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
To this kind of Critical Idealist the whole world seems a chaotic
dream, in the face of which all striving for knowledge is simply
meaningless. For him there can be only two sorts of men: (1) victims
of the illusion that the dreams they have woven themselves are real
things, and (2) wise men who see through the nothingness of this
dream world, and who gradually lose all desire to trouble themselves
further about it. From this point of view, even one's own personality
may become a mere dream phantom. Just as during sleep there appears
among my dream-images an image of myself, so in waking consciousness
the idea of my own Self is added to the idea of the outer world. I have
then given to me in consciousness, not my real Self, but only my idea
of my Self. Whoever denies that things exist, or, at least, that we
can know anything of them, must also deny the existence, respectively
the knowledge, of one's own personality. This is how the Critical
Idealist comes to maintain that "All reality transforms itself into
a wonderful dream, without a life which is the object of the dream,
and without a mind which has the dream; into a dream which is nothing
but a dream of itself." (Cp. Fichte, Die Bestimmung des Menschen.)
Whether he who believes that he recognises immediate experience to
be a dream, postulates nothing behind this dream, or whether he
relates his ideas to actual things, is immaterial. In both cases
life itself must lose all scientific interest for him. However,
whereas for those who believe that the whole of accessible reality
is exhausted in dreams, all science is an absurdity, for those who
feel compelled to argue from ideas to things, science consists in
studying these things-in-themselves. The first of these theories of
the world may be called Absolute Illusionism, the second is called
Transcendental Realism [2] by its most rigorously logical exponent,
Eduard von Hartmann.
These two points of view have this in common with Naïve Realism, that
they seek to gain a footing in the world by means of an analysis of
percepts. Within this sphere, however, they are unable to find any
stable point.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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