let us not speculate on the interaction between nature and spirit. Instead, we will descend into the
          depths of our own being in order to find there the elements that we have preserved and brought   
          over with us in our flight from nature. ‡ Research into our own being must bring the solution to          [7.]
          the riddle. We must arrive at a point where we can say to ourselves:  Here we are no longer just ‘I’;
          here is something that is more than ‘I’.

Let us note at this point that what corresponds to element 7 in Cycle II-B-5 is elements [5], [6] and [7] representing, as we have called it, the ‘ideal perception triad’ of the seven-membered lemniscates of the Cycle, as opposed to the dialectical triad. Similar patterns can also be observed in the large Cycle as a whole, but in the correspondence between sub-Cycle II-A and the first triad; between sub-Cycle II-B-5 and the second triad; while sub-Cycle II-B also embraces the second triad as well as transitional element 4, whereby the working of sub-Cycle II-B in favour of the ‘ideal perception triad’ is intensified to a special degree.

The third Cycle in the chapter is very short. Everything essential in it is resolved in the first two Cycles – in two, as this chapter embodies the antithesis. The first Cycle brings it into connection with chapter 1, and then in Cycle II takes place the entirely necessary conflict of the opposites. The third Cycle is required in order to give unity to the chapter and provide a connection to the next. This is the role played by the final conclusion of Cycle III.

The third Cycle also gives the impression of raising the sevenfoldness of the preceding Cycle to an octave. It, too, has its “musical scale”, but does not manage to unfold for us in temporal succession – the
tone elements merge together like overtones into a chord (or tone) of plashing along (plätschern) on the level of thought and will, where the methodological principle predominates considerably over the meaning. In the discus- sion with the opponents of monism, and with the opponents of freedom, the main stress is nevertheless laid on the following: We will now observe how consciousness lives.

     CYCLE III
     1-2. ‡ I can well imagine that many a reader who has got this far will find my presentation not “on the level
      of contemporary science”. 3. ‡ To this I can only reply that my wish has been, so far, not to have anything
      to do with the results of scientific research, but simply to describe what anyone experiences in his/her own
      consciousness. 4. ‡ My inclusion of a number of statements about attempts to reconcile consciousness with
      the world has only been for the sake of making clear the actual facts. I have therefore not found it necessary
      to use single expressions such as ‘I’, ‘spirit’ (or ‘mind’), ‘world’, ‘nature’ etc. in the precise way that is usual in 
      psychology and philosophy. 5. ‡ Everyday consciousness does not know the sharp distinctions made in
      science, 6. ‡ and up to this point my aim has been merely to register the facts of everyday experience. 7.
      ‡ I am concerned, not with the way science has so far interpreted consciousness, but with how it is
      experienced at any given moment.

We will now, as with chapter 1, review the content of the thought- structure we have highlighted (Table 3).

	Element 1	Element 3	Element 5	Element 7
C. I	In the human being a battle is waged between his higher and lower nature	The human being strives to step beyond the framework imposed by nature	Percepts are not enough for us; we look for concepts that will explain our observations.	The whole striving of mankind consists in the building of a bridge between man and the world. (Battle for Monism)
C. II	Hidden behind this battle is the antithesis between ourselves and the world	He does this in religion, art and science	When a contradiction arises here, then it occurs within our own consciousness.	If this bridge is to be built we must undertake research into our own being.
C. III	In cognition the battle is transformed into a contrast of methods: the philosophical and the spiritual-scientific (see motto on title page)	And the human being needs to understand what is going on in his own consciousness, and must not complicate the question for the sake of appearing to be scientific	Here it is necessary to use the everyday con- sciousness	It is important not to interpret consciousness, but to see how it is experienced on an everyday level.

Table 3

As we see from the Table, elements of the same order taken together in the three Cycles form dialectical triads. Admittedly, the quality prevailing in them is not confrontation but relationship. These are the triads of development.

In our Table we have not taken into account the material of the sub-Cycles. We are carrying out a general verification. Our chapter has shown itself to contain eight cycles altogether. Let us compare their concluding elements – meaning the seventh in each case.

     1. CYCLE I
         The whole striving of mankind consists in the building of a bridge between man and the world.

     2. CYCLE II-A
         Two world-views are concerned with this task: monism and dualism.

     3. CYCLE II-B-1
         The materialistic world-view is not able to establish a unitary picture of the world.

     4. CYCLE II-B-2
         The spiritualist is not able to set aside (aufheben) the outer world (i.e. we would venture to add to this
          that he lacks the capacity to ‘behold’!), and he therefore remains a dualist.

     5. CYCLE II-B-3
         Lange’s idealism is a mere product of phantasy.

     6. CYCLE II-B-4
         The monism that is based on the atomistic theory also proves to be invalid (anti-individualization).

     7. CYCLE II-B-5
         Research into the riddle of the human being makes it possible for us to build a bridge between the ‘I’ and
          the world. 

We have here a sevenfold structure, which ascends to the octave.

     8. CYCLE III
         The key to the riddle of the human being lies in research into the life of his consciousness.

So convincingly does living thinking demonstrate the laws of its movement. Ultimately, however, its laws are those of the process-of-becoming of the evolutionary cycle.

Now we will formulate a concluding résumé so as to enable us – without placing too great a burden on the memory, which disturbs the act of ‘beholding’ – to follow the macro-metamorphosis which proceeds from chapter to chapter.

    On an existential level the human being experiences the twofoldness of his nature. Once he had begun
    to reflect upon the world, he found himself standing in confrontation with it, and the question sprang up
    in him: Do we not have to do here with an absolute antithesis between two worlds – the spiritual in us  
    and the physical outside us? Attempts are made to resolve this question by way of religion, science and
    art, but in each case no account is taken of the fact that the two-worlds theory has been produced by
    thinking consciousness. Outside of this, dualism does not exist. Consciousness is also a form of being.
    If we examine how and through what it lives, together with everything else that exists, we will
    understand why the idea of duality arose within it, and what true monism, unity, means.

Further important elucidation of chapter 2 will be found in our study of chapter 9.