6. Anthroposophy and Agnosticism

When someone writes down the word “table”, they have details. They try to combine the individual letters into a word. They read. They would start the wrong activity if they said: T, and then had to assume that processes were taking place that combined the T. Then the i. Thus he who, in following an inner law of thought, penetrates the sensory tapestry with his thoughts, instead of reading in the sensory world, exempts himself from having to do so. One penetrates the sensory world and puts forward hypotheses, which is not to say anything against phenomenal atomism. Some people in the present are well aware that there must be a pure phenomenalism. That is simply the direction in which natural science is tending. The natural scientists themselves, after all, are more concerned with experimenting and observing than with reflecting on the methods. Therefore, one cannot really blame them when all kinds of constructs are added to the phenomena. Then they believe they have facts in these constructs. But certain philosophical minds feel that it must come to pure phenomenalism. In particular, among Western thinkers – in the East it is quite different – we often have such personalities who see clearly that the science of the external world must ultimately come to a pure grasp of phenomena and use thinking only to allow the phenomena to interpret themselves reciprocally. “All fact is already theory,” says Goethe. And in William James, the American who established pragmatism, a philosophical interpreter arose in response to pragmatism. In Europe, he has emerged somewhat more blatantly in the so-called “as-if philosophy,” where it is said that one should not interpret anything into the phenomenon. But one must still ascend to something that is no longer an appearance, so one does not say of what arises: it is there, but one acts as if it were there. Much clearer than this “as-if philosophy” is that of William James, who actually gives up any substantial effect of the power of thought. He is clear about the fact that with thinking one can only group external facts and come to a point where one can then control these external facts in practice in the service of human development, of civilization. So that he actually sees nothing in all the laws that man penetrates to but practical guidelines, so to speak, for getting along with the world.