Imaginative Knowledge: Transforming Thought into Spiritual Vision

GA 78 — 3 September 1921, Stuttgart

Sixth Lecture

You will have gathered from the preceding considerations that imaginative knowledge has something in common with the working of memories in the human soul. In fact, imaginative knowledge can also be characterized by comparing it to life in memory. One must then try to penetrate this life of memory a little more deeply than is the case in the psychological investigations commonly used today.

Memory is very often presented as if thoughts are linked to the external perceptions we make through our senses, and as if we had these thoughts about what we perceive during the perception, perhaps even a little afterwards, and then these thoughts somehow rolled down into a subconscious and, with the appropriate effort, came up again from this subconscious as remembered ideas. One school of philosophy has spoken of such thoughts or ideas descending, as it were, below the threshold of consciousness, only to rise again above this threshold at the appropriate moment. It is certainly a convenient way of thinking to imagine that the act that takes place there is that the ideas are first aroused by the perceptions and then, when we no longer have them, they wander around or float around somewhere in the subconscious — which we don't really think about — and then come back up again when we need them. Even a superficial examination of human experiences shows that this is certainly not the case.

At first glance, there is no significant difference between the occurrence of an idea through external perception and that in memory. In one case, the outside world stimulates our imagination. The external perception is there, and the idea follows. We are, of course, aware of the external perception and then calmly follow the process until the idea is stimulated. But that is not the essential point. It is true that when a memory image arises, what stimulates this image from within is not immediately present to our consciousness. But the essential point is not, as I have just indicated, that we know about perception, but that an idea is stimulated from some source, sometimes from outside, sometimes from within.

In a sense, one could say, if one does not misuse the words, that in both cases it is something objective that urges us to form ideas. And if we continue to pursue the process of perception and the associated idea, we will have to consider it essential that we perform certain exercises if we want to commit something to memory in a very special way, if we strive not simply to consign our experience of a fact to oblivion, but to retain it. One need only study the machinations one engaged in during one's youth for the purpose of good retention, when one needed this good retention. What leads to remembering goes far beyond what leads to the mere formation of ideas. If one studies memory itself, one will notice that in the way in which, at times, purely physical dispositions dampen or even enhance the power of memory, our entire organism has something to do with the formation of memories, so that when we live in the act of perceptive imagination, we are performing an activity that is organic. This organic activity remains half or wholly hidden from consciousness at first, but it is what actually causes memory. This is based on the fact that an idea, when it is linked to a perception, does not dance down into the subconscious and then come back up again, but rather that something else is linked to our perceptive imagination besides the mere formation of ideas. The idea fades away. And when we have passed the imagined process of perception, the idea has faded away; but something else has happened within us, which can evoke the idea again when the opportunity arises.

Anyone who is able to observe mental processes will find that a memory image as an image is entirely a new formation, that it is formed in a similar way to the perception image; only that in one case the process proceeds from the outside in, and in the other from the inside out; that in one case the cause clearly appears before the consciousness as perception, and in the other remains hidden from consciousness as an inner process connected with the organism. Let us leave this fact, which I have only been able to sketch out, and return to the consideration of imaginative knowledge. I have described how imaginative knowledge is developed by first doing exercises that enable the person to form inner images in the same way as when they remember something. I have described these exercises in my book How to Know Higher Worlds and in my Outline of Esoteric Science. Through these exercises, one acquires the ability to have imaginative experiences. One comes to have such inner experiences, similar to imagination, with pictorial content that do not remind one of personally experienced facts, but which, through their very nature, bear the stamp of being images of a reality that is initially hidden from ordinary consciousness, of a reality that we can call a spiritual reality.

But when one approaches the act I have just characterized with this image consciousness, it appears in a somewhat different light. One recognizes how imaginative perception and remembering imagination stand in contrast to the ability to imagine. Above all, through the ability of imaginative cognition, one gains a special inner experience of imagining, of thinking itself. If one reflects with ordinary consciousness, one does not get very far. One must already have trained oneself philosophically in order to be able to grasp anything at all if one wants to have imagining, thinking itself, as an object. Those who do not engage in philosophical training will become impatient when asked to somehow think for themselves. Even Goethe considered himself fortunate that he never thought about thinking. This can be easily explained by Goethe's nature. Goethe, who, as I have characterized him in these reflections, strove for clarity, felt as a fish must feel when it comes out of the water into the air, when he, Goethe, came out of his concrete element into this element of pure thinking, in which he could not breathe spiritually because it was completely contrary to his nature.

But one can and must also grasp thinking itself, otherwise one cannot arrive at a conclusive philosophical view. It may not be everyone's business, but it is certainly the philosopher's business. But now, what can be grasped in ordinary consciousness as thinking, as imagination, which takes on an extraordinarily abstract, pale character that one does not want to dwell on for long, becomes denser, more vivid for imaginative cognition; indeed, one might say that imagination and thinking, which previously seemed abstract and spiritual, approach material vividness.

One should not underestimate the full significance of such a statement; for it must at first seem surprising that what is usually addressed as if it had nothing to do with the material world, precisely when viewed in the first stage of supersensible knowledge, in the imagination, becomes more vivid and even approaches a form that, I would say, is already reminiscent of something material. And indeed, the image that one gets from thinking — for it is images that one gets for the imagination — is reminiscent of processes of dying, of killing oneself, of passing away. Through imaginative cognition, through thinking, one actually receives the image of dying matter. I may say that if one wants to compare what I have just described with anything in the external sensory world, one can only compare it with the process that can be observed as the onset of physical death in a living being. Basically, in the transition from ordinary cognition to the imaginative cognition of thinking, one really has in one's feeling something like what one has when one experiences death in the physical world.

Cognition becomes something more alive by approaching imagination and inspiration in a form that is more abstract than it is in ordinary consciousness. That is why the ascent to supersensible knowledge is connected with what I called yesterday inner experiences of destiny. With a certain inner indifference, one goes through what are processes of knowledge in ordinary consciousness. We know how the rest of life leads up to pleasure and down to pain, how we rise and fall in the waves of sensation and emotion, but how, in comparison, what takes place in our cognitive thinking has something icy about it, something that leaves us cold, something that causes few such waves in our mind.

This changes when one ascends to imaginative cognition. There, the processes of cognition, although they are entirely spiritual in nature and have nothing to do with the physical, become more similar to the processes of ordinary life. One becomes more intimate with the processes of cognition because they capture one's heightened personal interest. And now, by going through this process of making thinking and imagining more vivid, one actually learns to know a vivid process that is already approaching the material. If one visualizes this process correctly, one can use it to approach the inner process of remembering. In a sense, by imagining the human organism in this way, it becomes transparent. One has first experienced the thought process spiritually and psychologically in an imagination. One experiences its material image when one now studies memory; for what precedes the becoming conscious of the memory image is a kind of material process similar to that which results in the perception of an image when one approaches thinking in the imagination as I have just described. One can say that here lies the possibility of entering into the insight of the memory process through imaginative cognition. And if one then continues one's efforts at knowledge in this way, one actually comes to the insight that imagination itself is, spiritually and soulfully, a process similar to the physical and bodily process of memory, only, I would say, individualized within the human body, individualized for personal experiences. The process of imagination separates itself from the human body and focuses on similar processes taking place outside the human body in the cosmos.

A physical process of dying is at work in the organism; what appears in consciousness as a result of this are the images of memory. A spiritual-soul process is active in the imagination, and this corresponds to a real process in the outside world, which, however, must first be approached and cannot yet be grasped through the imagination, for the complete supersensible process of cognition consists of imagination, inspiration, and intuition. But you see: there are things in human life, such as memory, and indeed all physical and soul processes, which cannot be recognized through speculation or philosophical considerations, but only by approaching them through the training of soul abilities that are initially hidden. And that one approaches them is also evident from the following.

When we live inwardly and spiritually in ordinary thinking or imagining, we are conscious of this thinking: it is we ourselves who string one idea after another; indeed, we are clearly aware that if we could not calmly string one idea after another with a certain inner arbitrariness, but if the ideas drove each other, so that we were only like the image of an automaton working within us, then we would not really be human beings. This feeling that we have towards our ordinary thinking is, as I believe I have shown in my Philosophy of Freedom, at the same time that from which our overall feeling of freedom flows, through which the phenomenon of freedom can be empirically understood in the first place.

This feeling of inner arbitrariness is initially lost when one rises to the level of imagination. Imagination provides images which, although they are experienced purely mentally and emotionally, as I said yesterday, have nothing to do with the visionary, the hallucinatory, or the like. Because these images are rich in content, they show that, in terms of summarizing and analyzing them, they no longer allow us the same freedom that prevails when we combine or separate ideas in ordinary consciousness. We gradually get the feeling that with imaginative knowledge we do not just immerse ourselves in images, as we immerse ourselves in our ideas, which in the strict sense appear to us as individual ideas that connect us; but we gradually get the feeling that the imaginings are actually only broken down into details by us, but that they basically form a whole, that a continuous force prevails through them, so to speak. We experience something in the imaginative being that we only bring into our consciousness through this imaginative knowledge, something of which we actually have no idea in ordinary consciousness.

And again: when we study ordinary life, when we observe the becoming of the plant world, the transition from one form to another, this metamorphosis that lives within itself, in the way that Goethe did with his studies of metamorphosis, the becoming of the plant world, the transition from one form to another, this metamorphosis living within itself, then we find that in this life of the plant world there is something of which what we now experience as a continuous unfolding of power in the world of imagination is an image. Thus we gradually come to the conclusion that we have worked our way through with our imagination to grasp what growth force is. We come to the conclusion that we must reject the speculated life force even more strongly than the mechanists have done, because that which lies in the realm of this life force can never surrender to ordinary thinking, to ordinary philosophical speculation, but only to a higher way of understanding that must be attained. We come to the conclusion that only the inorganic yields to ordinary understanding and that what lives in growth must be grasped in an inner state of soul that we only have when we have acquired imagination. Thus, this growth force lives in our organism. We see through it by surrendering ourselves to imaginative life.

It must be pointed out here that for those exercises that lead to imaginative cognition, the rules I have given in my books must really be observed. For what is the aim of all these rules? They aim to ensure that everything undertaken by those who strive to develop a higher capacity for knowledge must be carried out with the same inner clarity that one has when developing mathematical ideas. The consciousness must have the same constitution it has when geometrizing, when it immerses itself in everything that is necessary to develop the imagination and also the following stages of supersensible cognition, inspiration and intuition. If you think of the pathological visionary, hallucinatory life, of the dream life that represents at least the shadow of the pathological, you will be able to consider the enormous difference between all this and a consciousness living with mathematical clarity. That which is to lead to imagination must not be sought with a lowered consciousness; for by striving for what must be striven for purely spiritually with mathematical clarity in a dreamlike, mystical, confused, and obscured way, one could not ascend to higher powers of knowledge, but would sink down into powers that one already has, namely the powers of growth, the inner reproductive powers of the human organism. These would be stimulated to proliferate, and tendencies toward the visionary and hallucinatory would arise instead of imaginative knowledge. One can already see how things are connected when one really considers this description of the path to imaginative knowledge.

In this imaginative cognition, as I have described, one lives in a world of images, except that the images bear the signature of their own essence, that they are reflections of realities. But one does not have the realities; rather, one has the clearest awareness of living in a non-real world of images, and that is precisely what is healthy. The hallucinator, the visionary, takes his visions, his hallucinations, for reality. The imaginative person has not only ordinary but heightened prudence precisely because he knows that everything he experiences in his imagination is an image, an image of reality, but still an image. He cannot possibly confuse this world of images with reality. For what transports us, as it were, from the world of images into reality is inspiration.

Imagination initially provides an image of supersensible reality; inspiration transports us into it. We achieve this inspiration by using an inner technique, just as we bring about the possibility of imagination through meditation and concentration, to develop another ability that cannot be particularly appreciated in ordinary life. One must observe in such a way that one brings oneself to a reasonably clear awareness of what forgetting is, what throwing an idea out of consciousness is. One must practice meditatively in artificial forgetting, in sorting out ideas, and must thereby develop the ability to now also reject and ultimately erase the imaginative life, the life in images, that one has acquired. Those who have only managed to develop their imagination cannot yet penetrate into spiritual reality; only those who have managed to erase these imaginations, which at first, I would say, appear only as a realization of the imaginative faculty, can do so, for these imaginations are, in fact, more or less self-made. The point is to empty one's consciousness, as it were, to apply the act of forgetting arbitrarily to this imaginative life, so that one learns what it means to live in a completely awake consciousness that does not imagine, but which has brought its inner energy to bear through previous imagining and has now rid itself of its content, what it means to live in such a powerful consciousness. One must learn to know this, then one rises from imagining to knowledge through inspiration, then one also knows that one is touched by a spiritual reality that reveals itself in a soul-spiritual process that can be compared to inhaling and exhaling, to the rhythmic process of breathing in general. Just as the rhythmic breathing process consists of taking in the outside air, working it through internally, and then releasing it again in a different form, after we have identified with it in a certain way, so we learn about a spiritual-soul process that consists of being able to feel the inner power of consciousness that we have gained, to breathe it in, so to speak, spiritually and soulfully into this consciousness that has been strengthened by imagination. But through this, objective imagination shines forth in this strengthened consciousness. We breathe in the spiritual world, we let it enter us, we identify with it, we live ourselves out of ourselves; a rhythmic interaction with the spiritual world takes place.

In ancient India, people had instinctive aspirations to attain higher knowledge. These instinctive aspirations, which lived in yoga, used the breathing process, as you may know, to arrive, in a physical way, I might say, at experiencing this breathing process itself as a spiritual-soul process. By regulating breathing — inhaling, holding the breath, exhaling — in a certain way in Oriental yoga practice and devoting oneself to this breathing process, one draws, as it were, the spiritual-soul out of this breathing process. One separates the breathing process from consciousness precisely by pressing it in, and then one is left with the spiritual-soul aspect. We cannot imitate this process, which has been undergone in yoga practice, according to the organization of our present culture; and we should not imitate it. It would throw us down into the physical organization. In a sense, our soul life no longer lies in the same field as that of the Indian. The Indian's soul life was more oriented toward sensitivity; ours is oriented toward intellectuality. And in the sphere of intellectuality, yogic breathing would put people in danger of destroying their physical organization. When living in the intellectual field, one is compelled to use exercises such as those I have described in my book “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds.” These remain purely in the spiritual-soul realm. At most, they touch on something of the physical breathing process, but only rarely or not at all in most cases. However, the essence of our exercises for attaining imagination takes place purely in the spiritual-soul realm, in the sphere that human beings experience when they geometrize and mathematize. What must be done for inspiration also takes place in this sphere.

Through inspiration, it becomes possible to attain consciousness of a spiritual-soul outer world, a spiritual-soul objectivity. But this is connected with the fact that the life of consciousness itself now undergoes an inner metamorphosis. Human beings must accept that, as physical beings, they undergo external metamorphoses of growth as they live through childhood, youth, old age, and senility. With regard to consciousness itself, human beings feel a quiet fear, a shyness, about undergoing such metamorphoses, such liveliness in the innermost content of the soul. But this must be endured if one wants to attain supersensible knowledge. What Goethe developed to a particular perfection, the contemplation of metamorphosis, can move particularly well in the field of imaginative life, because everything that is subject to the imagination presents itself as living, transforming forms. Some form appears before the consciousness. It transforms itself, perhaps with transitions or perhaps without transitions, into a completely different form, but one can still, in a sense, transfer the contours of the first form into the contours of the second form. There is a possibility of forming one from the other without making a significant leap. This ceases when one approaches the essence of the world, which must be grasped through inspiration: it ceases as soon as one approaches the animal organism.

I would like to illustrate what one must approach when approaching the animal organism with the following. If, as a psychologist or even as a logician, one studies human thinking in such a way that one arrives at a definition of thinking, one can establish a certain concept of thinking, and it will be the pride of logicians, epistemologists, and psychologists to arrive at such a clear, transparent, distinct concept of thinking. They will be happy when they have such a concept, when they can say: Thinking is... — and now come the predicates. But let us suppose that someone was quite happy to establish such a concept of thinking, and then found themselves in the situation I was in when I wrote my Philosophy of Freedom: they would have to follow thinking from the form in which it lives when it is connected to external sensory perception, to the form in which it lives in free spirituality in the human personality as an impulse of will, as an impulse to action. There, thinking arises in such a way that we still recognize it as pure, purified thinking. We can move from the thought we have studied in perception, with which it is connected, to those thoughts that are motives for our actions when we act as free human beings. But when we turn to this thinking, it is indeed real thinking, but it no longer corresponds to the definition we have made of thinking in perception. We can no longer do anything with this definition, because this thinking, which underlies action as a motive, although it is thinking, no longer resembles thinking, but is at the same time thoroughly will. It has, one might say, metamorphosed into its opposite, into will, has become will, is thoroughly, if I may use the expression, substantial will. You can also see from this how flexible we must become in our use of concepts. Anyone who gets into the habit of forming a concept and applying it can very easily find themselves in a situation where reality makes a mockery of their use of concepts.

Now, let us assume — and this is ultimately the case with regard to external reality — that we have formed a concept of Josef Müller in his seventh year. When we meet him again in his fiftieth year, the concept does not help us to understand him adequately. We must expect a metamorphosis; something has changed. The definition of the young Müller at the age of seven will not help us when we have the fifty-year-old Müller in front of us. Life mocks definitions, sharply contoured, meaningful concepts. This is what constitutes the misery of many discussions and disputes in life, that one actually disputes beyond reality, while reality mocks rigid definitions and rigid descriptions. And so it is also the case that one must gain an insight into how thinking becomes will and will becomes thinking.

If this is initially a case that applies to humans, it is already approximately the case when we simply want to get to know the animal organism through inspiration. We cannot merely speak of such metamorphoses as Goethe spoke of for the plant kingdom, in which we can, as it were, still transfer one contour into another, but we must speak of inner transitions — or, if I may use the word used yesterday by Dr. Unger and myself — we must use the term “inversion,” not merely geometric inversion, but qualitative inversion, in order to move from one to the other. In short, we must accept that the inner state of the soul itself undergoes a metamorphosis, that we undergo, as it were, a maturing of our inner experience and knowledge.

Thus, as we ascend from imagination to inspiration, we cannot use the same concepts that are used quite rightly and legitimately for ordinary consciousness, which of course must always remain our point of reference, but which must be modified when our knowledge penetrates into the actual inner, that is, spiritual essence of things. And so the logical distinction between “right” and “wrong” is lifted out of its abstractness when one ascends from imagination to inspiration. One can no longer relate to the world, which one now recognizes as a spiritual outer world, by using the terms “right” or “wrong” in the same way that one has rightly learned to use them at a previous stage of knowledge. These terms are transformed into something much more concrete, namely into what one now experiences in the illuminating imaginations. In contrast to these, one cannot say “right” and ‘wrong’ in the same way as one does with the ideas of intellectual life; but now, precisely in this spiritual-soul realm, more concrete ideas arise: one is “healthy,” the other is “sick”; one is life-promoting, the other is life-destroying. The abstract concept of rightness is transformed into a more concrete concept, so that what we are tempted to call “right” reaches into the spiritual world as something healthy and life-giving, while what we are tempted to call “wrong” reaches into the spiritual world in a way that is sickening, deadly, and paralyzing.

Views that we have become accustomed to applying in physical life arise in a new form when we have crossed the threshold into the spiritual world, but then we experience the content of these concepts in a spiritual-soul way. Therefore, you will find that those who are sincere in their pursuit of knowledge of the supersensible worlds will indeed adopt different characterizations; they will no longer juggle with the concepts of “right” or “wrong,” but will quite naturally come to use expressions such as ‘healthy’ and “unhealthy” and the like. With this, I have first attempted to describe—and I will return to these matters in much greater depth in the next lectures—how one can ascend from ordinary knowledge to imagination, to inspiration, how one can thereby methodically enter into the true essence, that is, into the spiritual-supernatural essence of the world.

Now I would like to recall how, in my Philosophy of Freedom, in order to describe human action and to understand the phenomenon of freedom, I was compelled, on the one hand, to sharply elaborate the concept of pure perception, with which thinking is connected. On the other hand, I pointed out at the time that moral impulses are taken as intuitions from a spiritual world. So, in attempting to establish a real ethic, I was compelled, on the one hand, to sharply characterize the perception of the external sensory world to be penetrated by thinking at one pole, and moral intuition at the other pole of human existence, objective viewing or cognition on the one hand, intuitive cognition on the other. If one wants to understand human beings as they live in this physical world in terms of the way they perceive sensually and the way they develop their impulses for action from the deepest inner core of their being, then one is compelled to draw attention, on the one hand, to perception permeated by thinking, which represents reality, and, on the other hand, to seek a reality at the other pole out of pure spiritual empiricism, one that is rooted in an intuitive experience of moral impulses.

Now, in these considerations, it is incumbent upon me to show you the various stages of cognition that lead into the spiritual world, which is nothing other than the world that, together with our sensory world, constitutes the full reality. We must begin with objective knowledge, which I placed at one pole in The Philosophy of Freedom, and we must ascend to imaginative and inspired knowledge. There we are touched by spiritual reality. Then we ascend to intuition, and in intuition — I will have to explain this in the next lectures — we are not only touched by spiritual-supersensible reality, but we live ourselves into it, we become one with it.

Then we live in intuition when we are at one with spiritual reality, which means nothing other than this: at one pole of the human being as he stands today in this world period, there is objective knowledge; at the other pole, there is intuitive knowledge. Between the two stand imagination and inspiration. But if one wants to describe the human being in ordinary life, then one must, if one conceives of him as an actor, as a moral agent, find moral intuition for this one isolated area of moral motives, already for the sake of a philosophy of freedom. If one then develops the same thing for the entire cosmos, what one develops through such a philosophy of freedom as the basis of human action, one realizes intuition over the entire cosmos, whereas otherwise one finds it only in the limited realm of human action. But while one simply adds moral intuition to the objective knowledge of everyday life through the ordinary natural dispositions of human beings here in the physical world, if one is a moral person, one must, if one wants to arrive at real knowledge of the world and, I would say, arrive at cosmic intuition, which corresponds in the cosmos to moral intuition for the inner life of human beings, then one must pass through the two stages of imagination and inspiration. In other words, if one describes human beings, one can do so through a philosophy of freedom. There one is only compelled to arrive at the limited realm of intuitive experience for human action. If one seeks a cosmic view corresponding to this philosophy of freedom, then one must expand what one has done there in a limited realm by developing the stages of knowledge: objective cognition, imagination, inspiration, intuition.

In principle, therefore, between the first half of my Philosophy of Freedom, where I work out the reality of objective cognition, and the second part of the Philosophy of Freedom, where I work out moral intuition in the chapter “The Moral Imagination,” there is a gap between what is imagination and inspiration. At the time when “The Philosophy of Freedom” was being worked out, this could only be hinted at. It was hinted at when I said in Philosophy of Freedom: "The individual human being is not actually separated from the world. He is part of the world, and there is a connection with the whole of the cosmos in reality, which is only interrupted for our perception. For the time being, we see this part as an entity existing in itself, because we do not see the straps and ropes through which the movement of our wheel of life is effected by the fundamental forces of the cosmos." If we only want to recognize human beings for this world, we do not know the direct transition from objective knowledge to moral intuition.

What can only be hinted at in such a consideration—of course, the straps and ropes are meant figuratively—is that humans have something within them that binds their essence to the entire cosmos, which would have to be elaborated further. It would have to be shown how human beings, just as they can move from objective perception and cognition to moral intuition through an empiricism that can leap over the two middle links, can also move from their human perceptual experience to cosmic intuition; for they are connected to the cosmos in their humanity by straps and ropes, that is, by spiritual essences. But they can only see how they are connected if they now fill in what may remain unfilled for ordinary observation between objective cognition and intuition, that is, if they rise from objective cognition through imagination and inspiration to cosmic intuition.

This is the connection between all developed anthroposophical science and what was planted as a seed in the Philosophy of Freedom; but one must have a sense that anthroposophy is something living, that it first had to appear as a seed before it could develop further into leaves and something more. For it is precisely in this liveliness that the characteristic difference between anthroposophical knowledge and the dead lies, which many already sense in that wisdom which still wants to reject anthroposophy today, partly because it cannot understand it, partly because it does not want to understand it.