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
Let us assume that a certain percept, e.g., red, appears in
consciousness. To continued observation, the percept shows itself to
be connected with other percepts, e.g., a certain figure, temperature,
and touch-qualities. This complex of percepts I call an object in
the world of sense. I can now ask myself: Over and above the percepts
just mentioned, what else is there in the section of space in which
they are? I shall then find mechanical, chemical, and other processes
in that section of space. I next go further and study the processes
which take place between the object and my sense-organs. I shall
find oscillations in an elastic medium, the character of which has
not the least in common with the percepts from which I started. I
get the same result if I trace further the connection between
sense-organs and brain. In each of these inquiries I gather new
percepts, but the connecting thread which binds all these spatially
and temporally separated percepts into one whole, is thought. The air
vibrations which carry sound are given to me as percepts just like
the sound. Thought alone links all these percepts one to the other
and exhibits them in their reciprocal relations. We have no right
to say that over and above our immediate percepts there is anything
except the ideal nexus of precepts (which thought has to reveal). The
relation of the object perceived to the perceiving subject, which
relation transcends the bare percept, is therefore purely ideal,
i.e., capable of being expressed only through concepts. Only if it
were possible to perceive how the object of perception affects the
perceiving subject, or, alternatively, only if I could watch the
construction of the perceptual complex through the subject, could we
speak as modern Physiology, and the Critical Idealism which is based
on it, speak. Their theory confuses an ideal relation (that of the
object to the subject) with a process of which we could speak only if
it were possible to perceive it. The proposition, "No colour without
a colour-sensing eye," cannot be taken to mean that the eye produces
the colour, but only that an ideal relation, recognisable by thought,
subsists between the percept "colour" and the percept "eye."
To empirical science belongs the task of ascertaining how the
properties of the eye and those of the colours are related to one
another; by means of what structures the organ of sight makes possible
the perception of colours, etc. I can trace how one percept succeeds
another and how one is related to others in space, and I can formulate
these relations in conceptual terms, but I can never perceive how a
percept originates out of the non-perceptible. All attempts to seek
any relations between percepts other than conceptual relations must
of necessity fail.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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