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
From the epistemological point of view, error can occur only within
the sphere of cognitive activity. An illusion of the senses is no
error. The fact that the rising moon appears to us bigger than the
moon overhead is not an error, but a phenomenon fully explained by the
laws of nature. An error would result only, if thought, in ordering
the data of perception, were to put a false interpretation on the
"bigger" or "smaller" size of the moon. But such an interpretation
would lie within the sphere of cognitive activity.
If knowledge is really to be understood in its essential nature,
we must, without doubt, begin our study of it at the point where
it originates, where it starts. Moreover, it is clear that whatever
precedes its starting-point has no legitimate place in any explanatory
Theory of Knowledge, but must simply be taken for granted. It is
the task of science, in its several branches, to study the essential
nature of all that we are here taking for granted. Our aim, here, is
not to acquire specific knowledge of this or that, but to investigate
knowledge as such. We must first understand the act of cognition,
before we can judge what significance to attach to the affirmations
about the content of the world which come to be made in the process
of getting to know that content.
For this reason, we abstain from every attempt to determine what is
immediately-given, so long as we are ignorant of the relation of our
determinations to what is determined by them. Not even the concept of
the "immediately-given" affirms any positive determination of what
precedes cognition. Its only purpose is to point towards the Given,
to direct our attention upon it. Here, at the starting-point of the
Theory of Knowledge, the term merely expresses, in conceptual form, the
initial relation of the cognitive activity to the world-content. The
choice of this term allows even for the case that the whole
world-content should turn out to be nothing but a figment of our own
"Ego," i.e., that the most extreme subjectivism should be right. For,
of course, subjectivism does not express a fact which is given. It can,
at best, be only the result of theoretical considerations. Its truth,
in other words, needs to be established by the Theory of Knowledge. It
cannot serve as the presupposition of that theory.
This immediately-given world-content includes everything which can
appear within the horizon of our experience, in the widest sense of
this term, viz., sensations, percepts, intuitions, feelings, volitions,
dreams, fancies, representations, concepts, ideas.
Illusions, too, and hallucinations stand at this level exactly on
a par with other elements of the world-content. Only theoretical
considerations can teach us in what relations illusions, etc., stand
to other percepts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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