Spiritual Teachings Concerning the Soul

GA 52 — 4 December 1903, Berlin

VI. The Epistemological Foundations of Theosophy II

Eight days ago, I began these lectures by remarking that contemporary philosophy, particularly German philosophy and especially its epistemology, makes it difficult for its adherents to find access to the theosophical worldview, and I remarked that I would attempt to outline this epistemology, this current philosophical worldview, and show how someone with a thoroughly serious conscience in this direction finds it difficult to be a theosophist.

In general, the epistemologies that have developed from Kantianism are excellent and absolutely correct. However, from their point of view, it is not clear how human beings can come to know anything about beings that are different from themselves, or indeed about real entities at all. Kantianism has shown us that this view ultimately leads to the conclusion that everything around us is only an appearance, only a mental image of ourselves. What we have around us is not reality, but is governed by the laws of our own mind, by the laws that we ourselves impose on our environment. I said: just as we have to see the whole world in this color nuance with an eye that is endowed with colored glasses, so, according to Kant's view, man must see the world colored as he sees it according to his organization, regardless of what it may be like in external reality. So we cannot speak of a “thing in itself,” but only of the entirely subjective world of appearances. If that is the case, then everything that surrounds me—the table, the chairs, and so on—is a mental image of my mind; for they are all only there for me insofar as I perceive them, insofar as I give form to these perceptions according to my own mental laws, prescribing laws for them. I cannot say anything about whether anything else exists beyond my perception of tables and chairs. That is basically what Kant's philosophy ultimately comes to.

This is, of course, incompatible with the idea that we can penetrate the true essence of things. Theosophy is inseparable from the view that we can penetrate not only the physical existence of things, but also their spiritual essence; that we not only have knowledge of what surrounds us physically, but can also have experiences of what is purely spiritual. I will show you how an energetic book with the worldview now called “theosophy” presents what later became Kantianism by reading to you from the work that was written shortly before the founding of Kantianism. The book was published in 1766. It is a book that — we can certainly say this — could have been written by a theosophist. It argues that humans are not only connected to the physical world around them, but that it will certainly one day be scientifically proven that humans belong not only to the physical world but also to a spiritual world, and that the manner in which they can be connected to this world can also be scientifically proven. Some things are so well demonstrated that they can be considered reasonably proven, or at least assumed to be proven in the future: “I do not know where or when, but the human soul is related to others, they interact and receive impressions from each other, of which humans are unaware as long as all is well.” And then from a second passage: “There are some things that are the same subject, which cannot be accompanying ideas of the other world, and therefore all spiritual thinking is such that it does not enter into the state of a spirit at all...” and so on.

Human beings with their average powers of perception cannot become aware of the spirit; but it is said that such a shared life with a spiritual world is nevertheless to be assumed. Kant's theory of knowledge cannot be reconciled with such a view. The person who wrote the foundation for this view is Immanuel Kant himself. So it is the case that we see a reversal in Kant himself. For in 1766 he writes this, and fourteen years later he establishes the theory of knowledge that makes it impossible to find the way to theosophy. Our modern philosophy is based on Kantianism. It has taken various forms, from Herbart and Schopenhauer to Otto Liebmann and Johannes Volkelt and Friedrich Albert Lange. Everywhere we find a theory of knowledge that is more or less Kantian in character, according to which we are dealing only with appearances, with our subjective world of perception, so that we cannot penetrate to the essence, the root of the “thing in itself.”

Now I would like to begin by presenting to you everything that developed in the course of the 19th century and what we can call the modified Kantian theory of knowledge. I would like to explain how the current theory of knowledge developed, which looks with a certain arrogance upon those who believe that it is possible to know anything. I would like to show how those who base their thinking on Kant's ideas form a basic epistemological view. Everything that science has brought forth seems to confirm Kant's theory of knowledge. It seems so firmly established that one cannot escape it. Today we will unravel it, and next time we will see how we can come to terms with it.

At first glance, it seems to be physics itself that teaches us everywhere that what the naive person believes to be reality is not reality. Take sound, for example. You know that the vibration of the air is outside our organ, outside our ear, which hears the sound. What is happening outside of us is a vibration of air particles. Only when this vibration enters our ear and causes the eardrum to vibrate does the movement continue to the brain. There we perceive what we call sound. The whole world would be silent and soundless; only when the external movement is picked up by our ear and what is merely vibration is converted do we experience what we perceive as the world of sound. So the epistemologist can easily say: Sound is only what exists within you, and if you think it away, there is nothing but moving air.

The same applies to what we encounter in the outside world in terms of colors and light. Physicists believe that color is a vibration of the ether that fills the entire universe. Just as sound causes the air to vibrate, and when we hear a sound there is nothing else present except the movement of the air, so with light there is only a vibrating movement of the ether. The vibrations of the ether are somewhat different from those of the air. The ether vibrates perpendicular to the direction of propagation of the waves. This has been clarified by experimental physics. When we perceive the color “red,” we are dealing with a sensation. Then we must ask ourselves: What else is there when there is no perceiving eye? — There should be nothing else in space but vibrating ether. The quality of color is eliminated from the world when the perceiving eye is eliminated from the world.

What you see as red is 392 to 454 trillion vibrations, and violet is 751 to 757 trillion vibrations. That is unimaginably fast. Nineteenth-century physics transformed all light and color perception into vibrations of the ether. If there were no eyes, the entire world of colors would not exist. Everything would be pitch black. It would not be possible to talk about color quality in outer space. This goes so far that Helmholtz said: We have within us the sensations of color and light, of sound and tone. This is not even similar to what is happening outside of us. We cannot even call it an image of what is happening outside of us. — What we know as the color quality of red is not similar to the approximately 420 trillion vibrations per second. That is why Helmholtz says: What is really present in our consciousness is not an image, but a mere sign.

The physicist therefore imagines that when I have a color sensation, movement occurs in space. And it is the same with the mental image of time: when I have the sensation of red and the sensation of violet, both are subjective processes within me. They follow each other in time. The vibrations follow each other in the outside world. Physics does not go as far as Kant in this regard. Whether “things in themselves” fill space, whether they are in space or follow one another in time, we cannot know — in Kant's sense — but we only know that we are organized in such and such a way, and therefore what is spatial or non-spatial must always take the form of the spatial. We spread this form over it. For physics, the oscillating motion must take place in space; it must take a certain amount of time. The ether oscillates at, say, 480 trillion oscillations per second. This already contains the concept of space and time. Physicists therefore assume that space and time exist outside of us. Everything else, however, is only a mental image, is subjective. You can read in physics works that for those who have become clear about what is happening in the outside world, there is nothing but vibrating air, vibrating ether. Physics seems to have contributed to the idea that everything we have exists only within our consciousness and that nothing exists outside of it.

The second thing that 19th-century science can show us are the reasons provided by physiology. The great physiologist Johannes Müller discovered the law of specific sensory energies. According to this law, each organ reacts with a specific sensation. If you bump your eye, you can perceive a flash of light; if electricity passes through it, the same thing happens. The eye will respond to any external influence in a manner appropriate to the eye. It has the power from within to respond with this peculiarity of light and color. When light and ether penetrate, the eye responds with light and color stimuli.

Physiology provides further evidence to support the subjective view. Suppose we have a tactile sensation. The naive person mentally imagines that it is the object itself that he perceives. But what does he actually perceive? — asks the epistemologist. What stands before me is nothing more than an assembly of tiny particles, of molecules. They are in motion. Every body is in such motion, which cannot be perceived by the senses because the vibrations are too small. Basically, it is nothing more than the motion that I can perceive, because the body cannot creep into me. What happens when you place your hand on the body? The hand performs a movement. This continues to the nerve, which translates it into what you perceive as sensation: warmth and cold, soft and hard. Movements are also present in the outside world, and when my sense of touch encounters them, the organ translates them into warmth or cold, softness or hardness.

We cannot even perceive what happens between the body and us, because the outermost layer of skin is insensitive. If the epidermis has no underlying nerve, it can never feel anything. The epidermis is always between the thing and the body. The stimulus therefore acts from a relatively large distance through the epidermis. Only what is stimulated in your nerve can be perceived. The outer body remains completely outside the movement process. You are separated from the thing, and what you really feel is generated within the epidermis. Everything that can really penetrate your consciousness happens in the area of the body, so that it is still separated from the epidermis. Based on this physiological consideration, we would have to say that we do not receive anything that is happening in the outside world, but that it is merely processes within our nerves themselves, which propagate in the brain, that excite us through completely unknown external processes. We can never go beyond our epidermis. You are stuck in your skin and perceive nothing other than what is happening within it.

Let us move on to another sensory organ, the eye. Let us move from the physical to the physiological. You see that the vibrations propagate; they must first penetrate our body. The eye consists first of a skin, the cornea. Behind this lies the lens, and behind the lens the vitreous body. The light must first pass through these. Then it reaches the back of the eye, which is lined with the retina. If you were to remove the retina, the eye would never convert anything into light. When you perceive the shapes of objects, the rays must first penetrate our eye, and a small retinal image is formed inside the eye. This is the last thing that can evoke sensation. What lies in front of the retina is insensitive; we cannot have any real perception of what happens there. Only the image on the retina can be perceived. One forms the mental image that chemical changes are taking place in the visual purple. The effect emanating from the external object must pass through the lens and the vitreous body, then cause a chemical change in the retina, and that is what becomes sensation. Then the eye projects the image back outwards, surrounds itself with the stimuli it has received, and translates them back into the world outside us. What goes on in our eye is not what constitutes the stimulus, but a chemical process. Physiologists are constantly providing new reasons for epistemologists. We must seem to agree completely with Schopenhauer when he says: The starry sky is created by ourselves. It is a reinterpretation of stimuli. We can know nothing about the “thing in itself.”

You see, this theory of knowledge limits humans solely to the things, let's say mental images, that their consciousness creates. They are enclosed in their consciousness. They can assume, if they want, that there is something in the world that makes an impression on them. In any case, however, nothing can penetrate them. Everything they feel is created by themselves. We cannot even know anything about what is going on in the periphery. Take the stimulus in the optic nerve. It must be conducted to the nerve, and this must in turn be converted in some way into the actual sensation, so that the whole world around us is nothing other than what we have created from within ourselves.

This is the physiological evidence that leads us to say that this is the case. But there are also people who now ask how we come to accept other people besides ourselves, whom we also only recognize from the perceptual impressions we receive from them. When a person stands in front of me, I only have vibrations as stimuli and then an image of my own consciousness. It is merely an assumption that, apart from the image in my consciousness, there is something similar to a human being. This is how modern epistemology supports its view that what is external experience is merely subjective in nature. It says: What is perceived is exclusively the content of one's own consciousness, is a change in this content of consciousness. Whether things exist in themselves is beyond our experience. For me, the world is a subjective phenomenon that is consciously or unconsciously constructed from my sensations. Whether other worlds exist is beyond the scope of my experience.

When I say that it is beyond the realm of experience whether there is another world, it is also beyond the realm of experience whether there are other people with other consciousnesses, because nothing from the consciousness of other people can enter into human beings. Nothing from the imagination of another or from the consciousness of another can enter into my consciousness. This is the view held by those who have more or less subscribed to Kant's theory of knowledge.

Kant summarized his theory of knowledge in the following words: A hundred possible talers do not contain less than a hundred real talers, that is, I cannot regard an object as real by adding anything to my mental image. The imagination merely provides an image. If an object is to be there, it must come to me, and I envelop it with the laws that I develop from within myself. Schopenhauer also subscribed to this view in a slightly modified form.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte also subscribed to this view in his youth. He thought Kant's theory through consistently. There is perhaps no more beautiful description of it than the one Fichte gave in his writing “On the Purpose of Man.” In it, he says: "There is nothing permanent anywhere, neither outside me nor inside me, but only incessant change. I know of no being anywhere, not even my own. There is no being. — I myself know nothing at all, and I am not. Images are: they are the only thing that exists, and they know of themselves in the manner of images; — images that float by without there being anything for them to float by; that are connected by images of the images. Images without anything depicted in them, without meaning or purpose. I myself am one of these images; indeed, I am not even that, but only a confused image of the images.

If you move on to the mental image of your own self, then you are no more aware of it than you are of the outside world. If you hold on to this thought in its full meaning, it will become clear to you that the outside world dissolves into a sum of illusions, and that the inner world is nothing more than a construct of subjective dreams intertwined with one another. You can already form a mental image from the outside, I would say from the side of physicality, that you yourself, like the outside world, are nothing more than a kind of dream construct, a kind of illusion, if you interpret the view correctly.

Look at your hand, which translates your movements into tactile sensations. This hand is nothing more than a construct of my subjective consciousness, and my entire body and what is inside me is also a construct of my subjective consciousness. Or take my brain: if I could examine under a microscope how sensation arose in the brain, I would have nothing before me but an object that I would have to translate back into an image in my consciousness.

The mental image of the self is just such a mental image; it is created like any other. Dreams pass before me, illusions pass before me—this is the worldview of illusionism, which necessarily reveals itself as the ultimate consequence of Kantianism. Kant wanted to overcome the old dogmatic philosophy; he wanted to overcome what had been put forward by Wolff and the Wolffian school. He regarded this as a collection of fantasies.

It was the proofs for the freedom of the will, for the immortality of the soul, and for the existence of God that Kant exposed as fantasies in terms of their evidential value. And what does he offer as evidence? He has proven that we cannot know anything about a “thing in itself,” that what we have is only the content of consciousness, but that God must be “something in itself.” Thus, we cannot necessarily prove the existence of God in Kant's sense. Our reason, our intellect, can only be applied to what is given in perception. They are only there to prescribe laws for what perception is, and therefore these things—God, soul, will—lie completely beyond our rational knowledge. Reason has a limit, and it cannot go beyond it.

In the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, he says at one point: “I therefore had to suspend knowledge in order to make room for faith.” That is what he basically wanted. He wanted to limit knowledge to sensory perception, and he wanted to achieve everything that goes beyond reason in other ways. He wanted to achieve it through moral faith. That is why he said: Science will never be able to attain the objective existence of things. But there is one thing we find within ourselves: the categorical imperative, which arises in us as an unconditional obligation. Kant calls it a divine voice. It is sublime above all things and carries with it unconditional moral necessity. From here, Kant ascends to recapture for faith what he has destroyed for knowledge. Since the categorical imperative has nothing to do with anything conditioned by sensory influence, but arises within us, there must be something that conditions both the senses and the categorical imperative, and which arises when all the duties of the categorical imperative are fulfilled. That would be bliss. But no human being can find the bridge between the two. Since he cannot find it, a divine being must create it. This brings us to a concept of God that we can never find in a sensual way.

A harmony must be established between the sensory world and the moral world of reason. Even if enough were done in one lifetime, we must not believe that earthly life is sufficient. Human life goes beyond earthly life because the categorical imperative demands it. And so we must accept a divine world order. And how could man follow a divine world order, the categorical imperative, if he did not have freedom? — Thus Kant destroyed knowledge in order to attain the higher things of the spirit through faith. We must believe! He attempts to bring back by means of practical reason what he has cast out by means of theoretical reason.

This Kantian philosophy also forms the basis for views that appear to be quite distant from Kantian philosophy. One philosopher who had a great influence, including in education, was Herbart. He developed his own view from Kant's critique of reason: when we look at the world, we encounter contradictions. Let us just look at our own ego. Today it has these mental images, yesterday it had others, tomorrow it will have yet others. Yes, what is the ego? It confronts us and is filled with a certain world of mental images. At another moment, it confronts us with a different world of mental images. We have a becoming, many characteristics, and yet it is supposed to be a thing. It is one and many. Every thing is a contradiction. Thus, says Herbart, there are only contradictions everywhere in the world. Above all, we must keep in mind the statement that contradiction cannot be true being. From this, Herbart derives the task of his philosophy. He says: We must eliminate contradictions; we must construct a world without contradictions. The world of experience is unreal, contradictory. He sees the true meaning, true being, in the transformation of the contradictory world into a world without contradictions. Herbart says: We find the way to the “thing in itself” by seeing the contradictions, and when we eliminate them from ourselves, we penetrate to true being, to the true real. — But he also has one thing in common with Kant, namely that what surrounds us in the outside world is a mere illusion. He, too, has tried to support what should be valuable to humans in a different way.

And now we come, so to speak, to the heart of the matter. We must bear in mind that all moral action basically only has meaning if it can take on real reality in the world. What is the point of all moral action if we live in a world of appearances? You can never be convinced that what you are doing is real. Then, basically, all your moralizing and all your goals are up in the air. Fichte was wonderfully consistent in this regard. Later, he changed his view and came to pure theosophy. Through perception, he says, we can never know anything about the world other than dreams of these dreams. But something drives us to want what is good. This allows us to glimpse into this great dream world. He sees the realization of the moral law in the dream world. What no intellect teaches must be justified by the requirements of the moral law. — And Herbart says: Because everything we perceive is contradictory, we can never arrive at norms for our moral actions. Therefore, there must be norms for our moral actions that are beyond the judgment of the intellect and reason. Moral perfection, benevolence, inner freedom—these are independent of intellectual activity. Because everything in our world is illusion, we must have something in which we are relieved of reflection.

This is the first phase of 19th-century development: the transformation of truth into a dream world. Dream idealism, which alone is supposed to be what reflection on being can arrive at, was what sought to make the foundation of a moral worldview independent of all knowledge and cognition. It sought to limit knowledge in order to make room for faith. That is why German philosophy broke with the ancient traditions of those worldviews that we call theosophy. No one who called themselves a theosophist could ever have accepted this dualism, this separation of the moral and the dream world. For him, there was always a unity, from the lowest atom of power to the highest spiritual reality. For just as what the animal accomplishes in pleasure and displeasure is only gradually different from what emerges at the highest peak of spiritual life from the purest motives, so everywhere what happens below is only gradually different from what happens above. Kant abandoned this unified path to a comprehensive knowledge and overview of the world by dividing the world into a world that can be known, but is only apparent, and another world that has a completely different origin, the world of morality. In doing so, he clouded the vision of countless people. All those who cannot find access to theosophy suffer from the aftereffects of Kant's philosophy.

Finally, you will see how theosophy springs from a true theory of knowledge; but first it was necessary for me to demonstrate the seemingly solid structure of science. That only the ether vibrates and we perceive green or blue, that we perceive sound through the vibrations of the air, seems to be irrefutably proven by research. To show how this really works will be the subject of the next lecture.