Is Anthroposophy Fantasy?
For the development of human spiritual life, there is a self-contained period between the demand, sounding from the Greek striving for knowledge, “know thyself” and the confession, “ignorabimus”, which was derived from the natural scientific view of the world in the last third of the nineteenth century.
The ancient Greek sage found the human soul in harmony with life only when knowledge of the world culminated in knowledge of the human being, revealed in self-awareness.
The modern thinker who believes that science has pushed him to his confession denies man precisely this culmination of his mental state. When Du Bois-Reymond spoke his “Ignorabimus,” the belief lived in him that all human knowledge could only move between the two poles of matter and consciousness. But these two poles elude human knowledge. We shall be able to recognize the manifestations of matter in so far as they can be expressed in terms of measure, number and weight; but we shall never be able to know what lies behind these manifestations as “matter in space”. Nor shall we be able to recognize how the experience arises in our own soul: “I see red”, “I smell the scent of roses”, and so on, that is, what takes place in our conscious life. For how could one grasp that a mass of moving carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen atoms in the brain is not indifferent to how they move, how they have moved, how they will move. We can grasp how the substance in the brain moves, we can define this movement according to mathematical concepts; but we cannot form any idea of how the conscious sensation arises from this movement, like smoke from a flame.
Should man go beyond these “limits of his knowledge,” he would have to proceed from knowledge of nature to knowledge of the spirit. And where the talk of the spirit begins, knowledge ends and must give way to faith. That is the ignorabimus (“we shall not know”) confession.
It cannot be said that the modern state of mind has gone beyond this confession of ignorance in the recognized quest for knowledge. Certainly, all sorts of attempts have been made to do so; but these are limited to pointing out this or that path to knowledge; however, they do not muster the energy to actually follow these paths with real knowledge in practice. One or other recognizes that in forming his ideas man experiences something that bears within it an independent, non-material entity; but one does not summon up the energy to live so energetically in this spiritual way of experiencing ideas that one passes from the realization that “ideas are spirit” to an understanding of the real spiritual world, which reveals itself in ideas only as on their surface.
One only arrives at the experience: when natural phenomena approach man, he answers them from within with ideas. But one does not grasp life in ideas themselves. One looks at how one is stimulated by nature to form ideas; but one does not place oneself in the inner experience that is woven into ideas themselves.
Anthroposophy is the first to take this step. And one recognizes it as such because in its experience of ideas, the ideas do not remain ideas but become a spiritual form of perception. Anyone who only sees through the spiritual essence of the ideas must stop at seeing in them spirit-like images of the nature of being, in which he has to content himself with the only incomprehensible content of the spirit. Only he who brings to inner experience the soul activity unconsciously at work in the forming of ideas stands before a spiritual reality through this experience. And this experience can be pursued with a full consciousness, just as it belongs to the mathematician when he pursues his problems. From the habits of thinking that one has acquired from sensory observation and experimentation, one fears today to immediately fall into the nebulous and fantastic if one does not have, when forming ideas, the support of what the senses say, what the measuring methods, what the scales reveal. This does not lead to the conscious activation of the inner soul power that flows through the formation of ideas, and in the experience of which one encounters the spiritual just as much as one encounters the spatially extended through the sense of touch.
What is described by anthroposophy as a thought exercise leads to this experience. And because every step of this experience is carried out with the same deliberation as in the field of natural research, measuring and determining weight, anthroposophy can be described as an exact spiritual research. Only those who do not understand the exact nature of their endeavors will lump them together with the nebulous forms of mysticism that so many people are fascinated by today.
Some people also claim that precisely because anthroposophy starts from experience, it should not ascribe to itself the character of knowledge. For knowledge is only present where there is a transition from experience to the derivation of the one from the other, to logical processing and so on.
Those who say this have failed to notice how all the soul activities through which modern man justifies his scientific approach pass through anthroposophy into experience. In this experience, one does not abandon the scientific approach in order to move on to a fantastic soul activity; rather, one takes the full scientific approach into the experience.
In every step of the types of spiritual knowledge described in this weekly from various points of view – imagination, inspiration and genuine intuition – the full fundamental character of science lives on, only in the realm of the spirit rather than in the realm of nature.
When Du Bois-Reymond made his confession “We will not know”, he had before his soul how man experiences inwardly: “I see red”, “I smell the scent of roses” and how, beyond this experience, “matter haunts space” and man cannot approach it. He cannot do so along this path either. But when he brings the formation of ideas to conscious experience in the imagination, then he opens the spiritual perception to the spirit, which then reveals itself in inspiration, and the person unites as spirit with the spirit in intuition. In this way, the person finds the spirit. But if he experiences himself in this way, he does not enter through the surface of the rose into the rose through the experience of “seeing red” or “smelling the scent of roses”; but he comes to experience what shines towards him from the rose as red, what streams towards him from the rose as the scent of roses; he finds that he has come to the other side of the red radiance and the scent of roses; matter ceases to “haunt space”; it reveals its spirit, and it is realized that belief in matter is only a preliminary stage to the realization that it is not matter that haunts space either, but spirit that reigns. And the concept of “matter” is only a provisional one, which is justified as long as its spiritual character is not understood. But one must speak of this “justification” after all. For the assumption of matter is justified as long as one faces the world with the senses. Anyone who, in this situation, attempts to assume some spiritual essence behind the sensory perceptions instead of matter is fantasizing about a spiritual world. Only when one penetrates to the spirit in one's inner experience does that which initially 'haunts' one as matter behind the sense impressions transform into a form of the spiritual world, to which one belongs with the eternal part of one's being. This transformation is not dream-like, but vividly and precisely imaginable.