Anthroposophy and Idealism

A better understanding of anthroposophy would be gained than is the case today from some quarters if one were to delve into the nature of the intellectual struggles that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century.

This was the time when certain thinkers believed that the victory of scientific research over philosophical endeavor, as it had been active in the previous epoch, seemed decisive. They pointed to Hegel, who, in the opinion of these thinkers, had wanted to develop the whole world out of the idea, but who had completely lost the world of reality in his thought constructions; while the sovereign natural science started from this reality and only engaged with ideas to the extent that observation of the sensory world allowed.

This way of thinking seemed to be confirmed in every respect by the positive results of natural science. One has only to read books such as Moriz Carriere's “Moral World Order,” published in 1877, and one will become acquainted with a spiritual warrior who wanted to defend the right of idealism against “sovereign natural science.” There were many such spiritual fighters in those days. It may be said that the prevailing school of thought has stepped over them, in the knowledge that their cause is lost. Gradually, no more attention has been paid to them. Through their scientific idealism they wanted to save for humanity the knowledge of the spiritual world. They realized that “sovereign natural science” must endanger this knowledge. They contrasted what could be observed with the world of ideas living in human self-awareness and believed that this was a testimony to the fact that spirit rules in the world. However, they were unable to convince their opponents that the world of ideas speaks of a different reality than the one on which natural science is based.

Anthroposophy, looking back at these spiritual warriors, feels differently than the thinkers standing on the ground of “sovereign natural science”. It sees in them personalities who came as far as the door of the spiritual world, but who did not have the strength to open it. Scientific idealism is right; but only as far as someone who sets out to enter a region, but only has the will to reach the border of the region, but not to cross that border.

The ideas to which Carriere and his like pointed are like the corpse of a living being, which in its form points to the living, but no longer contains it. The ideas of scientific idealism also point to the life of the spirit, but they do not contain it. Scientific idealism aspired to the ideas; anthroposophy aspires to the spiritual life in the ideas. Behind the thinking power that rises to the ideas, it finds a spiritual formative power that is inherent in the ideas like life in the organism. Behind thinking in the human soul lies imagination. Those who can only experience reality in relation to the sense world must see imagination as just another form of fantasy.

In our imagination, we create a world of images to which we do not ascribe any reality in relation to our sensory existence. We shape this world for our own enjoyment, for our inner pleasure. We do not care where we got the gift of creating this world. We let it spring forth from our inner being without reflecting on its origin.

In anthroposophy, we can learn something about this origin. What often prevails in man as a frequently exhilarating imagination is the child of the power that works in the child as it grows, which is active in the human being at all when it forms the dead materials into the human form. In man the world has left something of this power of growth, of formative power, something that it does not use up in fashioning the human being. Man takes possession of this remnant of the power that shapes his own being and develops it as imagination. One of the spiritual warriors referred to here also stood at the threshold of this knowledge. Frohschammer, a contemporary of Carrieres, has written a number of books in which he makes imagination the creator of the world, as Hegel made the idea or Schopenhauer the will.

But we cannot stop with fantasy any more than we can with ideas. For in fantasy there is a remainder of the power that creates the world and gives form to the human being. We must penetrate behind fantasy with the soul.

This happens in imaginative knowledge. This does not merely continue the activity of imagination; it first stops in it, clearly perceiving why, in contrast to the sense world, it can only acknowledge unreality, but then turns around and, moving backwards, reaches the origin of imagination and thinking. She thus enters into spiritual reality, which reveals itself to her through inspiration and intuition (spiritual perception) as she advances. She stands in this spiritual reality as sensory perception stands in physical reality.

Imagination can only be confused with fantasy by those who do not feel the jolt of life between the consciousness that depends on the senses and the consciousness that lives in the spirit. But such a person would be like someone who awakens from a dream but does not feel the awakening as a jolt of life, but instead sees both experiences, dreaming and being awake, as equivalent.

The abstract thinker fears that imagination will continue to be fantasized; the artistic person feels slightly uncomfortable that the imaginative activity, in which he wants to develop freely, undisturbed by reality, should accept another activity, of which it is a child, but which reigns in the realm of true reality. He imagines that this casts a shadow over the free child of the human soul. But that is not the case. Rather, the experience of spiritual reality only makes the heart beat faster in the realization that the spirit sends an offspring into the world of the senses through art, which only appears unreal in the world of the senses because it has its origin “in another world”.

Anthroposophy wants to open the gate where noble spiritual fighters stood in the second half of the nineteenth century, without the strength to unlock this gate. The power of thought showed them the way to the ideas; but this power of thought froze in the ideas; Anthroposophy has the task of melting the frozen power.