# Truth and Science

## GA 51 — 7 May 1902, Berlin

### Truth and Science

*An introductory lecture by Rudolf Steiner: “Before which forum can a decision be made regarding ‘a unified worldview?’ — An attempt at an answer to the question of ‘Truth and Science’”; followed by discussion.*

Dr. Rudolf Steiner, as speaker: I was once inspired to pose our question “Before which forum must a unified worldview be decided?” by the earlier discussions of our association, which, after all, wants to cultivate a monistic worldview, and also by my personal involvement in the dispute over Haeckel's “Welträtsel” (World Riddle). Here in the group, the questions were often considered: What is the essence of a unified worldview, what is its value, do we actually have the right to speak of a specifically monistic one? It was emphasized once that according to the present standpoint of science we have no right to speak of unity in material respects, and on another occasion Dr. Penzig explained that in the striving after a unified world picture embracing the whole of nature and the spiritual world one could not but round off the objective picture given by the individual sciences, thus forcing the facts. Even then I noticed that the greatest advances often originated from such supposed falsifications. The Copernican system, for example, was a “falsification” of the facts available for its time, just as the Lamarck-Darwin theory of evolution is nothing more. Just as Tycho de Brahe provided the only possible world view for his time, so it is easy for the fact fanatic, who does not want to go beyond the objectively given facts with his thinking, to prove the “falsifications” that Lamarck-Haeckel's theory of evolution contains according to the current state of science. Nevertheless, I believe that, like Copernicus, Haeckel will be proved right. At the time, I strongly supported the much-debated “Welträtsel” because I admired the consistency and extreme boldness with which a mind creates and “falsifies” a world view from a one-sided point of view. Although my basic philosophical views are only opposed to his in what he fights against in them and agree with him in what he presents positively. At the same time, however, I was described as one of Haeckel's main opponents, an experience that seems symptomatic to me of our time, in that the author's world of ideas takes on a completely different image in someone else's mind. We use our terms, based on their usual position in intellectual life, to put forward ideas that mean something other than what we want to express.

In the course of these arguments about Haeckel and in the discussions within the Bund, a question has been brought to life for me that I have often asked myself: What is the relationship between truth and science? Does science contain truth? Does it contain any elements that could lead to the construction of a unified world view? Do we have the right to construct a unified world view or any world view at all on the basis of science?

This question, which has preoccupied people for centuries, who were closer to solving it than modern times, which has blocked the path to a solution through so-called epistemology, requires us to clarify before which forum anything can be decided at all with regard to truth and science, with regard to the truth content of science.

Nowadays, after all the developments of the 19th century, we have the idea of truth as something that must correspond to objective reality. We find ourselves in an intensive fanaticism of facts that does not allow us to go beyond mere registration. If truth is only a conceptual repetition of what exists outside of us, then, according to the perception of those who today strive for a worldview, this is also nothing more than a counter-image of facts existing outside of us, of the reality already finished in the world outside of us. If it were possible to take a photograph of the world from some corner in the most favorable perspective possible, the ideal of a worldview would be achieved. But to construct such a world view would actually be superfluous, a mere luxury of the human mind, if, like science, it were to be nothing more than a mere repetition, a kind of photographic counter-image of what is going on in the world, what is available in a completed form. The fact that the individual still forms an individual counter-image alongside science would be completely superfluous, infinitely unimportant for the whole world context. If nature has provided and developed everything for us except the final point, then what the human spirit dreams and creates does not belong to reality. For this point of view, which appears grotesquely in today's science, even in Haeckel's “Welträtsel” (World Riddle), man is nothing more than a mere speck of dust in the cosmos, differing from the worm only quantitatively. If he forms a picture of the world, he lives a life of luxury, doing something that adds not the slightest thing to the evolution of the world. Rather, he is required never to contribute anything of his own that is not found in the rest of nature, but only to register, compare, and logically combine.

We ask: Is this procedure of merely confronting objective nature logically, never adding anything beyond the current state of affairs, consistent with the course of nature's entities; is there perhaps nothing in the direction of nature's development that compels us to add anything to reality? Nature gives us the answer itself. In particular, it should give it to the evolution theorist.

Allow me to explain this to you in a concise way, assuming that nature is at the stage of its development that there were only monkeys and no humans. The monkeys would have investigated the phenomena of the world, they would have found what lies beneath them, and monkeys too. If they had taken the empirical standpoint, they would have been satisfied with the realization that the world ends with monkeys. Perhaps they would have founded a monkey ethic based on general monkey perception, so that nothing new would have been added to the world here and they would have remained at their standpoint. But from our standpoint of knowledge, we know that in the principle of development there was indeed something that led beyond the ape genus, that, because it was a productive principle, because it led beyond what was present as a completed reality, , led to the development of man, something that was not limited to the actual, which, as a real imagination, as it were, real intuition in nature, leads it beyond its individual stages and lifts it beyond the immediate present.

Man, too, as a product of evolution, as a being in nature, is there to live for evolution, not merely to look back and form a picture of evolution and regard himself as the end of the series. A Weltanschhauung that seeks to summarize the content of all his thinking and doing will therefore not only be theoretical and contemplative, but also practical and postulating. Man should therefore not only repeat nature in some way, but see if there are not forces within him that lead beyond the immediately given. He should make the development spiritually, ideally alive in himself, should seek the forces that drive the species forward, that bring about progress, not merely examine his mental powers to see if they correspond to reality. The question “Can we penetrate to the thing in itself, see into the essence of the world?” is a disaster, an obstacle for man. But when he places himself in the process of evolution, intervening in nature to advance it a step further, he comes to a sense of his exalted task, of his position within the world.

There are in fact rudiments for the formation of this superscientific standpoint, which fully recognizes science but rises above what science offers it as the lawfulness of logical thought. Maeterlinck, for example, has advanced similar views in one of his more recent books, in which he describes the marriage of the bees. One wonders: can we speak of truth in the sense of scientific truth, of agreement with the given reality, which is always in the material small print, if it is to be the content of a world view, or does it, as a world view , does it lead beyond the purely objective truth in a similar way to the poetic truth according to the view of those who understand it in the Goethean sense, as the poetic truth leads beyond the immediate naturalistic truth?

Such approaches can be found in many forms today, to the delight of those who see truth in living life, and to the horror of fact fanatics like Tycho de Brahe or Haeckel's opponents. But it does not belong in their forum. The truth, which wants to fertilize, will always be a search, will always have to “falsify” the image of the fact fanatics; but it stands infinitely above this, in that it develops something intuitive, spiritual in man, adding something new to nature, which would not be without the human spirit. Thus, what man cherishes in his dreams, what he creates in his mind, acquires more than the significance of mere luxury; in life, it becomes a cosmic truth, something that man has newly generated. Thus, on the foundation of science, he rises to productive work that flows freely from his soul as original intuition. At the highest level of development, he has a task that no other being in the world has; he adds something that would not exist forever without him.

These views may be abhorrent to the pure scientist, but I believe it is a correct insight that man has the right to be productive in his world view, a feeling that was different times, when we had not yet been blinded by a fanatical belief in facts and by epistemology, times that were convinced from the outset of the cosmic character of this addition.

Let me conclude with the words of Angelus Silesius, which express the realization of the unique significance of the human spirit in the world:

Without me, God could not create a single little worm; if I became nothing, it would have to break into nothingness.

Dr. Steiner: “I must confess that the attacks have not touched on what I have said today at all. I did not speak of a contradiction between humanity and nature. I was speaking rather from the standpoint of the most consistent point of view in the theory of evolution, that I regard all stages of nature, from the lowest to the highest stirrings of the spirit, as unified, and only appearing in different forms. But an amoeba is not a human being, and it is not a matter of blurring all distinctions. But if I say that in nature everything is only force, resistance, motion, then it is too reminiscent of the sentence: All cats are gray at night. It is not possible to get to the bottom of the world in the twinkling of an eye. Only when I have distinguished things can I look for a unifying, connecting principle. In the sense of the connecting principle of development, I have spoken of the task of man as one within nature, given by the facts of development.

I fully agree that we must adhere to reality if we want to be productive, and that we must correct our imagination in line with it. I only pointed out that efforts to present a world view that is only a copy of reality, as Büchner wants, have not yet met these requirements, and that, for example, this too is forced to do violence to the facts. It is not the intention that is important here, but the result. One behaves as if one wanted to give a picture of reality, but cannot. My principle is therefore not a theoretical, but a practical going beyond reality in the sense in which I see it in the principle of development, where creatures go beyond their own kind. This aspect of the problem has not been touched upon in the discussion.

I did not use the word falsification in the sense of the imperfection of a presentation that will only be clarified later, but rather meant that researchers are always forced into deliberately false representation for the sake of the system when they seek comprehensive unity, and therefore asked whether what we are entitled to call reality in the highest sense at all coincides with what the naturalist thinks of as reality. When Haeckel illustrates three stages of embryonic development with the same stereotype, he is forced to falsify in order to be able to provide evidence according to the scientific method. I mean that such forgers are nevertheless right, as Haeckel is in relation to his opponents who cling to the purely factual nature of the scientific method, because they intuitively see beyond the individual facts, not in a fanciful way.

But when Dr. Stern rejects the possibility of a world picture, of an overall view in principle, and in doing so draws on the diversity of philosophical systems to support his view, it is a fable convenue based on incomplete ideas of the individual systems. The most significant attempts at truth that have been made, from Vedanta philosophy through Greek to German, are approximations to the truth in varying degrees.

The forum before which the legitimacy of one or the other view is decided can only be the forum of the human being, his sovereign personality, as I agree with Dr. Schäfer. This sentence seems to me to be a truly real one, which has been formed not out of theoretical fantasies but out of the experience of men who have worked practically. But just as it is true that the personality is the ultimate forum, so it is certainly true that then the personality must always feel the responsibility of this position and the duty to constantly develop, to educate the depths of the personality. The child cannot be a forum in the same way as someone who is at the height of knowledge. The question therefore arises: Where in us humans lies the potential for development, the productive element? What in us corresponds to that which nature drives forward, which allowed apes to leave their species and become human?

If I regard man as a product of evolution, then I can indeed see him as the highest possible forum. But I also have the obligation to constantly call the highest human in me into existence and have no right in any moment of my life to recognize myself as the final and absolute forum, but I can, as I am in development, give myself up to the expectation that in every moment of my existence a higher point of knowledge than I now have can arise. The further development of the personality must be based on science, but it must also go beyond it, as art and poetry do. Just as art and poetry cannot be reduced to blind phantasms, so, when people control their personality by means of the principle of development, however far they go beyond objective nature, agreement will arise in the most diverse people, as the agreement of philosophical systems of all times shows.

The solution to the question “To what extent does science contain truth? Can it alone lead to truth?” lies in this sovereign meaning of human personality.

The world, especially for science, is in many respects dualistically constructed. Evolution is only possible because nature has prepared the future in it in a twofold way. Nature presents itself to man as an apparent, seemingly irreconcilable contradiction that cannot be resolved by science, as force, matter, and so on.

This is where the significance of human personality comes in. Only the life activity of man can be unifying, monistic. It consists in dissolving these apparent contradictions into a higher, productively generated view of life, in the life of development, in the uniting of contradictions, in living action.

Therefore, the question of the validity of the world view is to be decided before the forum of life, not before the forum of knowledge.