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
We need to be absolutely clear that this creative activity must, in
its turn, be given to us in all its immediacy. No inferences must be
required in order to know that it occurs. Thence it follows, at once,
that sense-data do not meet our requirement. For, the fact that they
do not occur without our activity is known to us, not immediately,
but as an inference from physical and physiological arguments. On the
other hand, we do know immediately that it is only in and through the
cognitive act that concepts and ideas enter into the sphere of the
Immediately-Given. Hence, no one is deceived concerning the character
of concepts and ideas. It is possible to mistake a hallucination for an
object given from without, but no one is ever likely to believe that
his concepts are given without the activity of his own thinking. A
lunatic will regard as real, though they are in fact unreal, only
things and relations which have attached to them the predicate of
"actuality," but he will never say of his concepts and ideas that they
have come into the world without his activity. Everything else in our
world-picture is such that it must be given, if it is to be experienced
by us. Only of our concepts and ideas is the opposite true: they must
be produced by us, if they are to be experienced. They, and only they,
are given in a way which might be called intellectual intuition. Kant
and the modern philosophers who follow him deny altogether that man
possesses this kind of intuition, on the ground that all our thinking
refers solely to objects and is absolutely impotent to produce anything
out of itself, whereas in intellectual intuition form and matter must
be given together. But, is not precisely this actually the case with
pure concepts and ideas? [48] To see this, we must consider them purely
in the form in which, as yet, they are quite free from all empirical
content. In order, e.g., to comprehend the pure concept of causality,
we must go, not to a particular instance of causality nor to the sum
of all instances, but to the pure concept itself. Particular causes
and effects must be discovered by investigation in the world, but
causality as a Form of Thought must be created by ourselves before we
can discover causes in the world. If we hold fast to Kant's thesis
that concepts without percepts are empty, it becomes unintelligible
how the determination of the Given by concepts is to be possible. For,
suppose there are given two items of the world-content, a and b. In
order to find a relation between them, I must be guided in my search
by a rule of determinate content. Such a rule I can only create in the
act of cognition itself. I cannot derive it from the object, because
it is only with the help of the rule that the object is to receive
its determinations. Such a rule, therefore, for the determination of
the real has its being wholly in purely conceptual form.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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