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
It is from a Dualism such as this that there arises the distinction
between the object of perception and the thing-in-itself, which
Kant introduced into philosophy, and which, to the present day, we
have not succeeded in expelling. According to our interpretation,
it is due to the nature of our organisation that a particular
object can be given to us only as a percept. Thought transcends this
particularity by assigning to each percept its proper place in the
world as a whole. As long as we determine the separate parts of the
cosmos as percepts, we are simply following, in this sorting out,
a law of our subjective constitution. If, however, we regard all
percepts, taken together, merely as one part, and contrast with this
a second part, viz., the things-in-themselves, then our philosophy
is building castles-in-the-air. We are then engaged in mere playing
with concepts. We construct an artificial opposition, but we can find
no content for the second of these opposites, seeing that no content
for a particular thing can be found except in perception.
Every kind of reality which is assumed to exist outside the sphere of
perception and conception must be relegated to the limbo of unverified
hypotheses. To this category belongs the "thing-in-itself." It
is, of course, quite natural that a Dualistic thinker should be
unable to find the connection between the world-principle which he
hypothetically assumes and the facts that are given in experience. For
the hypothetical world-principle itself a content can be found only
by borrowing it from experience and shutting one's eyes to the fact of
the borrowing. Otherwise it remains an empty and meaningless concept,
a mere form without content. In this case the Dualistic thinker
generally asserts that the content of this concept is inaccessible to
our knowledge. We can know only that such a content exists, but not
what it is. In either case it is impossible to transcend Dualism. Even
though one were to import a few abstract elements from the world of
experience into the content of the thing-in-itself, it would still
remain impossible to reduce the rich concrete life of experience
to those few elements, which are, after all, themselves taken from
experience. Du Bois-Reymond lays it down that the imperceptible
atoms of matter produce sensation and feeling by means of their
position and motion, and then infers from this premise that we
can never find a satisfactory explanation of how matter and motion
produce sensation and feeling, for "it is absolutely and for ever
unintelligible that it should be other than indifferent to a number
of atoms of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen, etc., how they lie and
move, how they lay or moved, or how they will lie and will move. It
is in no way intelligible how consciousness can come into existence
through their interaction." This conclusion is characteristic of the
whole tendency of this school of thought. Position and motion are
abstracted from the rich world of percepts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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