VI. The Present State of Philosophy and Science

It is useful in any case to be familiar with at least that rigor that man can acquire through mathematical training. For everything that is legitimately produced in the field of spiritual science must, insofar as a thinking element is involved, be imbued with this rigorously disciplined thinking. This may disappear behind the facts, but anyone who produces in the field of spiritual science should be aware that this thinking should be in the background. Otherwise spiritual science will be something that can easily be trampled to death by those who live outside the spiritual. And we will not be able to say everywhere that there is bad will when we are not understood. In the field of spiritual science, it must become more and more apparent that we place the same demands on our own thinking as, one might say, the strictest mathematician places on himself. The fact that we have seerical research at our disposal will protect us from building mathematical structures into the wind, so to speak. I say this because there are also many arguments to be said against the building of Riemann's and Lobachevsky's geometry. I just wanted to characterize the desire for knowledge. But that it would be useful to be familiar with mathematical structures, I tried to show in my “Philosophy of Freedom”. There is a chapter in it that I would like to call “On the Lustwert of Life”. Until I had written this chapter on the pleasure value of life, there was much talk in philosophical circles of the pleasure balance of life, and one put the 'world of facts in such a way that, for my sake, all the pleasure of a life was summed up as an a and all the displeasure of the same life as a b, and the difference was called the pleasure balance, the excess of pleasure over displeasure. If you put pleasure and displeasure into a formula, you have chosen a difference, you have chosen what you can call the mathematical formula of subtraction. The important thing in that chapter is that I showed how it is impossible to summarize pleasure and displeasure in such a way that they are brought into a relationship of minuend and subtrahend. What you get out of it will never match real experience. I have shown that you only get the pleasure value if you do it this way: if you divide the a by the 5, then the quotient c gives you the pleasure value: