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
Voluntarism can as little be called scientific as can Mysticism. For
both assert that the conceptual interpretation of the world is
inadequate. Both demand, in addition to a principle of being which is
ideal, also a principle which is real. But as perception is our only
means of apprehending these so-called real principles, the assertion
of Mysticism and Voluntarism coincides with the view that we have
two sources of knowledge, viz., thought and perception, the latter
finding individual expression as will and feeling. Since the immediate
experiences which flow from the one source cannot be directly absorbed
into the thoughts which flow from the other, perception (immediate
experience) and thought remain side by side, without any higher
form of experience to mediate between them. Beside the conceptual
principle to which we attain by means of knowledge, there is also
a real principle which must be immediately experienced. In other
words, Mysticism and Voluntarism are both forms of Naïve Realism,
because they subscribe to the doctrine that the immediately perceived
(experienced) is real. Compared with Naïve Realism in its primitive
form, they are guilty of the yet further inconsistency of accepting
one definite form of perception (feeling, respectively will) as the
exclusive means of knowing reality. Yet they can do this only so
long as they cling to the general principle that everything that is
perceived is real. They ought, therefore, to attach an equal value
to external perception for purposes of knowledge.
Voluntarism turns into Metaphysical Realism, when it asserts the
existence of will also in those spheres of reality in which will can no
longer, as in the individual subject, be immediately experienced. It
assumes hypothetically that a principle holds outside subjective
experience, for the existence of which, nevertheless, subjective
experience is the sole criterion. As a form of Metaphysical Realism,
Voluntarism is open to the criticism developed in the preceding
chapter, a criticism which makes it necessary to overcome the
contradictory element in every form of Metaphysical Realism, and to
recognise that the will is a universal world-process only in so far
as it is ideally related to the rest of the world.
ADDITION TO THE REVISED EDITION (1918).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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