Anthroposophy: Its Roots of Knowledge and Fruits of Life
GA 78 — 30 August 1921, Stuttgart
Second Lecture
In today's lecture, allow me to begin by presenting some background information on how the roots of anthroposophy were historically discovered. I will be compelled to draw on some rather remote areas and also to include some personal observations; the former in particular, the digression into somewhat remote, seemingly philosophical areas, should be avoided as far as possible in the coming days. But in order to avoid the impression that anthroposophy is based on some kind of amateurish ideas, it is necessary to say something about this foundation today.
What has come into the whole of human life as an actual effect of agnosticism was particularly observable at the time when the path to the roots of what I now call anthroposophy opened up to me. My first search for these roots took place in the 1880s, and anyone who wants to follow that search will find clues in my writings, which I composed as introductions to Goethe's scientific works, in my writings “Goethe's Theory of Knowledge,” in my short work “Truth and Science,” and then in “The Philosophy of Freedom,” which was published in the early 1990s.
At the time these writings were produced, people were completely opposed to a mindset of knowledge and science that arose directly from agnosticism. Everywhere — even where one encountered a serious quest for knowledge and a serious endeavor to put into practice what human beings can achieve as knowledge — everywhere one encountered people who could not get beyond agnosticism, people who, because of everything that agnosticism had planted in them, had to be completely hostile to everything that could lead to anthroposophy. Everything one experienced with such people led one to raise two questions out of a sense of the times, which seem to be of eminent, purely human significance. For someone who, on the one hand, had learned to love scientific endeavour, but who, on the other hand, also recognised the profound influence that the scientific spirit had gained over all human life in recent times, the important question of life arose: Can science, where it seeks to develop to its highest flowering, as philosophy, provide what human beings must have from their deepest innermost being as the actual answers to the fundamental questions of life? And this question, in contrast to the consciousness of the time, split into two others: Does contemporary science provide what human beings must seek from their innermost urge? And what is it that human beings must seek in our time in accordance with this innermost urge?
These two burning questions stood before my soul in the 1880s, and with these two questions in my heart, I considered what the various sciences, which, by becoming philosophical, had been nourished by the spirit of agnosticism, could give to human beings. I asked: What can the philosophy that emerged at the end of the 19th century offer to human urges? And from what I felt in response to these two questions, I formed what I wrote down in 1885 for my “Grundlinien einer Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung” (Fundamentals of a Theory of Knowledge of Goethe's Worldview). The words came to me: “So we have a science that no one is looking for and a scientific need that no one is satisfying.” For that is how I saw what had emerged at that time as philosophy from agnosticism. This philosophy dealt with questions of such a remote, abstract nature that they had nothing to do with what was alive in the soul, seeking a solution to the actual riddles of existence.
Out of this mood arose what I have called “The Theory of Knowledge of Goethe's Worldview.” For from all that contemporary philosophy had to offer at that time, one could only gain a certain perspective by attempting to grapple with a spirit that was, in essence, dead in the last third of the 19th century, one that was much talked about in terms of all kinds of externalities, but one that no one really wanted to penetrate spiritually: I mean Goethe. And what was striking about Goethe was that even when he dealt with a narrower field of scientific research, for example with plants, animals, or colors, there was always an underlying tendency to rise from individual human science to a comprehensive science of the mysteries of the world.
Goethe certainly did not tread all the different paths that can lead from the lowlands to the heights. Despite his greatness, he was in a certain sense extraordinarily modest inwardly; but that was not the point. The point was whether one could see in Goethe everywhere the tendency to ascend from the lowlands of scientific striving to the peaks of existence. And this tendency could be clearly seen. But in Goethe, one perceived something that could initially serve as a guide. I recall a statement Goethe made during his Italian journey in the 1780s, which can be found in his printed work “Italian Journey.” I recall that Goethe used this Italian journey not only to penetrate the essence of artistic creation in his own way, but also to gain a scientific worldview from his observations of the mineralogical and geognostic phenomena he encountered, and from his observations of the plant and animal world. And after he had already spent many months on this journey, after he had already developed all kinds of scientific principles—that is, those that he considered to be such—he wrote the meaningful words: “After what I have seen here in terms of plants and fish, I would like to... embark on a journey to India, not to discover something new, but to view what has been discovered in my own way.”
Anyone who immerses themselves completely in what was living in Goethe's soul when he made such a statement can find it a very special guide; for if they start from the meaning of such a statement, they will gradually realize how Goethe's understanding of the outside world was completely different from that of many other people. And especially in the 1880s, in contrast to the fruits of agnosticism, it was particularly important to look at Goethe's way of knowing, because it is different from everything that resulted from the great scientific achievements of the 19th century as a precipitate of knowledge for the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, and there was good reason to take a closer look at the special nature of the spiritual behavior that was present in Goethe's cognitive processes.
Goethe presented things differently; Goethe thought about the world differently from those who, in a certain sense, believed they had achieved a kind of philosophical conclusion at the end of the 19th century. This can be seen particularly clearly in Goethe when we consider how, on his return from his Italian journey, he wrote the classic little treatise “An Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants,” and how the ideas in this treatise emerged as a natural product of his soul from this particular kind of quest for knowledge. If we look at what is presented here, we will find that Goethe's way of knowing was particularly suited to penetrating the life of the plant world through observation. At the end of the 19th century, however, there was a particular focus on developing those processes of knowledge that penetrate the fabric of inorganic, inanimate nature. In their knowledge, some individuals attempted to react against this orientation of the entire process of knowledge toward inanimate nature. It can be said that Goethe's thinking, Goethe's imagination, lived in a different way in relation to external perception, to the external sensory world, than the kind of thinking that is particularly capable of penetrating the inanimate world. What Goethe thought was, in a sense, inclined to penetrate deeply into what his eyes saw, what his senses perceived. What the senses perceive is much further removed from the thought process that approaches inanimate nature than perception and thinking were in Goethe. Goethe's thinking was such that it could remain flexible by following the entire growth process of the plant, by following how one plant form is a modification of another. Goethe's thinking was not rigid, not stiffly contoured; it was such that his concepts were constantly metamorphosing, and through this they became, I would say, intimately adapted to the course that plant nature itself undergoes.
It is therefore understandable that Goethe was particularly impressed when, decades later, he found a description of his special way of thinking in the work of the psychologist Heinroth. Heinroth called Goethe's thinking “objective thinking.” And Goethe was particularly fond of this term, “objective thinking,” appealed to Goethe in particular, because he felt that his thinking in a certain way submerged itself in what it observed, that it connected intimately with what was observed, that it slipped out of subjectivity, so to speak, and slipped into the object, that the objects of perception were completely taken over by the concepts and the concepts in turn completely submerged themselves in the objects of perception. “Objective thinking,” said Heinroth, and Goethe really found in this a characteristic of what lived in his process of cognition.
One can now elaborate further on what I am suggesting here as Goethe's particular process of cognition. This has been done in the aforementioned introductions to Goethe's scientific writings and also in my little book “Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung” (Epistemology of Goethe's Worldview). But one thing may strike us here: Goethe described the metamorphosis of plants in an extraordinarily illuminating way with his thinking. He became a classical morphologist of the plant world. But although Goethe did not initially start from the plant world in his scientific studies of the organic world, but rather from the animal-human world, he nevertheless did not achieve the same perfection in his observation of the animal-human world as he did in his pursuit of the secrets of the plant world. It is perhaps well known, and can be read in my writings, how Goethe rebelled against the distinction that some anatomists and physiologists sought to establish between animals and humans by denying that humans have an intermaxillary bone in the upper jaw, whereas all animals have one. When he became aware of this, Goethe was not inclined to allow the difference between animality and humanity to be seen in such a minor detail. Goethe wanted to seek what elevated humans above animality in something quite different from such a detail. This led him to attempt to show that humans, like other animals, have an intermaxillary bone in the upper jaw. He did this in a classical manner, using all the scientific means available at the time to prove his point. And when Goethe then moved from the study of the animal-human to the study of plants and, I would say, incorporated this into the aforementioned extraordinarily significant treatise of 1790, he also had the idea of extending this view of metamorphosis to the animal world, that is, to that which not only lives like plants, but is also animated like animals.
If we now take a look at how Goethe approached this task, we will notice that he made many attempts to write a kind of metamorphosis of animal organs. He conducted an immeasurable number of studies in order to write such a metamorphosis of animals; but one will not find that any of these studies even remotely approaches what he had achieved with his metamorphosis of plants. And one can also see how Goethe repeatedly began to expand the theory of metamorphosis, at least in the field of osteology. But he always stopped before going any further. All these things remained fragments. He could not reach the point where his thinking, as an inner soul life, would have become so animated that it could also have submerged itself in animality, as in plant life and its transformations. And so, precisely in the study of Goethe, the great question arose about the nature and ways of human cognition in general, and here lies historically — at least for me — one of the roots of anthroposophy.
Thus, from the effects of agnosticism at the end of the 19th century, one had to ask the fundamental question: What actually happens in human beings when they cognize? — This cognition is obviously an activity that he performs internally; but it is not merely an indifferent activity. It is an activity that is supposed to bring him together with the essence of world phenomena, an activity through which he is supposed to orient himself as to how he stands with his own being within the facts of the world. Is cognition something with which one stands, I might say, like a fifth wheel on a wagon next to the outer world, and is there only something to be found in one's ideas, which form the process of cognition, that is a reflection of outer reality? Or is the process of cognition not merely something formal with which one stands in a corner while the world process takes place outside, through which one allows this world process to be reflected within oneself, so that it would be completely irrelevant to this process whether the human being stands there in the corner and, in addition to everything else that is happening, also forms all kinds of concepts and ideas about this world process through his thinking? In other words: Is cognition merely a formal thing, something that man does for himself, or is cognition something real? Does man stand with cognition as with something real, with a real process in the world as a whole? By recognizing, does one experience something that happens in the world and through the world, and which, only because of the special organization of the world, takes place not outside but within man, so that man himself becomes the scene for important world events that take place on this scene? If the latter is the case, then human beings, with their cognition, are part of a real process in the context of the world. Then they are not a bystander of existence, then they are, in a sense, counted on in the world process; then their organization is such that the world would not be complete if what takes place within them, within their skin, so to speak, did not also happen and did not constitute the pinnacle of world events.
That, for example, is the question that arose in the soul from the experience of agnosticism. And then, by drawing on everything that is active in the human process of cognition, it became clear what this activity, which is either merely formal or real, actually entails. If one now tries to find a characteristic contrast within this activity, one finds that which then takes one further, which places one in a position to answer the question of what was knowledge for Goethe and what was therefore not yet complete knowledge, because he had to break off between the plant world and the animal world. This question can only be answered if one clearly visualizes the contrast between thinking on the one hand and perception on the other. In human inner experience, there is actually no greater contrast than that between thinking and perception.
In thinking, we live in such a way that we are completely devoted to an inner activity. In real thinking, everything is activity within us. No thought can take hold in our consciousness without us participating with our very own activity in the emergence and further development of this thought. For when a dream or a memory image appears in our imagination, that is not thinking; we feel that we have not progressed beyond the dream and memory image or other contents of consciousness to what is real thinking. Real thinking is only there when we are completely engaged in this thinking with our activity. We can develop thinking in its purest, clearest form when we completely disregard the outside world and surrender ourselves to the thought process as it unfolds. Then we perceive how thoughts can develop from thoughts, and we also perceive how this peculiar emergence of thought from thought is an inner spiritual experience.
This contrasts with what we experience as a soul experience in perception when we encounter the external world through our eyes, our ears, and our other senses. Perception is, in its most fundamental characteristic, the complete opposite of thinking. A perception in which we were already present with our activity would not be pure perception; thinking would already have mixed into it. Pure perception is only that which we experience completely passively.
These two opposites of human soul experience could present themselves to the soul precisely out of agnosticism. But then one had to ask the question: How does the human soul behave when it continually pushes thinking into perception, continually permeates what emerges in passive perception with the activity of thinking in the process of cognition, and then stands alive within the continual permeation of passive perception with active thinking?
It was precisely the age of agnosticism — I would say the culmination of agnosticism — that pointed out that perception itself, that is, what is experienced in complete passivity, should be placed before the soul in all its purity. I remember how a work published in 1884 by the person who later wrote the extensive book Das Ganze der Philosophie und ihr Ende (The Whole of Philosophy and Its End) made a powerful impression on me; it was the work Gehirn und Bewusstsein (Brain and Consciousness) by Richard Wähle. At the time, I saw the particular merit of this text in the fact that Richard Wahle sharply characterized what human beings actually perceive, what remains when one separates from the content of the soul everything that has been brought into it through the activity of thinking. It was precisely through this work that one could grapple with an important issue, namely that in ordinary human soul experience, there is by no means a strict separation between what is perceived and what is already mixed with thinking.
For ordinary consciousness, it is indeed the case that from the moment a person wakes up in the morning until they fall asleep in the evening, they actually always live in soul contents that perception has already mixed with thinking. Only a truly thorough analysis can separate what is passive perception from what has been brought in by thinking. Then one comes to understand what our image of perception actually looks like. This image of perception can only be traced by, let's say, refraining from summary thinking for just five minutes and simply registering what one perceives in sequence. Thinkers such as Richard Wahle and Johannes Volkelt have done this, registering how, say, a postman comes in, delivers a letter, what happens to this letter, how one image of perception after another is chaotically strung together in contrast to the ordering of thought. But this gives one a real insight into the constantly ongoing, only minimally conscious activity in the human soul, which consists of constantly mixing perception with thinking, that is, passively observed things with things actively produced internally.
At that time, however, the fruits of agnosticism regarding the process of cognition presented the soul with nothing other than what had emerged in the development of Kantianism and what had further manifested itself in the development of what had been the maxim of physiological imagination in the 19th century since Johannes Müller. People thought that the only way to explore what was truly real was to look outside, and that thinking only had the task of depicting this exterior; one would arrive at correct thinking not by bringing something from within the human being into perception, but by using thinking only passively to create images of reality. But this reality, it was thought, already existed somewhere, quite apart from the thought process, from the inner soul process. Such thinking then leads to imaginary concepts, such as the familiar or unfamiliar “thing in itself.” Talking about this “thing in itself” only makes sense if one believes that reality must exist somewhere, apart from human knowledge, and that one only needs to use certain procedures to gain knowledge of this reality. Then the process of cognition would not be something actually experienced, but only something formal, standing in the corner alongside real events and real things. In contrast, it became clear to me that cognition is in fact something real; because by examining the actual content of perception, that is, what we are devoted to when we passively allow the outside world to affect us through our senses, it became apparent that this outside world does not contain reality, but that humans are born into the world in such a way that when they look into this outside world only through their senses, he experiences only half of this reality, only one side of reality, through his senses.
Throughout my writings, up to and including the book “The Riddles of Philosophy,” you will find attempts to prove that what is available to sensory perception is not reality; that when human beings are born into the world, their perception does not convey reality to them, and that this reality only appears before the soul when he generates the activity of thinking from within himself and contrasts the incomplete reality, the one side of reality, with the other, which belongs to this reality, that which is initially given to him in his mind as thinking. The fact is that reality only becomes a soul experience when human beings connect their perception with their thinking, which arises in their minds. Reality is something that comes about through recognition. Reality is not something we have to seek. Reality is something we create, in which we participate as creators; and the mystery of human beings lies in the fact that, when they are born, they are surrounded by a world that is not full reality, and that they are born to add something to what is presented to them in external sensory appearance that arises only within them. Only in this context, in this coexistence of what arises within him and what he perceives externally, does he live himself into reality.
As long as we merely look out with our senses at what we can perceive outside, we have no reality before us. When we struggle to connect everything we perceive with what we bring into this existence from a completely different side, from the roots of the world, when we struggle with what initially arises in our thinking, and when we connect these two sides of reality in our own active cognitive activity, we add to our external perception what is still missing from reality; we first shape it into reality. The process of cognition is what human beings must rise to in order for reality to be contained in their world. There would be no reality in their world if they could only perceive, if they could not strive to connect what they perceive with that which perception cannot provide, that which they bring to perception from a completely different corner of the world and which is initially revealed in their thinking.
Because humans place themselves in reality with their process of cognition in such a way that this process of cognition itself is a reality, that is, that reality is first created and arises in the process that leads to knowledge, I was able to call the little book in which I wanted to describe this type of human cognition “Truth and Science.” In this little book, I attempted, in a sense, to present my view of a kind of understanding of human consciousness with itself. Human consciousness asks itself, in a sense: How do you relate to reality? Are you the fifth wheel on the wagon or the corner-standing observer who, with his knowledge, accomplishes something that has nothing to do with reality? Is reality perhaps already out there, only concealed, and do you merely have to seek it through your knowledge? Or is the process of knowledge something that contributes to the emergence of full reality? — This question could only be answered in the latter sense. However, if one wants to understand the correctness of this answer, which at first appears paradoxical to the agnostic, it is necessary to truly grasp the very special nature of thinking as something real on the one hand, and on the other hand to truly grasp how perception everywhere proves itself to be something that approaches us as something that is actually dark and gloomy in itself. One must visualize the sensation of this contrast between thinking and perception in such a way that one clearly sees how, in thinking, we have something in which we are fully awake.
The process of waking has its stages, its degrees. If we want to grasp it in its most original form for our ordinary consciousness, we can only do so by experiencing ourselves with the full activity of the soul in thinking. And then we will experience how we are actually present in perception. If we have managed, in the sense of Richard Wahle or Johannes Volkelt, to place perception in its true form before our soul, and if we then examine how the soul lives by living only in perception, we will find no difference between this experience of the soul and the perception in the actual state of sleep, which is still completely unpermeated by thinking. And just as our daily life alternates between waking and sleeping, so the weaving, undulating life of the soul continually alternates, as it enters into communication with the outside world, between that in which it can actually only sleep, perception, and that in which it is completely awake, active thinking.
What otherwise takes place in the time when we illuminate the darkness of sleep with the brightness of wakefulness actually takes place in another field at every moment, as we penetrate the darkness of perception with the light that lives within us, as we are present in active thinking. We continually illuminate dark perception. This is the living thing that takes place between what sleeps in the impression that perception makes on us and what awakens into this sleeping life when we penetrate it with the activity of thinking. Something really comes before the soul, like a kind of alternation between waking and sleeping during the ordinary waking state, when we vividly put ourselves into this relationship between thinking — that is, the activity experienced in the mind — and perception, that is, that which continually takes the mind out of itself, which continually makes the mind such that it can only grasp it in its unconsciousness, just as it can only grasp the processes during sleep in its unconsciousness. By following such a path of knowledge, one gains a true insight into what this process of knowledge actually is, how it really is a real process, how it works inside reality, not in the corner as a mere formality.
Nevertheless, it is extremely difficult to arrive at a purely philosophical understanding of the activity of thinking in this way, and I can completely understand that minds such as Richard Wahle, who once clearly presented to the soul how perception actually only places chaos before our soul, and how such thinkers, who really only have before them what Johannes Volkelt rightly called the individual fragments of external perception juxtaposed next to each other, which thinking must first order — I can understand how such thinkers, because they become completely immersed in perception, do not manage to become immersed in the active essence of thinking, cannot bring themselves to recognize that, by experiencing the activity of thinking, we are completely immersed in an activity, and because we are completely immersed, we can connect it completely with our consciousness. I can well imagine how incomprehensible it is to such thinkers when, from the full experience of this activity of thinking, one responds to them with the words: In thinking, we have grasped world events themselves by one corner! — as I have expressed it in my Philosophy of Freedom.
That this is the case, that we really grasp world events in thinking by one corner, could only be illustrated initially by the thinking that underlies human action, the thinking that develops when we shape the moral world in our actions out of our pure thinking. For then we are compelled first to develop pure thinking in the soul, that is, to have thinking in its pure form, so to speak, and then to shape our perception ourselves. The facts themselves compel us to separate perception, cognition, and thinking from one another in order to combine them in action, in moral deeds. How, precisely in the pursuit of ethical, social life, the true essence of intellectual activity dawns on us—what I have developed in my Philosophy of Freedom—is what I want to talk about tomorrow.
From what I have presented today, I would like you to see how, precisely from the experience of 19th-century agnosticism, a problem arises in the soul that goes something like this: Is the external world that we perceive through the senses a closed, definitive reality whose meaning we can only seek passively — or is this external reality only one side of true reality? As living human beings, do we ourselves have to help create this reality in the process of cognition?
Everything I have said today, albeit only hinted at, will make it clear to you that I had to write in my “Epistemology of Goethe's Worldview” that the most important question of our age is whether the nature of our external experience already presents us with a reality. For if external experience already presents us with a complete reality, then our knowledge can only be a repetition of this external reality. But if external reality presents us with only half, only a part of the whole, true reality, then the following must be said, which you will find in my 1886 publication “Grundlinien einer Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung” (Fundamentals of a Theory of Knowledge of Goethe's Worldview): “It would be quite different if, in this form of reality” — which is conveyed by the external senses — "we were not dealing with the essence of reality, but only with its completely insignificant outer side, if we had before us only a shell of the true essence of the world, which conceals the essence of the world from us and challenges us to search further for it. We would then have to strive to penetrate this shell. We would have to start from the first form of the world in order to grasp its true (essential) properties. We would have to overcome the appearance to the senses in order to develop a higher form of appearance from it."
I asked this question at the time, and based on the assumptions I have outlined today, albeit only in a rudimentary way, it could only be answered in such a way that there is something real and actual in science itself, something that participates in the world process; and that in art, which, as I showed yesterday, has also been influenced to a certain extent by agnostic thinking, there must also be something that lives on beyond external reality in living spirituality. And if I were to seek a motto today, a motto for what I have to characterize for you from spiritual science, from anthroposophy, as its true meaning, then I would have to set the following motto for the whole of anthroposophy and especially for these lectures:
"Overcoming sensuality through the spirit is the goal of art and science. Science overcomes sensuality by dissolving it completely in spirit, and art by implanting spirit in it — that is, in sensuality."
Now, there are people who say that I developed anthroposophy after I separated myself from other scientific attitudes. What I would like to put forward today, before what I have to say to you over the next few days, is nothing other than this:
“Overcoming sensuality through the spirit is the goal of art and science. Science overcomes sensuality by dissolving it completely into spirit, art overcomes sensuality by implanting spirit into it.”
But let it be said to all those who speak of alleged contradictions in my development that I did not write this today, nor yesterday, nor ten or twenty years ago, but that it is contained in my “Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung” (Theory of Knowledge in Goethe's Worldview), published in 1886.