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
Suppose a being with fully-developed human intelligence were to
be suddenly created out of Nothing and confronted with the world,
the first impression made by the world on his senses and his thought
would be pretty much what we have here called the immediately-given
world-picture. Of course, no actual man at any moment of his life has
nothing but this original world-picture before him. In his mental
development there is nowhere a sharp line between pure, passive
reception of the Given from without and the cognitive apprehension of
it by Thought. This fact might suggest critical doubts concerning
our method of determining the starting-point of the Theory of
Knowledge. Thus, e.g., Eduard von Hartmann remarks: "We do not ask
what is the content of consciousness of a child just awakening to
conscious life, nor of an animal on the lowest rung of the ladder of
organisms. For, of these things philosophising man has no experience,
and, if he tries to reconstruct the content of consciousness of beings
on primitive biogenetic or ontogenetic levels, he cannot but base his
conclusions on his own personal experience. Hence, our first task is to
determine what is the content of consciousness which philosophising man
discovers in himself when he begins his philosophical reflection." [47]
But, the objection to this view is that the picture of the world
with which we begin philosophical reflection, is already qualified by
predicates which are the results solely of knowledge. We have no right
to accept these predicates without question. On the contrary, we must
carefully extract them from out of the world-picture, in order that
it may appear in its purity without any admixture due to the process
of cognition. In general, the dividing line between what is given
and what is added by cognition cannot be identified with any single
moment of human development, but must be drawn artificially. But this
can be done at every level of development, provided only we divide
correctly what is presented to us prior to cognition, without any
determination by thinking, from what is made of it by cognition.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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