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 is the reason why he shifted to the second of the two ways,
indicated above, for the deduction of the Ego. Already in 1797,
in his Erste Einleitung in die Wissenschaftslehre, he recommends
self-observation as the right method for studying the Ego in its
true, original character. "Observe and watch thyself, turn thy
eye away from all that surrounds thee and look into thyself--this
is the first demand which philosophy makes upon its disciple. The
topic of our discourse, is, not anything outside thyself, but thyself
alone." [58] This introduction to the Theory of Science is, in truth,
in one way much superior to the other. For, self-observation does
not make us acquainted with the activity of the Ego one-sidedly in a
fixed direction. It exhibits that activity, not merely as affirming
its own existence, but as striving, in its many-sided development, to
comprehend by thinking the world-content which is immediately-given. To
self-observation, the Ego reveals itself as engaged in building up
its world-picture by the synthesis of the Given with concepts. But,
anyone who has not accompanied us in our line of thought above, and
who, consequently, does not know that the Ego can grasp the whole
content of reality only on condition of applying its Thought-Forms to
the Given, is liable to regard cognition as a mere process of spinning
the world out of the Ego itself. Hence, for Fichte the world-picture
tends increasingly to become a construction of the Ego. He emphasises
more and more that the main point in the Wissenschaftslehre is to
awaken the sense which is able to watch the Ego in this constructing
of its world. He who is able thus to watch stands, for Fichte, on a
higher level of knowledge than he who has eyes only for the finished
construct, the ready-made world. If we fix our eyes only on the world
of objects, we fail to perceive that, but for the creative activity
of the Ego, that world would not exist. If, on the other hand,
we watch the Ego in its constructive activity, we understand the
ground of the finished world-picture. We know how it has come to be
what it is. We understand it as the conclusion for which we have the
premises. The ordinary consciousness sees only what has been affirmed,
what has been determined thus or thus. It lacks the insight into the
premises, into the grounds why an affirmation is just as it is and not
otherwise. To mediate the knowledge of these premises is, according
to Fichte, the task of a wholly new sense. This is expressed most
clearly in the Einleitungsvorlesungen in die Wissenschaftslehre. [59]
"My theory presupposes a wholly novel inward sense-organ, by means
of which a new world is given which does not exist for the ordinary
man at all." Or, again, "The world of this novel sense, and thereby
this sense itself, are hereby for the present clearly determined: it
is the world in which we see the premises on which is grounded the
judgment, 'Something exists'; it is the ground of existence which,
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