The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity: A Modern Philosophy of Life Developed by Scientific MethodsSteiner, Rudolf
Religion
The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity: A Modern Philosophy of Life Developed by Scientific Methods
Steiner, Rudolf
Anthroposophy; Free will and determinism; Knowledge, Theory of; Life
This feeling makes us strive to bridge over this opposition,
and ultimately the whole spiritual striving of mankind is nothing
but the bridging of this opposition. The history of our spiritual
life is a continuous seeking after union between ourselves and the
world. Religion, Art, and Science follow, one and all, this goal. The
religious man seeks in the revelation, which God grants him, the
solution of the world problem, which his Self, dissatisfied with
the world of mere phenomena, sets him as a task. The artist seeks to
embody in his material the ideas which are his Self, that he may thus
reconcile the spirit which lives within him and the outer world. He,
too, feels dissatisfied with the world of mere appearances, and
seeks to mould into it that something more which his Self supplies
and which transcends appearances. The thinker searches for the laws
of phenomena. He strives to master by thought what he experiences
by observation. Only when we have transformed the world-content
into our thought-content do we recapture the connection which we
had ourselves broken off. We shall see later that this goal can be
reached only if we penetrate much more deeply than is often done into
the nature of the scientist's problem. The whole situation, as I have
here stated it, meets us, on the stage of history, in the conflict
between the one-world theory, or Monism, and the two-world theory,
or Dualism. Dualism pays attention only to the separation between
the Self and the World, which the consciousness of man has brought
about. All its efforts consist in a vain struggle to reconcile these
opposites, which it calls now Mind and Matter, now Subject and Object,
now Thought and Appearance. The Dualist feels that there must be
a bridge between the two worlds, but is not able to find it. In so
far as man is aware of himself as "I," he cannot but put down this
"I" in thought on the side of Spirit; and in opposing to this "I"
the world, he is bound to reckon on the world's side the realm of
percepts given to the senses, i.e., the Material World. In doing so,
man assigns a position to himself within this very antithesis of
Spirit and Matter. He is the more compelled to do so because his own
body belongs to the Material World. Thus the "I," or Ego, belongs as a
part to the realm of Spirit; the material objects and processes which
are perceived by the senses belong to the "World." All the riddles
which belong to Spirit and Matter, man must inevitably rediscover in
the fundamental riddle of his own nature. Monism pays attention only
to the unity and tries either to deny or to slur over the opposites,
present though they are. Neither of these two points of view can
satisfy us, for they do not do justice to the facts. The Dualist
sees in Mind (Self) and Matter (World) two essentially different
entities, and cannot therefore understand how they can interact with
one another. How should Mind be aware of what goes on in Matter,
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