Anthroposophical Spiritual Science and the Big Questions of Contemporary Civilization

GA 80c — 1 March 1921, Amsterdam

6. Philosophy and Anthroposophy

Opening words by Leo Polak: Dear attendees and Mr. Speaker! As the chairman of the local Philosophy Association, I would like to welcome everyone here and believe that I have the right and the duty to make a very brief preliminary remark. We were in fact surprised that the Philosophy Association, a scientific association, organized an evening in the auditorium of the university with Dr. Steiner, whose relationship to philosophy was well known. Some people wanted to see this as a sanction and recognition of the scientific-philosophical value or significance of Dr. Steiner's work. I believe that both sides thought this wrongly. Firstly, our association did not spontaneously invite this evening's speaker from its own ranks, but merely responded to a request from the anthroposophical side to organize such an evening here, and rightly so, as I will have more to say in a few moments. Secondly, organizing this evening does not in any way imply agreement or unanimity with the work of Dr. Steiner. They know that in the same lecture halls here at the university, where, for example, critical philosophy, Kantian philosophy, is read, dogmatic, Thomist philosophy is heard, and rightly so. That is not to say the approval of those who gave rise to it, but purely and exclusively the objective attitude of science itself, which always and everywhere sees and examines everything and retains the good, which always and everywhere says, “audite et alteram partem”. Our philosophical association also wanted to express this idea. We did so in the justified conviction that the speaker this evening also holds exactly the same opinion. We also asked beforehand whether there would be an opportunity to give an account of a dissenting opinion afterwards, and, I might almost say, Dr. Steiner naturally agreed. So he also wanted to apply the “audite et alteram partem”. After these brief but necessary conditions, I ask the speaker to take the floor.

Rudolf Steiner: Dear attendees! In the various lectures that I have been privileged to give here in Holland since February 19th, on anthroposophical spiritual science and its practical orientation, my main concern has been to emphasize the practical aspects of these spiritual scientific endeavors. For these spiritual-scientific endeavors seek to accommodate the innumerable souls who, in the broadest circles of life today, long for something that arises out of the facts of this present time.

Today, however, my dear audience, allow me to speak from a completely different point of view. If, on the one hand, the anthroposophical spiritual scientist is condemned to seek their circles in the general public because of its practical approach to life, it is also the case that the roots of this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science extend in a very precise way, I believe, into the philosophical foundations of human endeavor. And it is this connection between anthroposophy and philosophical research, with the way of thinking that is philosophical, that I would like to speak to you about today. I will try not to speak in generalizations, but rather to speak in three directions, in the hope that this will shed light on the connections between philosophical research and anthroposophical spiritual knowledge.

Within philosophical research, we recognize a wide variety of problems and problem formulations. Today, I would like to focus mainly on the relationships between anthroposophy and three problem formulations: the epistemological problem, the ontological problem and the ethical problem. It would be tempting, however, to also touch on the aesthetic problem, but that would mean taking up too much of your time.

The epistemological problem, in the way we find it presented today in philosophy in the most diverse forms, is concerned with justifying man's belief in the reality of the external world; it is concerned to show the extent to which we can assume a valid relationship between that which is present within our knowledge in our consciousness and that which we can regard as some kind of objective reality outside ourselves. This problem, as well as numerous others, swings back and forth between dogmatics and skepticism in the history of philosophy, one might almost say as a matter of course. And anyone who is familiar with the history of more recent epistemology knows how extraordinarily easy it is to fall into a kind of skepticism when faced with the epistemological problem. I will have more to say about this later. In any case, here we have something of what must be of particular interest to anthroposophical spiritual science in relation to philosophy: in a certain way, it presents epistemology in a very vivid and very pressing way for human research and knowledge of the limits of knowledge.

The second problem I would like to talk about is the ontological problem. It is much older than the problem of knowledge. It seeks to bring reality – namely insofar as this reality goes beyond the sensory – into consciousness in some way, by means of knowledge, from what man can experience in the entities of consciousness. Now anyone who is familiar with the history of the development of ontology knows that, basically, a very understandable skepticism has entered into the ontological problem since the time that the ontological proof of God's existence has fallen victim to criticism, especially since the criticism of Kantianism regarding this ontological proof of God's existence. Since that time, there has also been little inclination within philosophical research to find something in the ontological that can provide clues for placing oneself in the sphere of reality itself through the development of inner knowledge. So here, too, in a sense, we are approaching a kind of limit, which is probably felt much more clearly in the face of ontology than in the face of many epistemological problems.

With regard to the ethical problem, I would just like to point out in the introduction that, out of a certain – forgive the expression, it is only meant terminologically – philosophical despair, we have come to the so-called value theory in relation to the ethical problem in recent times. But that means basically nothing more than despairing of being able to see through the ethical impulses present in our consciousness in their connection with reality and therefore seeing as based on something that is supposed to have validity in our world view - the value - but which is nevertheless formulated in such a way that one does not want to imagine a certain relationship to reality, to objective being.

I did not want to say anything binding, but only point out certain forms that the three problems have taken and which give reason to intervene in these three problem formulations with anthroposophical spiritual science. Before I can do that, I would like to briefly discuss the methodology of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science here, which I also do in my public lectures. However, I then try to present the things as popularly as possible, which of course has its drawbacks, but in some respects perhaps also some advantages.

I would like to say only this much today about the methodology of anthroposophy: that the entire path of research in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is based on the development of soul forces that already exist in ordinary life, that are also applied in ordinary science, but which are initially obtained from both ordinary life and ordinary science at a certain level, a level to which they are brought by inheritance, by ordinary education and so on. I need not define this stage, to which certain soul-powers are brought, for it is generally known, and what I actually want to say with this will emerge from what I have to communicate about the further development of these soul-powers.

Anyone who wants to become a spiritual researcher must, through careful inner soul work, further develop certain soul powers beyond those applied in ordinary life and in ordinary science. He must first further develop what is popularly known as the ability to remember, which underlies our memory, beyond what it is in ordinary life. The method of systematically ordered meditation and concentration, as I have described it in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds', and in other writings of mine in the anthroposophical literature, serves this purpose. The essence of this further development of the ability to remember is based on the fact that one forms ideas that can easily be overlooked. This fact, that one demands easily comprehensible ideas in the spiritual scientific method, has its profound significance. For nothing may be used for this further development of soul forces that could somehow be a reminiscence of life or that could somehow have an autosuggestive or even suggestive effect. Therefore, it is necessary to keep the images used in meditation and concentration as simple and straightforward as possible. It is not important that such images have a truth value in the usual sense, because they are not intended to point to any reality at all. They are only to be used to develop inner soul forces. Therefore, it is important that we not be deterred by the questionable character of the relationship between a representation and reality; whether the representation is fantastic, whether the representation is somehow made quite arbitrarily, is not the point, but rather that we can survey it in terms of its entire content, so to speak, like a mathematical representation, a geometric representation. Then it is a matter of mustering the strength to go through a certain period of time – this must be learned, at first one can only do it for a very short time, little by little one acquires a certain inner practice – then it is a matter of learning to rest with the whole intensity of the soul on such ideas.

Now a misunderstanding can arise right away. Because if it is done wrongly, if all the things that I have carefully compiled in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” are not observed, then the inner state of mind that is absolutely necessary for the spiritual scientific method to work properly will not be achieved. This state of soul must be exactly the same as when solving problems in geometry or in mathematics in general. In the same way that one is fully aware of one's will at work in the soul when constructing figures, when searching for any algebraic or other relationships, one must remain fully aware of the entire content of consciousness while resting on easily comprehensible ideas. It is therefore very important that anyone who is to become a spiritual researcher in an impeccable way should actually have at least a certain degree of mathematical training, and to such an extent that he has in particular acquired the way of thinking about mathematical problems.

Perhaps I may refer to a personal experience, the following one. I always think, when I am dealing with spiritual-scientific problems, which sometimes become quite difficult for one, because they often slip away from one when one already has them – I always think of the event that helped me decades ago, perhaps forty years ago, to get ahead on the path that I am about to characterize. It was the moment when I was able to grasp the strange fact in synthetic geometry for the first time – we don't want to dwell on the justification of this assumption now – that, based on the assumptions of synthetic geometry, the one infinitely distant point of a straight line on the right side is the same as the infinitely distant point on the left side. It was not so much this mathematical fact, but the whole way of thinking, how this assumption arises from the prerequisites of synthetic geometry, of projective geometry. I am only pointing this out here to draw attention to how the same state of mind, the same way of letting consciousness work, must take place in what I call meditation and concentration.

If one now does such inner soul work for a sufficiently long time — it depends entirely on the inner destiny of the person whether it takes a short time, two or three years, or much longer, until the first inner results of this further development of certain soul abilities occur, But out of the ordinary power of memory, by which we can conjure up past events before our soul, through the further development of this power of memory, a new soul power actually arises, a soul power of which we had no idea before. This soul power is developed memory, and yet it is quite different from ordinary memory. This soul power enables us to link certain states of our consciousness with other ideas than we usually do. In his everyday life, a person lives in the alternating states between waking and sleeping. We are, of course, familiar with the various physiological hypotheses that have been put forward about them, but these are of little interest to us here. What interests us is the state of ordinary consciousness. This ordinary consciousness is dulled, even paralyzed, to the point of complete dullness when we fall asleep, and returns to its bright state when we wake up. Of course, the human being does not arise spiritually and mentally when he wakes up; he must exist in some way between falling asleep and waking up. The fact is that during this time he does not use his senses, does not use his will organization, and does not use the mind that combines sensory perceptions. I will not go into the interruption of sleep by dreams, that would be taking it too far.

The person who has trained their memory in the way described is in exactly the same state in relation to their physical organism. When this trained memory awakens in them, they do not use their ordinary senses in the states in which they induce this memory. He knows how to switch them off, he knows how to switch off everything that is switched off during sleep. But his consciousness is not dulled. He lives in a conscious state, in a consciousness that is filled with content, and he knows that this content is of a spiritual-soul nature. Just as we otherwise receive soul-content in ordinary life through our senses, through the combining mind, so there is soul-content when the spiritual scientist makes use of the developed faculty of memory. Just as we have a sensory environment around us through our physical organism, so the spiritual scientist has a truly supersensible environment that permeates our sensory environment all around him. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a fact of the developing experience that occurs in the spiritual researcher; and any conceit, as if one were dealing with some kind of illusion, is simply excluded by the whole context of life in which one is placed by virtue of the method, which has only been outlined to you in principle, by which one reaches such a developed consciousness. One learns to recognize what it means to have consciousness in the body-free state.

I would like to show you, so that you can see that anthroposophical spiritual science does not speak from some vague, nebulous realm, but from concrete facts, to explain something very specific: our ordinary ability to remember, which is precisely what is needed to recall what we have once experienced. When this ability to remember is further developed in the way I have just described, then it becomes something else, and that is the peculiar thing. It is indeed developed memory, but there is no actual memory; the ability to remember has been transformed into an immediate perception of the spiritual, supersensible environment. This can be seen from the fact that once one has a spiritual-supernatural fact before one and can also characterize it, and one simply wants to recall this spiritual-supernatural state into consciousness again later from memory, one cannot do so immediately. It does not come up directly from consciousness. The ability to remember has been developed, and yet one does not remember exactly what one experiences through this developed ability to remember. You have to do something completely different if you want to see a spiritual state that you have once had again.

You then have to re-establish the conditions through which you called the fact before you. You can remember everything that led you to the moment of seeing the fact, then you can have the fact again, but you cannot simply reconstruct this fact from memory, as is the case with an ordinary memory. Therefore it is true when one speaks of the paradox: the one who writes his books as a spiritual researcher forgets the contents; he writes down the spiritual facts, so to speak, he takes them in, but he forgets them. Nor can he repeat a lecture from memory a second time, but he must recall the conditions under which he was placed before the vision the first time, then he can have the vision again. It is just as one can only have a perception again, if it is just a perception, by approaching the fact. Memory only gives one an image. The developed faculty of memory must simply go back to the event in the spiritual-supernatural world in order to be able to experience it again. This is, in a sense, the first step in entering the supernatural world, in developing the faculty of memory in a certain way so that it becomes a kind of supernatural faculty of intuition. In this way, one gradually comes to truly recognize the spiritual and soul as such, the spiritual and soul that underlies the human being, and the spiritual and soul that surrounds us in the outer world, which is also the basis of the facts and laws of nature.

And I want to characterize a second soul power in its further development. I believe that the development of this soul power as a power of knowledge must justifiably evoke even more contradiction than the development of the memory, because one does not want to accept this second soul power as a power of knowledge at all, it is the power of love. Of course, my dear audience, love is certainly considered to be something subjective. It is also in ordinary life. But if you apply certain spiritual research methods to the ability to love, as I have just described for the ability to remember, then something else emerges from the power of love, which is then also a power of knowledge of the supersensible world. The point is to first become aware of how you are actually undergoing a transformation every moment of your life, how you become a different person. You only have to look honestly into the depths of your soul and you will realize that what you are today was something different ten or twenty years ago. And you will have to say to yourself: In the vast majority of things, one has left oneself to the stream of life, one has had very little influence on the developmental conditions that have made one different from year to year, from decade to decade.

The spiritual researcher must move on to action in this area. He must, so to speak, take the development of his entire soul into his own hands through self-discipline. He must give himself certain directions, without thereby losing the naivety and the elementary of a full life. He must give himself certain directions and must be able to pursue what is formed out of him in metamorphosis, in careful self-observation. In this way, a certain soul power, which is otherwise latent, is drawn out of the depths of the soul. And love, which in ordinary life is bound to the physical organism, becomes independent of this physical organism in a similar way to soul power, just as the developed ability to remember does, except that the developed ability to remember conjures up images and imaginations of a supersensible world before our soul, whereas the developed power of love enables us to inwardly participate in what is presented to us in these images. Objectification of one's own soul life, absorption in objectivity, is the precondition for the knowledge of the supersensible and is achieved by developing the ability to love in this way. Through the development of the ability to remember, we attain the possibility of developing higher worlds of imagination, worlds of imagination about the supersensible. Through the development of the ability to love, we attain the ability to experience the inner reality, the essentiality of the supersensible.

I have only briefly sketched out what actually leads to the knowledge of a spiritual world, to which we belong with our actual inner human nature and in which we find the clues to the knowledge of the eternal nature of this human being. The real knowledge about the question of immortality is achieved on the path I have just characterized. In this way we come to know that part of us which passes through birth and death; we learn to recognize those worlds in which we live as [spiritual beings] before we descend to a birth or to a conception, and into which we also descend when we pass through the gate of death. But I will only hint at this; a more detailed explanation can be found in the literature, it would lead too far now.

Now, by means of such a method of spiritual research, two wrong paths of the human soul are, firstly, seen in the right way; but secondly, the conditions for avoiding them are created. The first thing is that in this way one gains a real insight into what memory actually is, by developing it. We need this power of remembrance; if we want to keep our ordinary life intact, we must be able to conjure up before our soul the images of our experiences from a certain point in our childhood that lies very early. We get to know this ability to remember through the insights I have just described, in that we say to ourselves: it actually prevents us from looking into our inner being. The mystic wants to look into the depths of the soul through direct experience. The spiritual researcher studies the dangers associated with such mystical introspection. It is a peculiarity of the soul life that what one has been experiencing since childhood between birth and death can not only arise in its original form at any given moment in consciousness, but that it can arise in the most diverse met amorphoses, so that there is the possibility that some experience, perhaps quite trivial, may gradually transform itself in the subconscious so that it later enters consciousness as a sublime-looking event. The mystic then perhaps believes he is immersing himself in some divine substratum of the soul and the world, while he has nothing but a transformed memory of life. The exact knowledge of the ability to remember leads us to avoid the mystical paths in the right way. Because if you have developed the ability to remember in the way I have described, you naturally remain a perfectly rational person. You only use this developed ability to remember when you want to. But if you have developed this ability to remember, you can really see through the ordinary memory. One can then take the path that the mystic only believes he can take. The mystic dwells in the same region of the soul where the memory is also present; basically, he sees only sensual, transformed memories. But the one who knows the developed memory, he, so to speak, sees through the ordinary memory region. Then, however, he does not get to see what a Tauler, a Mechthild of Magdeburg or anyone else believed they saw mystically, but he gets to see, but now from the inside, the material organs of the human organism. That is the real way, my dear attendees, to get to know people physically from the inside.

The mystic gets to know nothing else, so to speak, but the soul smoke, the soul mist that rises from the boiling internal organs. That is what needs to be said, that it is not at all the case that mystical raptures are present when one comes to self-knowledge through a developed memory. Rather, self-knowledge radiates into the real human organization, which can of course be recognized from the outside through anatomy and physiology, but its inner essence cannot be seen through. Here, my dear attendees, we reveal those things where we see the inner being of man in an inner connection with the surrounding nature in its various kingdoms. Only when we get to know the inner workings of the human organization in this way do we get to know the kind of physiology that shows the relationship between the various organs in their healthy and diseased states and what is present in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms and in the other natural spheres and kingdoms.

This is where it is possible to internalize our medicine, which has advanced so far through external research, to build the bridge between pathology and a therapy based on a real understanding of the human being and the world; last spring I presented to doctors and medical students at our School of Spiritual Science in Dornach about such a deepening of medicine. And it is precisely in this field that one can show how the individual sciences can in turn be fertilized by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. This was also shown for the other sciences by the university courses in Dornach last fall, which were given by thirty scholars in various fields of science, as well as by artists, by practical people, by commercial people. They showed how anthroposophical spiritual science can enrich the individual sciences by adding to what has led to such research triumphs in recent times, to what external research can offer, that which can be seen inwardly. For just as I have described, that through the real knowledge of the ability to remember, through its further development, the knowledge of the human being truly comes about, so too does a spiritual-supernatural knowledge of nature come about in this way.

The other pitfall to be avoided, which can be seen through with such further developed cognitive abilities, is that of dialectical-philosophical speculation, which is of course present to a certain extent within our scientific research, or at least our thinking. We research by observing phenomena and by causing phenomena through our own experiments. But we do not just apply our combining mind to it, for example in the methodical sense of doing natural science, which remains phenomenology, but we apply it to extrapolate beyond the empirical, and then we arrive at those constructions that are given in atomistics, in molecular theory. It is not the intention here to criticize the significance and justification of molecular and atomic theory, which has been confirmed by experiment. But that which, to a certain extent, is present as the supporting element of natural scientific phenomena in the form of atomistic thinking, is seen through in its unreasonableness when the second power of cognition, that which arises out of the power of love, is developed in the way described. Then we learn to recognize that we must remain within the outer empirical-sensory environment in the world of phenomena. Further penetration then depends on whether we actually get the spiritual-supersensible, and not just a small-scale translation of the sensory world of atoms.

Here, my dear audience, I would like to draw your attention to something that cannot be ignored, especially if you are a spiritual researcher. In philosophical epistemology, we speak of having sensory impressions. We speak of the quite legitimate research results of modern physiology, through which one wants to form an idea of the formation of an objective fact unknown to us, which then continues to the sensory organ. We speak of what takes place in the sensory organ, what possibly takes place in the corresponding brain sphere, and so on. In this way, one arrives at pushing the epistemological problem to the physiological problem in a certain sense, but one considers this problem at every single point in the world. One wants to go from a single phenomenon to what is behind it. One proceeds in exactly the same way as if one wanted to conclude something from a single letter on a written page. You read the whole page; the context of the letters on the whole page reveals the reason why the individual letter is as it is. In this way, we also remain within the world of phenomena. We do not speculate about the individual phenomena in terms of something underlying them, such as a “thing in itself.” Rather, we consider the context of the phenomena, reading the reality of the phenomena to certain totalities, one might say, studying them. This then leads us to that which is expressed spiritually in the phenomena, and can only be grasped spiritually with the supersensible powers of knowledge of which I have spoken.

In this way, I tried to penetrate deeper into the world through a kind of further development of the cognitive abilities of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. However, this also presents the epistemological problem to anthroposophy in a very specific way. This epistemological problem, as I have just mentioned, suffers from such things. We study in a certain way that which is supposed to be unknown to us. We then pursue it to the sense, to the brain. We come to the point where we find no transition to what actually lives in the soul. And if I — naturally leaving out much that could be said, but which is certainly well known to those present from the history of more recent epistemology — if I just pick out the most important things, so it might be the following: The conscientious epistemologist comes to the conclusion that he no longer allows the possibility, within the world of representation – on closer analysis, however, not only the world of representation arises, but also a part of the world of sensation – but let us stick to the world of representation – to relate the representations, as they live inwardly through logic, psychology, to some actual reality or to something that he would like to take as an actual reality. It comes about, so to speak, that one feels very strongly the pictorial character of the life of imagination in the empirical fact; to feel it so strongly that one sees no bridge from this experienced pictorial character of the life of imagination over into reality. Therefore, many of the newer epistemologists have given up trying to build a bridge from the life of imagination over into reality. They appeal to the will, to the will, which they felt to be the elementary point of contact with things; for them, the will has become the thing by which man is actually authorized to speak of the reality of the external world, whereas he should never actually be able to derive the reality of an external world from the world of imagination.

I believe that in this area of epistemology, an enormous amount of conscientious work has been done in recent times, and that ingenious things have come to light; the literature is indeed one of the richest. But I do not believe that one can recognize, by immersing oneself in this literature with a completely open mind, that one is standing on quite uncertain ground within this epistemology and that one cannot build a bridge from something in the soul to some reality that can reasonably be assumed. The world of imagination – if one can grasp it, it shows – really does have the character of a picture. No matter how significant the conclusions we arrive at in this pictorial realm of the life of imagination may be, we cannot escape from the pictorial to arrive at any kind of reality.

On the other hand, I do not believe that the way out of approaching reality through the will can be fully realized epistemologically. Because, dear attendees, in the imagination we are at least completely filled with the full clarity of day-consciousness; in the world of imagination we overlook exactly that which is happening, at least in the imagination, pictorially. In the activity of the will, we are asleep to a certain extent. We do not experience the activity of the will inwardly; it is not transparent to us. Therefore, it was particularly striking to me that a recent epistemologist who rejected the justification of the objective reality of the world of imagination and who assumed the activity of the will in order to establish a reality, Dilthey, that he did not refer to the experiences of the adult, but of the still dreaming child. It is indeed the case that we never come to a full awakening in relation to the actual inner essence of the will in our lives between birth and death if we do not develop the ability to love in the way I have shown. But when that happens, the whole inner soul condition changes. Then one comes to understand the reason why our imaginative life is essentially pictorial.

If one wants to grasp something like the developed capacity for knowledge, one must be prepared for a completely different state of mind. Then, of course, the usual conditions for understanding are not present. Understanding is much more an experience, an immersion in things. But the person must fulfill this prerequisite in order to penetrate into the matter at all. If one now approaches with the developed ability to remember, with one's soul experience — leaving aside bodily functions — and observes what, because of its pictorial nature, prevents the epistemologist from building a bridge to it, then one finds out why the life of imagination is essentially pictorial. One then examines precisely, but now with the developed ability to remember, what the relationship actually is between the imagination and the external, empirical world. And one finds: there is basically no relationship at all between what arises in us as an image and what is, so to speak, reflected back as images of our imagination when our organism is affected by the external world. There is no inner relationship at all between these images. There is a relationship between the content of the images and what is in the external world, but not between the essence, the being of this world of imagination and what is externally the environment. We are confronted with an environment and an inner world that are essentially distinct from one another. One can be reflected in the other, but they are different. Through the developed power of memory, one learns to recognize what actually lives in the imagination, which is essentially bound to the main human organization. It is not what comes from the outside world, which we can look at with our senses, but rather the echo of our prenatal or pre-conception spiritual being. That which essentially underlies our imaginative life is like the penetration of a shadow of our prenatal existence into our existence between birth and death. We think essentially with the powers with which we lived in the spiritual world before our conception.

This analysis is arrived at through the developed faculty of memory; hence the lack of affinity between what is actually the echo of a completely different world and what surrounds us in the external world. It is only in the course of our lives that we establish the relationship between what we bring with us from the prenatal world and what we perceive through our senses. This, ladies and gentlemen, becomes a fact. And now the epistemological problem no longer presents itself before our soul as a mere formality, but now it presents itself, so to speak, like the shadow of a very real world of facts. We learn to recognize what we actually want through conceptual cognition as human beings. Through this conceptual cognition, we want to bring two worlds into concordance: the prenatal purely spiritual world and the postnatal sensual world. The purely spiritual world dismisses us with a question, the sensual world gives us the answer.

I first tried to present this development of the human being in relation to truth in a philosophical way in my small epistemological work “Truth and Science”, where I tried to show how the grasping of reality is not a mere formal, but how man first stands vis-a-vis reality as a half, as a something that is made by himself as something not quite real; how he then acquires knowledge, especially in scientific work. That was purely scientific, philosophical-formal work based on Kantianism, an epistemology that then had to be supplemented by what I have just presented, so that light is shed by the recognition of the supersensible in methodology with regard to this supersensible, in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

These, ladies and gentlemen, are some highlights with regard to the epistemological problem. This epistemological problem came to my mind particularly 30 years ago when I devoted myself to the study of the problem of freedom. I will just summarize in a few sentences what I explained in my “Philosophy of Freedom” in 1892. I do not want to define freedom now, but just point out how it lives in everyone. It would be impossible to understand free actions in any way if the basis for those free actions were available to us as the result of an external, physical-sensory reality or as the result of an internal, organic reality. Only because we have images in our life of ideas, images that, as it were, mirror our prenatal existence as mirror images do not have reality but mirror what is in front of the mirror, only because such images, for which there is no external reality in relation to their essence, provide the impulses for our free actions; only because of this are free actions possible. If free acts were not based on pictorial impulses, they could not be free acts. The fact that a truly real epistemology leads us precisely to the pictorial character of the life of imagination, and in particular to the pictorial character of pure thinking, makes it possible to base a real philosophy of freedom on such an epistemology.

Now, my dear audience, how has the ontological problem been brought to skepticism? The fact that in the course of human development, which I have shown in relation to philosophy in my two-volume book “The Riddles of Philosophy”, humanity has increasingly lost the inner experience of reality, that humanity has virtually moved on to the pictorial character of conceptualized experience. Why did the ontological proof of the existence of God become invalid in a certain age?

In fact, if one studies the true history of philosophy, one finds that this refutation of the ontological proof of God's existence would have had no value at all for older times, because in those times, not only was the existence of God the existence of God with ontological proofs, but rather, one inwardly experienced the divine in the concepts, and by letting the concepts run dialectically, a reality lived in this dialectical process. This reality was lost inwardly more and more. That is the meaning of the development of the ego in humanity: that more and more the inner connection with reality was lost, so that finally the very theory of knowledge became necessary, which wanted to build a bridge from the non-existing, but merely pictorial concept to external reality. In ontology, this occurs at a higher level. We have mere dialectics instead of the dialectic full of content, instead of the real process, which lived as a supersensible process in the world of concepts. Our ontology – we have almost none anymore, but the one that still remained in older philosophers – is, I would like to say, the filtered dialectical product of an old, inner experience; inner experience that has become mere concept, mere conceptual web.

Now, what I have just characterized as the experience of a supersensible world through the developed powers of knowledge, leads one, as I have already mentioned, to ultimately rising to recognize the simultaneously real, for example, behind natural phenomena. The enrichment of therapy through spiritual science is based on the fact that what lives spiritually and soulfully in natural phenomena can be related to the recognized inner organs of the human being. At the same time, ontology takes on meaning again because the external and the spiritual and soul-like can be seen through objectively. So that what humanity, as humanity becoming free, has felt towards ontology is a kind of intermediate stage. In earlier times, through an instinctive experience of the concepts, reality was in the experience of the concepts. Then this was lost, had to be lost in the process of educating humanity to freedom, to life in pure concepts. For that is what it means to experience freedom: to be able to experience pure image concepts and to act accordingly. Now we are again faced with the possibility of giving ontology a content through the visions of the simultaneously spiritual-supersensible.

Dearly beloved, I have thus pointed out to you two fields of supersensible vision: that which, as it were, precedes our birth, and that which is the supersensible present at the same time.

And a third sphere reveals itself to man when, through a developed psychology, he first looks at what is not his imaginative faculty, but his will; the will and a part - I expressly say a part - of the feeling nature. These spheres, they also lie so far below the threshold of our waking consciousness, as our nocturnal experiences lie below this threshold for the ordinary consciousness. If one analyzes the facts of the soul without prejudice, one cannot help but come to the conclusion that the same intensity of inner experience that one sees in the dullness of sleep consciousness is also seen in the experience of what is actually the effect of the will in us.

A careful analysis of consciousness, which has been carried out by numerous psychologists, shows that the human being first experiences ideas of what he should want and what he should do. He does not then experience the whole intermediate stage, where what is imagined passes over into the organism of the will. Then he experiences the other end of this will life, he experiences the transition of his will into the outer deed; he looks at what is happening through him. What lies between these two extremes, that is experienced by man with exactly the same subdued consciousness as he has in deep sleep. The emotional life is not experienced with the same intensity as the imaginative life either, but with the intensity of the dream life. But what is important now is to look at how the actual life of the will is experienced with the dullness of the life of sleep. We not only sleep in time and wake in time, but also while we are awake, we sleep with a part of our being, with our volitional being. What makes us sleep in relation to our volitional being, the reason for this, becomes apparent when knowledge is developed in the way I have explained. If one succeeds in developing the ability to love to the point where one experiences the supersensible, then there arises as a special experience the living over into the process of the will, which otherwise does not enter into consciousness, which otherwise remains dull. One does indeed come to know not only the organs of the body, as I explained earlier, but one also comes to see that part of the will that is otherwise overslept in waking, in the same way as one otherwise looks at an external fact through the senses. One arrives at a self-knowledge of the will. And through this, my dear audience, the ethical world is integrated into the rest of the world, into the world in which natural necessity otherwise prevails. In this way, we learn to recognize something that is still extremely difficult to describe, even for today's ideas.

When we consider the content of our consciousness, we can ascribe certain intensities to it in its individual parts. We can then – this can be said with particular reference to certain senses – we can then go down to intensity zero with regard to certain contents of consciousness. But we can also – and this is usually given little attention, because the necessity for it only emerges in spiritual research – we can also go down from an objectivity with regard to the intensive experience of consciousness, we have to go into the negative. Yes, it turns out to be necessary not just to speak of matter, but to speak of matter, to speak of empty space and of negative matter; thus not just to speak of empty space, but to speak of emptied space, to bring the intensity below absolute zero. This is a concept that necessarily arises for the spiritual researcher when he attempts to make a transition from the essence of the life of thinking to the essence of the life of will and the relationship of this life of will to the physical-organic functions. If we imagine by name — it could also be the other way around —, if we imagine the processes that take place between the spiritual-soul and the physical-bodily when imagining, if we imagine these processes as positive, then we must imagine the will processes as negative; to a certain extent, if one represents a pressure effect, we must imagine the other as a suction effect. These are more or less comparative ideas, but they lead to reality. I may briefly characterize this reality.

We usually imagine, through today's psychology, which has become more and more abstract, that there is an interaction between the processes of the brain, that is, the nervous organism, and between the soul and spiritual processes. Certainly, such an interaction exists. But the nature of this interaction presents itself before the developed ability to remember, as I have described it. That which actually comes to life in the act of imagining is not based on the progressive growth of the nervous organism, but rather, quite the opposite, on the wearing away of the nervous organism. Once this has been properly understood, then spiritual science will be followed on this point. I can only sketch it out here, but you will find detailed descriptions of the matter everywhere in our literature. Once this has been understood, you will say to yourself: you are deceiving yourself if you assume a parallelism between spiritual and mental processes and brain processes in the usual way; a deception that I will illustrate with an example.

Let us assume that someone walks over a soft road surface, a car drives over the soft ground, impressions are formed, footprints, wheel tracks. A being from Mars or wherever could now come and speculate about these impressions and say: under the surface of the ground there is a certain force that causes these impressions by pulling down and pushing up. There is no power there that causes these impressions, but they have been caused by a person who has walked over them, or a wagon that has driven over them. In what the spiritual-soulful is acting out, it simply finds a soil, a resistant soil on the physical organization, makes impressions, and in fact it even destroys the organic substance. So the organic substance is worn away. The organic processes are regressed. And by making room for the spiritual in this way, the soul penetrates. If we imagine the process as positive, then the will process is the negative, then the will process promotes organic growth, albeit in a roundabout way. But just as the process of imagination continues in the organism as a process of removal, as a process of destruction, and to a certain extent as a process of excretion of organic substance, so too does the will lie in the increased, more lively construction of the organic. This is the effect of willpower. In this way, we learn to see the interaction between the physical and the spiritual in a positive and concrete way. But through this we also learn to recognize how we not only have a nature around us that contains natural laws, but just as the will integrates itself into our own organism as a growth-promoting, growth-stimulating force, so the spiritual-soul element that we are aware of in our consciousness as ethical impulses integrates itself into the whole of nature around us.

In this way, through this supersensible knowledge, we find not only values, or something that merely corresponds to utility, but we actually find within the world that surrounds us, on the one hand, natural necessity and, on the other, objective ethical necessity. Ethical impulses are actually integrated into objective world existence. And what comes out of it – I would have to describe the process at length, but for now I can only characterize it by way of comparison – what comes out of it is this: we live in the world of natural necessity. The moral ideals arise within us. It is like with a plant. It develops leaves, flowers, and in the center of the flower, the seed of next year's plant. Leaves and flowers fall away, but the germ, which is inconspicuous, remains and develops into next year's plant.

From this point of view, which I have just discussed methodologically, the relationship between natural necessity, everything that surrounds us as natural necessity, and what arises in us as ethical impulses appears as follows. Natural necessity will undergo a process that cannot be understood merely as natural necessity, as Clausius, for example, wants to understand his entropy of the universe. Rather, there is a process of mortifying that which appears physical to us today, and how the germ lives in this physical [that which ethical impulses are] to the physical world of a distant future. And we come to realize that our physical world is the realized ethical world of a distant past, and our ethical impulses of the present are the germs of a physical world of the future. The ethical problem, understood anthroposophically, is part of the cosmological problem. Through this anthroposophical view, the human being is in turn incorporated into the whole cosmos.

This has important social implications. The ethical ideal, the ethical impulse, is intimately connected with the social impulse. The social impulses will only take hold of humanity in the right way again, they will only lead us out of the chaos of the present, when it is grasped that what man does here on earth is not something that disappears like smoke and fog, which is like ideology based on purely external, purely economic processes, but what has a cosmological significance so that, in fact, with a variant, the Christian word is true, which every person can pronounce, can repeat after the Christian master: “Heaven and earth will pass away” – that is, what surrounds us as the physical world will pass away – “but my word,” that is, the logos that lives in me also as the ethical, “will not pass away.” It creates a future world. Thus, that which lives in the human being expands into a consciousness that in turn integrates the human being into the cosmology of world evolution.

I just wanted to show you today, dear attendees, what the relationship is between anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and the epistemological problem; how, in fact, what makes this epistemological problem so difficult for today's philosophy, in that on the one hand, cannot get out of the image character of the life of imagination, and on the other hand, cannot really do anything with the will because it cannot be brought out into the bright clarity of consciousness, how this problem, when grasped anthroposophically, places the human being in reality. Because that which he was in reality before his birth or conception takes on the character of an image in our life between birth and death. In this way, what is in the human being in the form of an image is linked to the external reality that he experiences and to which he himself builds the bridge. If one looks between two realities — the external environment and the internal world of ideas —, one can basically come to no solution to the problem, because one is dealing with a [shading] in the actual impulses of the inner world of ideas, an influence of that which was our reality before birth.

The ontological problem is posed anew by the fact that the human being experiences real spirituality again, that is, not only thinks dialectically, but by thinking dialectically, the spiritual-substantial, the essential is within this dialectical thinking.

The ethical problem, viewed anthroposophically, places the human being within the whole of cosmic becoming. It elevates what we do as individuals to a world fact by showing that what is ultimately necessary for a comprehensive world view is that in what happens in a person, there is not only something that is enclosed by his skin, but that, apart from the fact that he experiences it subjectively, it is also a subjective fact, it is also an objective event for the existence of the world. We live the existence of the world with us. Something lives in us, it is our subjective experience, but at the same time it is an objective experience of the world. By connecting the ethical impulses in this way with the cosmological existence, the cosmic experience of existence, the human being transcends death in the same way as he transcends birth in the other way. By understanding the powers of imagination, one comes to understand existence before birth. By understanding the will, one gets to know the germinal forces in the human organization, that which cannot be lived out at all until death, that which lives in us as the germ lives in the plant.

And from there, the path, which I cannot even hint at because of the shortness of time, is to recognize the immortality problem, namely, life beyond death. We have become so unclear about the problem of immortality in recent times because we cannot see it properly by the hand of the other problem. We do not even have a word for this other problem in ordinary language. We talk about immortality, but we do not talk about being unborn, about unbornness. Immortality belongs to the realm of the unborn. Until we are able to think and talk about being unborn in the same way as we do about immortality, we will only grope in matters of faith and not come to certain knowledge.

Dear attendees, I am well aware of how much can be objected to what I have been allowed to explain today. Believe me when I say that the spiritual researcher raises the objections that can be raised, because he is aware of the difficult and questionable areas his research enters into. But perhaps these arguments have shown that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, insofar as it emanates from the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum in Dornach, is not concerned with wild fantasy, nebulous mysticism, or some kind of enthusiastic theosophy, but that it has to do with something that, at least in its striving, wants to continue on the path of serious, even exact science. To what extent this can be achieved today, I cannot say. But serious research is being pursued precisely because the tremendous scientific advances of recent times point not only to themselves, but at the same time beyond themselves. It is my heartfelt conviction that today's good natural scientist is not driven by the results of natural science research, but by what a natural scientist does with mind and soul, into the development of these soul abilities, which are already applied unconsciously in natural science research. He is driven to consciously develop these abilities and is then drawn into a truly concrete grasp of the spirit. A concrete grasp of the spirit, just as science is a concrete grasp of nature, of objective natural facts, that is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science seeks to achieve.

Discussion

Leo Polak: Since no one else wants to take the floor, I would like to do so myself. After we have heard about anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, I would also like to hear something from the other side, I would like to say, from the purely philosophical side here, especially from the epistemological side. Because what pleased me most this evening was at least the striving to also give an epistemological foundation for this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, as Dr. Steiner also tried to do in his works, which I am familiar with for the most part.

But then it became clear to me that there really is a fundamental contradiction, I would even say a contradiction, between anthroposophy and philosophy. In my opinion, this contradiction is not based on what Dr. Steiner founded it on. He explained somewhere that the real fact of the matter is that it is not philosophy that contradicts anthroposophy, but rather that philosophers, and especially Kant, do not understand philosophy. Now I believe that the whole attitude of philosophy towards anthroposophy is different from the opposite. I would like to say, even if it sounds a little immodest: philosophy is a little more modest; it will never dare to say, “This clairvoyant knowledge does not exist.” It will not dare to say that if Dr. Steiner believes and thinks that by developing certain soul forces he can expand memory or expand it to see a supersensible world, to see the higher world of ideas, to think with prenatal spiritual powers, and what else we have heard here, to purely spiritual in this sense, and when he thus directly beholds the supersensible non-ego, when he beholds what occurred before birth and after death, then we can simply say: We do not see this, we lack this cognitive faculty, in principle, not gradually, but in principle, and so we have to remain silent about it. The only thing we can critically note here is that it is a mistake to speak here of a mere extension of the known forces. Each time, the familiar force is not expanded, but transformed into and transferred into something that is fundamentally opposed to it. Remembering is always only remembering what one has experienced oneself. When remembering becomes beholding, when it becomes supersensible, it becomes something fundamentally different, an insight into something that is no longer and never can be a power of remembrance.

It is exactly the same with love. We do not believe for a moment, at least I am convinced, that it is a lack of my ability to love that I cannot immediately merge with that objectivity in which Dr. Steiner can, that I cannot experience the inner reality of the supersensible and therefore also solve the question of the supersensible when a before and after is experienced. I do not believe that, that is the only thing I can say; and what I can definitely say is that something new is being achieved here, and not just an expansion of our powers of knowledge and love.

But if epistemology and philosophy do not want to and cannot presume to pass judgment on spiritual powers, about which they themselves absolutely do not dispose, do not know and even cannot think, a seeing of a non-ego, then on the other hand, where the spiritual scientist turns to epistemology and wants to judge and condemn epistemological questions, she feels obliged to let her criticism be heard and to say: It is possible that clairvoyance has penetrated into the core of matter, even if epistemology does not recognize this whole matter as reality; this vision may be able to enter into the inner being of matter, but it has not entered into the inner being of epistemology; it has only been able to see epistemology and especially critique, the Kantian one, from the outside, without ever being inside.

It is clear that it would be taking this far too far if one were to expand on this with specific reasons. I would then need a whole evening here, just as the previous speaker would have needed this and more to express his view on epistemology. But there are some words that I just want to touch on briefly because they are of the utmost and greatest interest in principle. In the book 'Philosophy of Freedom', for example, Dr. Steiner particularly addresses the problem of knowledge, and perhaps the most characteristic sentence in the book is that, from the concept of knowledge as we have defined it, we cannot speak of limits to knowledge. Well, there could hardly be a more fundamental contradiction than that between critical epistemology, which I have the honor of representing here at the university and on which I give my lectures, and a statement like this, which rejects every limit of knowledge that the exact research work of so many of the greatest thinkers, and especially Kant, has taught us, could hardly be more fundamentally opposed than this between a theory that denies the limits of knowledge and one that establishes them. And this denial of origin is also the basis of the rest of the antagonism. Dr. Steiner has criticized critical idealism in this book and elsewhere, but he always remained outside the actual problem, never even touching on the essence of actual Kantianism. He believes that the phenomenon of nature is the nature of Kantianism, for which every nature, every material world, for example, not only exists as a physical world for Dr. Steiner, but there is also an ethereal body outside our physical body , we also have an astral body, we not only have the one spirit, but also four kinds of spirit, so to speak, which are then named with these Indian words: manas, budhi, atma and so on. But the physical body is denied by Kantianism as an independently existing reality; it is merely a phenomenon of the thing in itself. We also heard that day that one had even come to speculate, to a “thing in itself,” as if that were the most unreasonable thing one could do. And here, no less a figure than Kant said of the denial of this thing in itself: “I have shown with all my criticism that what we perceive, the things of the world of appearances, are not things in themselves, but appearances. That is, as is well known, the sum total of Kant's entire critique of knowledge: it would be incorrect to consider these appearances to be things in themselves; but it would be an even greater contradiction to want to deny the existence of any “thing in itself” at all. It would, of course, take me much too far afield if I were to elaborate on this point, but I can completely hint at Dr. Steiner's fundamental errors here with a few words: He has partly adopted Hartmann's criticism of idealism and in any case made the big mistake in it – which I believe I have shown in my book, and that is this – that idealism or the phenomenon of matter or nature, that one could arrive there only if one presupposes the reality of nature, the reality of [gap in the text]. This is quite incorrect and is based on the false formulation of this subjectivity of the content of perception. Not a single critical idealist in this sense says, as Dr. Steiner has him say, as he himself believes that it should be said, that colors merely depend on and exist for an eye, but every critical thinker knows here that that the eye is just as much a phenomenon and just as dependent and is not the eye [the first principle] but just as secondary, so he says: All colors exist only for and through the sense of color, the sense of sight, as a mental faculty. And in exactly the same way, all sounds in the whole world only exist if the sense of hearing is presupposed as the [primum], and not the ear or the brain. If one makes this single and absolutely necessary change in this whole critique of Dr. Steiner on Kantian idealism, then it collapses into nothing and then Dr. Steiner's only argument remains, but it is scattered and shown to have been insignificant. I would ask those experts who deal with epistemology to read the relevant passage from Dr. Steiner's work, and I would ask Dr. Steiner to consider the matter in this light and to see whether this change is not enough to show that what he has brought up here in a critical sense is unfortunate.

And there is still another fundamental difference between this merely formal, merely critical idealism and everything that Kant, I believe rightly, called enthusiastic, mystical idealism. The previous speaker wanted to make a fundamental distinction between mysticism and his teaching. I fear that some of those present here were unable or hardly able to find this difference. There was much in it that must be considered enthusiastic from a Kantian point of view, as belonging to that higher idealism. The higher [gap in the text] [is] not for me; for me it is only the pathos, the depth of experience. I believe that for some people what was presented tonight will have had a mystical quality, and quite rightly so. For mystical has always been used to describe that which is based on the direct content of the transcendent, the non-ego, that which is not directly given in the ego, that is, the non-ego. And it is precisely this insight into the supersensible, the other, the non-ego, the non-self-experienced, the previous and the subsequent, all these mystical things that we have heard proclaimed as the elements of anthroposophy. I would like to conclude with a motto from Kant's “Prolegomena”. It goes without saying that I cannot go into everything in detail, that would of course be impossible. Dr. Steiner said: “The interaction between brain and soul certainly exists.” We are very surprised at this certainty, since the whole critical theory of knowledge, in contrast to the psychology Dr. Steiner pointed to, not only denies this interaction in principle, but can also demonstrate the fundamental impossibility of interaction, because interaction requires two, two realities, and for critical idealism one of these realities does not exist materially as such, but in itself something else, something that is in itself psychic and ideal, just as we ourselves are, and just as one's own deeper opinion may be Dr. Steiner's own, but which he merely clothes in this uncritical, dogmatic, duplicated theory of perception, never speaking of images and even mirror images; when criticism shows, never Kantian criticism, that our perception never delivers images, never reproduction, but production. That would be the fundamental error, but I cannot go into that in detail now. The words of Kant with which I would like to end – there are actually two – I would first like to formulate the contrast between this clairvoyance and critical philosophy in Kant's words. Because “this much is certain and certain to me: anyone who has ever tasted criticism is forever disgusted by all the dogmatic drivel they previously had to make do with.” And further: “Criticism relates to ordinary school metaphysics” – and I would like to say also to this new metaphysics, to anthroposophy – “just as chemistry relates to alchemy or astronomy to divinatory astrology”. That is the one word that formulates the opposition in principle. The other is this: “Now suppose what seems most credible even after the most careful examination of the reasons. These may be facts or reasons, but reason does not deny that which makes it the greatest good on earth, namely, the prerogative of being the final touchstone of truth."

With this final touchstone of truth, we want to measure anthroposophy and theosophy. For, as Kant says - and with this I would like to conclude - otherwise you will become unworthy of this freedom and surely lose it.

Rudolf Steiner: I would like to just touch on a few points and not keep you any longer. The first is the fundamental point that your esteemed chairman has brought forward, that there is not just a difference in degree between what I characterized as a developed ability to remember and remembering, but a fundamental contradiction. Nothing else emerges from my characterization, of course. Perhaps I may trace it back to the difficulty in communication through language, when your chairman introduced a word to justify his criticism that I have not used and would never use. I spoke of a further development of the ability to remember, not of an extension. I would like to explicitly draw attention to this. Extension is wrong. Further development can also lead to a form of the same thing, a metamorphosis that shows a fundamental opposition to that from which it developed. That just to point out how easily misunderstandings could arise within a critique. Because what I have explained is basically not changed by the fact that this principal opposition, which was already clearly included in my formulation, is particularly characterized. Because, my dear attendees, since there is of course an opposition, yes, a principal contradiction between what I have explained and Kantianism, I will never deny that.

I have never made a secret of the fact that, based on all my research results, I had to become an anti-Kantian. And what I have written in my “Truth and Science” and in my “Philosophy of Freedom” is, of course, to be taken as an examination of Kantianism based on years of effort. It is of little importance whether one says, perhaps with a somewhat imprecise expression, “Without the eye, there is no color,” as Schopenhauer actually said in various places, or whether one says, “Colors are not objective, but phenomena; the eye itself is a phenomenon.” Of course, that is all correct. And if one then goes on to say, “Without the sense of color, there would be no colors,” then one would really have to weave this into a critique, not just hint at it. Of course, all that is correct. And if one then goes on to say, “Without the sense of color, there would be no colors,” then one would really need to weave this into a critique not just in a suggestive way, but then one would need to go into great detail about how to characterize what is called the sense of color. For in my opinion, the transition to the sense of color, as soon as one wants to arrive at clear, sharply contoured concepts, is very mystical. Kantianism becomes a rather nebulous mysticism for me. And in the newer epistemology, Kantianism has become a nebulous mysticism for me in many ways. It would be more fruitful, ladies and gentlemen, to discuss the things that I have actually presented in the lecture. Because to pick out one thing from my “Philosophy of Freedom” is virtually impossible. This sentence stands in the middle of a long development. It is impossible to grasp its meaning without this long development.

When I say that one should not assume any limits to knowledge, it must be borne in mind that the meaning of this sentence emerges from the whole argument. This sentence can be understood in the most diverse ways. It can be understood in such a way that one does not initially speak of fundamental limits to knowledge, as do du Bois-Reymond in his Ignorabimus or as certain representatives of Kantianism do. But it can also be understood in such a way that one does not set any limits to research, but sees research as an [asymptotic] approximation to truth, so that one should not speak of limits to knowledge in order not to hinder the progress of research.

I don't want to try your patience too much by going into all the quotes from my writings, because that would take a really long time. I could only pick out certain things from the whole range of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, and, you see, you have to start with certain things with a certain understanding. It seems to me that it is not acceptable to formulate the contrast between anthroposophy and mysticism so sharply, not only defining it so sharply, but also showing how anthroposophy can be used to avoid the danger of going astray into nebulous mysticism. It is not acceptable to describe anthroposophy as mysticism by means of pure definition. You can do that if you have made a definition of mysticism and subsumed everything that does not belong in that which you want to accept. But the progressive path of knowledge must be allowed to go beyond given definitions; you will also find in my “Philosophy of Freedom” that there is no need to rethink Kantianism. It has been considered from all sides precisely by these considerations, which I have tried to employ in my “Philosophy of Freedom”.

Today, after I have passed my sixtieth year, it makes a strange impression on me when I am given the advice that I should consider Kantianism. As a fifteen-year-old schoolboy, because I didn't like my history teacher, I stapled the then-published edition of the Critique of Pure Reason into my school notebooks so that I could read Kant while the teacher was teaching history. Since that time, I have been studying Kant and I have followed this advice, given from various sides, to thoroughly consider Kantianism. That was forty-four years ago. If the admonition had not come at this point in Kantianism, with regard to which I want to confess that I am somewhat sensitive, I would not have kept you these few minutes with this purely personal matter, because that is what it is. Otherwise, I would have liked to have been mindful of the fact that I was speaking here only as a guest and therefore should have behaved as a guest. Perhaps I have already gone beyond what is necessary here by making this latter personal remark. But sometimes the personal is necessarily connected with the objective and may then be permitted as personal.

I would just like to have this mentioned for the reason that too little has actually been said about my lecture, and more of what has been formulated by me in completely different contexts has been criticized, which I find very understandable; for anyone who has been involved with Kantianism for forty-four years also understands the enthusiasm for Kant's critique of reason, for Kantian idealism; understands how one can speak of the “thing in itself”. I also appreciate all the objections that have just been raised, and I thank your chair for them. I don't want to bother you any further, but I would ask that what I actually presented in my lecture today be examined more closely.

Leo Polak: If I have perhaps given rise to misunderstandings in my words, I am happy to acknowledge my error. I see that there has also been constant talk here of further development, which I read in my notes as “expansion” of the power of remembrance. If, as the speaker himself says, he does not mean an extension, but something fundamentally new, then we fully agree on this point. And I have also given the reason why it would be unfeasible for me to go into these positive statements in more detail: because I lack all knowledge in this area. I can only say: I do not possess this ability of clairvoyance and therefore do not talk about something I do not know.

And if I might have been a little immodest again in the formulation of my advice, where it appears as if I am telling an older thinker and writer to consider this or that, I did not say he should study Kantianism; I know his work and know what he thinks about it. But he should reconsider his one argument against Kantianism – eyes, colors, sense of color – and I must stick to that. I know that Dr. Steiner has studied Kantianism, has read Kant, and so on; I simply wanted to state that in a sense he would have remained on the outside. Perhaps I am allowed to say one more thing, a saying that was not made this evening either, but that was taken from another book, “Philosophy and Theosophy”, the essay that deals with the relationship between these two, which says that Kant can only imagine a “thing in itself” in material terms, however grotesque it may sound. Therefore, I also understand why Dr. Steiner must deny the “thing in itself” if he thinks that the “thing in itself” must be imagined materially. This “thing in itself” would then be an “un-thing in itself”.

Rudolf Steiner: That is not there.

Leo Polak: Dr. Steiner says it is not there. Here it is!

Rudolf Steiner: You have the translation there. Then the sentence has been mistranslated. It doesn't mean that I refute Kant, that he could only imagine the “thing in itself” materially, but that I find that the “thing in itself”, if you want to imagine it impartially, could be imagined materially. This is not an objection that I am making, but one that many have already made, that the Kantian definition of the “thing in itself” does not exclude a material conception.

Leo Polak: Now this is the fundamental opposition of the whole of Kantianism to this doctrine, that Kant has shown by all means of epistemology and criticism, at any rate, that the “thing in itself”, whatever qualities it may have in addition , can only be in principle and fundamentally non-sensuous, supersensuous; that sensuous qualities are only the sense-thing, that is, the phenomenon. So if I also agree with Dr. Steiner, then so much the better. Then he will see that what he calls the supersensible world is not so far removed from what Kant says, only that Kant does not have a faculty of vindication. I think I have explained why I cannot go into Dr. Steiner's positive assertions: because I am a layman in that field, and that was the first commandment of spiritual science: one should not speak of what one does not understand. And if we can all finally agree that we want to understand and comprehend the world only with the means that the spirit provides us with — as Dr. Steiner ultimately also wants to do, even if he says that one can further develop the powers —, and if we want to understand the world with the spiritual powers that everyone feels within, and if we take as a point of reference, just as Kantianism does with all of critical philosophy, and just as Dr. Steiner does — I grant myself the concession of emphasizing, in a conciliatory way, that we agree — if one no longer, as a past period of science did, regards the objective, the material, the mechanical as the primary and original given, but rather, emphasizing the ego, the ego experience, the psychic, the inner life itself, and seeing, recognizing and knowing it as the primary, the founding, the starting and secure point of all science, then I believe that, marching separately, one can still beat unitedly the forces of of ignorance, of superstition and of enthusiastic mysticism, which, as I was pleased to hear, Dr. Steiner also regards as an opponent; marching separately, but unitedly overcoming these black forces of ignorance and superstition in order to achieve some light, some understanding, some insight, some comprehension. In this happy hope we want to agree and finally thank Dr. Steiner with all our hearts for what he has given with all his conviction after a long life of so many years as the result of his research. That it does not agree with our results, with the results of our research and others, that we object to in principle, I have considered it my duty not to keep to myself. Even if Dr. Steiner is a guest, I have not taken this into account and neither has Dr. Steiner. Even if the guests are friends, [gap in the text].