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
Thought contributes this content to the percept from the world of
concepts and ideas. In contrast with the content of perception which
is given to us from without, the content of thought appears within
our minds. The form in which thought first appears in consciousness
we will call "intuition." Intuition is to thoughts what observation
is to percepts. Intuition and observation are the sources of our
knowledge. An external object which we observe remains unintelligible
to us, until the corresponding intuition arises within us which adds
to the reality those sides of it which are lacking in the percept. To
anyone who is incapable of supplying the relevant intuitions,
the full nature of the real remains a sealed book. Just as the
colour-blind person sees only differences of brightness without
any colour qualities, so the mind which lacks intuition sees only
disconnected fragments of percepts.
To explain a thing, to make it intelligible, means nothing else than to
place it in the context from which it has been torn by the peculiar
organisation of our minds, described above. Nothing can possibly
exist cut off from the universe. Hence all isolation of objects has
only subjective validity for minds organised like ours. For us the
universe is split up into above and below, before and after, cause
and effect, object and idea, matter and force, object and subject,
etc. The objects which, in observation, appear to us as separate,
become combined, bit by bit, through the coherent, unified system
of our intuitions. By thought we fuse again into one whole all that
perception has separated.
An object presents riddles to our understanding so long as it exists
in isolation. But this is an abstraction of our own making and can
be unmade again in the world of concepts.
Except through thought and perception nothing is given to us
directly. The question now arises as to the interpretation of percepts
on our theory. We have learnt that the proof which Critical Idealism
offers for the subjective nature of percepts collapses. But the
exhibition of the falsity of the proof is not, by itself, sufficient
to show that the doctrine itself is an error. Critical Idealism does
not base its proof on the absolute nature of thought, but relies on the
argument that Naïve Realism, when followed to its logical conclusion,
contradicts itself. How does the matter appear when we recognise the
absoluteness of thought?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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