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 foregoing considerations it follows that it is impossible
to prove, by analysis of the content of our perceptions, that our
percepts are ideas. This is supposed to be proved by showing that, if
the process of perceiving takes place in the way in which we conceive
it in accordance with the naïve-realistic assumptions concerning the
psychological and physiological constitution of human individuals,
then we have to do, not with things themselves, but merely with our
ideas of things. Now, if Naïve Realism, when consistently thought
out, leads to results which directly contradict its presuppositions,
then these presuppositions must be discarded as unsuitable for the
foundation of a theory of the world. In any case, it is inadmissible
to reject the presuppositions and yet accept the consequences, as the
Critical Idealist does who bases his assertion that the world is my
idea on the line of argument indicated above. (Eduard von Hartmann
gives in his work Das Grundproblem der Erkenntnistheorie a full
account of this line of argument.)
The truth of Critical Idealism is one thing, the persuasiveness
of its proofs another. How it stands with the former, will appear
later in the course of our argument, but the persuasiveness of its
proofs is nil. If one builds a house, and the ground floor collapses
whilst the first floor is being built, then the first floor collapses
too. Naïve Realism and Critical Idealism are related to one another
like the ground floor to the first floor in this simile.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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