Spiritual Teachings Concerning the Soul

GA 52 — 17 December 1903, Berlin

VII. The Epistemological Foundations of Theosophy III

In the previous lectures, I have attempted to outline the basic ideas of contemporary epistemology as it is taught at our universities and as it is also taught by those philosophers and thinking researchers who follow Schopenhauer, Kant, and similar great German thinkers. At the same time, I attempted to indicate how the entire scientific development of the 19th century, be it physical, physiological, or psychological, has basically accepted and found correct Kant's epistemology or its elaboration as it came through Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann. In doing so, we have shown that, fundamentally, the type of epistemology that we can describe as illusionism, which refers us entirely to our own consciousness and makes the whole world a world of mental images that alone seems to be correct, seems so self-evident that today one is considered philosophically immature if one were to question the statement: The world is my mental image.

You will now allow me to speak about the spiritual, since I have presented you with almost all the reasons that have led to this illusionist theory of knowledge. I have shown you the reasons that lead to the realization that the world is our mental image; I have shown you how, through the sensory-physiological approach, everything that surrounds us is destroyed, be it the world of temperature perception, the world of touch, and so on. These perceptions, mental images, and concepts ultimately appear to be born from the human soul as a self-product of human beings. The knowledge that seeks to justify this in every respect corresponds to Schopenhauer's teaching: The world is our mental image — according to which there is no heaven, but only an eye that sees it, no sounds, but only an ear that hears them.

You may have thought that I wanted to refute these different epistemological positions. I have shown where they lead, but do not take this as a refutation of the various positions. The theosophist knows no refutation. He does not know what is called taking a single position in philosophy. Those who have surrendered to a philosophical system believe that this one is absolutely correct. Thus, we can see Schopenhauer, Hartmann, the Hegelianists, and the Kantianists fighting from this point of view. But this can never be the point of view of the theosophist. The theosophist sees it differently. In a broader sense, he does not see any conflict between the various religious systems, since he understands that they are all based on a kernel of truth and that the conflict between Buddhists, Muslims, and Christians is unjustified. Theosophists also know that every philosophical system contains a kernel of knowledge, that each one conceals, so to speak, a stage of human knowledge.

It cannot be a matter of refuting Kant, nor of refuting Schopenhauer. Those who strive honestly may err, but the next best cannot simply come along and refute them. We must realize that all these minds have sought the truth from their own point of view, and that we will find the core of truth in the various philosophical systems. Nor can it be a matter for us of who is right or wrong. Anyone who stands firmly on their own point of view, then compares the points of view with each other and says that they can only accept this or that, is in no different a position with regard to philosophical knowledge than a stamp collector. Not even the most highly educated person has climbed to the highest level of insight. We are all on the ladder of development. Even the highest cannot determine anything absolute about truth, about the world spirit. And when we have climbed to a higher level of knowledge, we still only have a relative judgment, but one that will always expand when we have climbed to an even higher summit.

Once we have grasped the fundamentals of the theosophical system, it seems presumptuous to speak about a philosopher if we cannot tentatively take his point of view, so that we can prove the truth of his thoughts just as he himself could. One can always be mistaken, but one must not take the sophistical position that it is impossible to see another point of view. I will provide you with proof from German intellectual development that it is possible to see things as I have characterized them.

In the 1860s, Darwinism dawned, and it was immediately interpreted in a materialistic way. The materialistic interpretation is one-sided. But those who interpreted it in this way considered themselves infallible; the materialists of the 1860s considered themselves infallible in their conclusions. Then Eduard von Hartmann's “Philosophy of the Unconscious” appeared. I do not wish to defend it. It may have its one-sidedness, but I do recognize that this point of view is far superior to that of a Vogt, a Haeckel, or a Büchner. That is why the materialists considered it to be a rehash of Schopenhauerianism. Then a new book appeared that refuted the “Philosophy of the Unconscious” with compelling arguments, refuting everything. People believed that it could only have come from the ranks of natural scientists. “Let him name himself to us,” wrote Haeckel, “and we will name him one of our own.” Then the second edition appeared, and the author named himself: it was Eduard von Hartmann himself. He showed that he could fully adopt the standpoint of the natural scientists. Had he put his name on it right away, the work would not have achieved its purpose. You see that the superior can also take the subordinate standpoint and is able to present everything that can be brought up against the superior standpoint. No one, therefore, should presume, especially from a theosophical standpoint, to speak about a philosophical system if he is not aware of having understood this philosophical system from within.

Therefore, it is not a matter of refuting Kantianism and Schopenhauerianism. We must overcome these infantile diseases of refutation. We must show how they themselves lead beyond themselves when pursued to their true core. Let us therefore once again tentatively take the standpoint of subjective epistemology, which leads to the principle: The world is my mental image. — It seeks to overcome the naive realism according to which what stands before me is the truth, while epistemologists have found that everything that surrounds me is nothing but my mental images.

If we were to remain at this point of view of epistemology, any basis for a theosophical construction of a view of life would be futile. We know that what we perceive of the world is not merely our mental images. If they were only subjective constructs of our ego, we could not go beyond them. We could not determine the truth value of what we perceive. We would never be able to regard things as essential in the theosophical worldview, but only as subjective constructs of our ego. This would always lead us back to our ego. We could never say that knowledge comes to us from some higher world if what we bring up from the depths of our mental images is only for ourselves, but only if we also have the manifestations of a true and real world in our subjective world. This is the basis of what we must imagine as theosophy. Therefore, theosophy can never be satisfied with the statement: The world is my mental image.

Even with Schopenhauer, we can see that he goes beyond the statement: The world is my mental image. Schopenhauer also has another statement that is intended to complement the first: The world is will. Schopenhauer arrives at this conclusion in the same way as the theosophist. He says: Everything in the starry sky is only my mental image, but one thing, my own existence, I do not recognize as a mental image. I act, I do, I will; this is a force in the world in which I am and in me, so that I know from myself what underlies my mental image. Therefore, even if everything else that surrounds me is a mental image, I myself am my will. — With this, Schopenhauer sought to gain a firm foothold, but he was never really able to achieve it. For this sentence is a self-destructive sentence that only needs to be thought through logically to the end in order to realize that it is what mathematicians call a reductio ad absurdum.

No stone can be removed from the structure that Schopenhauer has built for us. When we have sensations of touch, warmth, and cold, we know that we only have mental images of our ego. Let us be consistent. How do we recognize ourselves? We do not see real color, but we only know that there is an eye that sees color. But how do we know that an eye sees, that a hand is there to feel? Only because we perceive them, just as we perceive any other thing, any sensory perception, when we want to recognize the outside world. Thus, our self-knowledge is also bound by the same laws and rules that govern the external world. And as true as my world is my mental image, so true must it be that I myself, with everything that is within me, am my mental image. This leads us to regard the whole of Schopenhauer's philosophy, everything that is thought about the entire subjective and objective world, as mere mental image. Be clear that this alone can be the true and genuine consequence of Schopenhauer's philosophy. But then he must also admit that everything he has established about himself is only his mental image. And with that we have arrived at what mathematicians call a reductio ad absurdum, pulling oneself up by one's own hair. We are completely floating in the air. We no longer have a fixed point. We have destroyed naive realism, but at the same time we have shown that this leads us into nihilism. So we have to look for another point if this conclusion leads to absurdity.

Schopenhauer did this himself. He said: If I want to arrive at the real, I must not remain in the mental image, but must proceed to the will. This made Schopenhauer a realist, albeit in a different way than Herbart. Herbart says: We must seek the real in the non-contradictory. — That is why he established his many realia. And Schopenhauer also establishes such realities.

Now it is true, really true, that the world around me is an illusion. But just as smoke indicates fire, so illusion indicates the being that underlies it. Herbart seeks to solve the problem in a monadological way, as does Leibniz; in Herbart's case, however, it is colored by Kantianism. Leibniz lived before Kant and was still free from Kantian influence. Schopenhauer takes the position: I myself know myself as a willing being. This will to exist guarantees my being. I am will, and I reveal myself in the world as a mental image. Just as I am will and manifest myself, so are all other things, and they manifest themselves in the external world. Just as the self lies within me, so too does the will lie within me, and in external things lies the will of those things. — Schopenhauer thus showed the way to self-knowledge, and in doing so he implicitly admitted that one can only truly know things by being inside them.

Certainly, if naive realism is right in saying that things are outside of us, have nothing to do with our ego, and we only have knowledge of things outside of us through our mental image, if, in other words, their essence remains outside of us, then there is no escaping Schopenhauerianism. However, the second part is the least justifiable: The world is my will.

You will understand this in a moment. When you form a mental image, it can be compared to a seal and its imprint. The “thing in itself” is like the seal, the mental image is like the seal's imprint. Everything remains outside the substance that receives the seal's imprint. The impression, the mental image, is entirely subjective. I have nothing of the “thing in itself” within me, just as the seal itself never enters into the substance of the seal impression. This is the basic idea of the subjectivist view. Schopenhauer, however, says: I can only recognize a thing by standing inside it. Julius Baumann, who also has a hint of the doctrine of reincarnation, even though he is not a theosophist, says the same thing. But this way of thinking has led Julius Baumann to apply it also in relation to the epistemological foundation. Even if this form of thinking has remained elementary in his case, he is nevertheless on the right track.

In fact, there is no way to know a thing except by crawling into it. And that is not possible if we say that the thing is outside of us and we only have knowledge of it; then nothing can enter into us. But if we could enter into the thing itself, then we could know the essence of things. This seems to be the most absurd idea to today's epistemologists. But it only seems that way. Admittedly, it appears that way under the assumptions of Western epistemology. But it did not always appear that way, especially not to those whose minds were not clouded by the principles of this epistemology.

But one thing could be possible: perhaps we have never really left things behind. Perhaps we have never erected that strict partition, opened up that abyss which, according to Kant, is supposed to strictly separate us from things. Then the idea that we can be in things comes closer to us. And that is the basic idea of theosophy. It is that our ego does not belong to us, is not enclosed in the tightly enclosed structure that our organization appears to be, but that the individual human being is only a manifestation of the divine self of the world. He is, as it were, only a reflection, an outflow, a spark of the All-Ego. This is a point of view that dominated the minds of people for centuries before Kant's philosophy came into being. The greatest minds never thought differently than in this sense.

Johannes Kepler revealed the structure of the planetary system to us and conceived the idea that the planets orbit the sun in elliptical paths. This is a thought that gives us insight into the nature of the cosmos. I would now like to quote his words so that you can see how he felt: “Several years ago, the first dawn appeared to me, several weeks ago the day dawned, and a few hours ago the sun came up. I wrote a book. Those who read and understand the book are fine with me, the others — I don't care about them . . .” A thought that waited a long time before it could reappear in a human mind. This is spoken from the realization that what lies in our spirit and what we recognize of the world is the same thing that the world has brought forth; that it is no coincidence that the planets describe elliptical orbits, but that they must have been brought into them by the creative spirit itself; that we are not mere bystanders who only think about the universe, but that the contents of our minds are themselves creatively active outside. For this reason, Kepler was convinced that, for what he identified as the fundamental idea of the cosmic universe, he himself was only the human stage on which this idea, living and flowing through the universe, appeared in order to be recognized.

It would never have occurred to Kepler to say that what he had recognized about the universe was only his mental image, but rather he would have said: What I have recognized gives me knowledge of what is really out there in space. — If someone had told Kepler that this was only imagination and not objectively out there, he would have said: Do you really believe that what brings me a message from the other is only present when I receive the message? — Consequently, anyone who stands on the ground of subjective epistemology would have to say to himself when standing in front of a telephone: The gentleman in Hamburg who is calling me now is only my mental image; I perceive him only as my mental image.

So this train of thought leads us to ask: How is it possible to truly recognize the principle that we only recognize the essence when we enter into the essence of things themselves, when we can identify with the essence? This is the epistemology of those who want to have a deeper and clearer standpoint than the modern view.

Hamerling has written a good book: “The Atomism of the Will.” He is a serious thinker and has serious thoughts. They are written in the Schopenhauerian sense, but they are thoughts that strive to get to the essence of things. Hamerling says: One thing is absolutely certain: no human being will want to deny their own existence, no human being will admit that they themselves only have a conceptual existence, that their existence ceases when they no longer think. Schiller also says at one point: Yes, Descartes claims: I think, therefore I am. But I have often not thought and yet I have been there.

Hamerling seeks to regain a similar attitude to Schopenhauer: I must also acknowledge a sense of existence in all other beings. For him, the self and the atoms are the two poles. — It is all a bit sparse, even the Hamerling book. In order to escape illusionism, he seeks to express this by saying: We can only realize that existence within which we ourselves stand. — Hamerling seeks to express this with all his acumen. Fechner attempts to replace the feeling of existence with feeling in general. Herbart — he said — made the mistake of wanting to arrive at real reality through mere thinking. But this does not bring us to the self. Rather, the self emerges from the foundation of feeling. Similar to Schopenhauer, he could have written: The world as feeling and mental image. — Hamerling could have written: The world as atom, will, and mental image. — And Frohschammer wrote about imagination as world creation, guaranteeing actual being, as Schopenhauer wrote about the will. He sought to portray all of nature as a product of imagination. — They all seek to escape the absurdity of Kant's philosophy.

A subtle train of thought is now necessary, but anyone who wants to join in the discussion must have made it: How do we come to formulate any statement at all about what our knowledge is? What makes us feel called upon to say that the world is our mental image, is will or imagination or the like? Something must give us the possibility and ability to relate ourselves, our cognitive faculties, and our powers of imagination to the world.

Form a mental image of the contrast between yourself and the rest of the world, that is, you should say how you perceive yourself and the rest of the world. Take two opposites: a prosecutor of a criminal and a defense attorney. One judges from one point of view, the other from another. Neither of them can be called upon to provide complete objectivity. Only the judge, who stands objectively above them, can pass judgment. Form a mental image of what the two of them present, and also the judge, who weighs both sides objectively. No one can ever decide alone, and neither can the self alone decide what its relationship to the world is. The individual self is subjective; it could never decide alone on its relationship to the world. A theory of knowledge would never be possible if there were only the ego on one side and the world on the other. I must gain an objective standpoint in my thinking and thus transcend myself and the world. If I am completely immersed in my thinking, this is impossible, just as it is impossible for the thinking of the Kantians and Schopenhauerians. Imagine the mental image of Kant sitting at his desk and judging only from within himself. It is not possible to arrive at an objective judgment in this way. There is only one condition under which it is possible for me to make my thinking about myself and the world the judge, as it were: if it is something that transcends me.

Now, even the slightest self-reflection shows you that your thinking is something beyond yourself. It is not true that it is only a mere appearance, only a mere phenomenon, that two times two equals four, that all truths that appear with absolute validity are only valid in your consciousness. You recognize that their objectivity transcends their subjective validity; you acknowledge their validity. The fact that two times two equals four has nothing to do with your ego. Nothing in the field of wisdom has anything to do with your ego. Because you can rise to objective, self-contained thinking, you can also judge the world objectively. All thinkers already presuppose this statement, otherwise they could not sit down and think about the world. And if there were only two thoughts, namely: I am in the world — and: The world is in me — then neither Kantianism nor Schopenhauerianism could be justified. You must admit that you are authorized to judge truth. For within our thinking there is something that lies above our ego. This has been admitted by all philosophers who are not biased by Kantianism, who think impartially in monadological terms. All those who have thought about the true realities of the world in this sense have thought of them as spiritual. They have thought of them spiritually. If we go back to Giordano Bruno, to Leibniz, to those who endeavored to attribute properties to realities, you will find that they thought monadologically, that they recognized thinking as coming from the primordial ground, from the spirit. But if spirit is what constitutes the essence of things, then even Kantian and Schopenhauerian epistemology stands in opposition to this view from the standpoint of naive realism.

I return to my parable. Imagine that nothing from the material of the seal transfers to the seal impression, but that what matters is the writing, your name on the seal, the spirit. Then you can say that it may be that nothing from the material transfers, but something that does transfer is your name on the seal; it transfers from the world of the spirit. It transfers despite all the dividing walls we have erected. Then it need not be denied that Schopenhauer's theory of knowledge is partly correct, but we step over the dividing walls. All those materialistic considerations, let them remain! Admit that nothing migrates into the seal impression from the material of the seal, but that the spirit migrates, for it enters us in its true form, because in truth we have come out of it. Because we are a spark of this world spirit, we live in it and recognize it again. We know quite clearly when the world spirit knocks at our eyes and ears that this is not merely our subjective perception, but that we see who is out there. Thus we are clear that the spirit outside seeks the mediators whom we have designated as the mediators of the spirit. If it is established that the world is spirit in its fundamental nature, then we can fully adopt the position taken by Kant and Schopenhauer. All of this is correct, but it does not go far enough. It is easy to align oneself with Kant and Schopenhauer. But we must go beyond them, for it is true that it is the spirit that lives in all things and that the spirit turns to us, knocking, in order to give us its essence. Thus, in the theosophical sense, what Baumann demands for a true understanding of things actually comes true, namely that we must be inside the essence of things. We are also inside the world spirit and are only one being of it.

Today I have clothed the basic idea of this philosophy in images. You will find a philosophical treatise on this in my “Philosophy of Freedom,” and you will also find the opposing points of view there. I have argued that Schopenhauer, Kant, and the neo-Kantians take the position that we cannot go beyond the mental image, and then how they have overcome naive realism halfway. But since they start from the “thing in itself” and show that one cannot go beyond oneself, they still remain stuck in naive realism because they seek truth in the material world. And even all the modern epistemologists, however much they believe they have gone beyond naive realism, still have one foot in naive realism because they have not departed from basing everything on the material world.

Only theosophy can lead us to the gateway of knowledge. If we want to find the object of knowledge, it leads us to be able to say that the true essence of the world is spirit. From the moment we arrive at this gateway, the further path is spirit. Spirit is the foundation of the whole world.

I wanted to explain that. I have done so only briefly and sketchily. Man is certainly an imprint of the world. But his essence does not lie in the material. We can recognize this essence at any moment, because it lies in the spirit. The spirit flows into the material, into us, just as the name on the seal flows into the imprint.

I believe I have shown that one can also take the standpoint of academic philosophy, only that one must then understand it better than the academic philosophers themselves. Then everyone among us will also find the way to theosophy, even if they take an opposing standpoint. You can take any standpoint, as long as you do not let yourself be intimidated. From any philosophy, you will be able to find the path to theosophy.

The best way to overcome Schopenhauer is to get to know him thoroughly. Most people know him only a little. But here, too, one must get to the heart of the matter, namely, take his point of view. There are twelve volumes of Schopenhauer that I have edited critically. So I have also studied Schopenhauer for several years. That is why I believe I know something about him. But when you really recognize and understand him, you come to the theosophical point of view. Not through half-knowledge, because that leads away from theosophy. Half-knowledge of the West initially leads away from theosophy, leading to subjectivism, idealism, and so on. But let that become complete knowledge, and then the West will also find its way to theosophy.

I have already mentioned Julius Baumann. He knows what true knowledge is, even if he has not yet arrived at what is great about theosophy, which I believe I have hinted at weakly. For real knowledge in no way contradicts theosophy. It is precisely the view that brings peace and tolerance everywhere. All these truths that I have mentioned are steps toward the actual truth. Kant has climbed part of the way up the steps, as has Schopenhauer. One more than the other. They are on the way. But it is always a question of how far they have pursued this path. Theosophy does not miss being at the summit. The right path is the path itself, above all the one that was inscribed above the Greek temples: “Know thyself.” We are one with the world spirit. As we come to know our own nature, so will we come to know the nature of the world spirit. “Ascension from our spirit to the universal spirit”—that is theosophy.