With disciplined observation and patient repetition, we can create space for another living being in our own inner life. This “thinking with the eyes” is the basis of a science that does justice to the constantly evolving living world.
Imagine that you live in a world in which luminous clouds continuously weave sometimes dense, sometimes less dense structures; a world in which sounds from distant beings resound, and every plant is accompanied by attentive, bustling creatures. Once you got used to it, you could cope with it. But it would still be disconcerting to discover that the people around you only speak about a fraction of the things you see: only the few solid phenomena that are accessible to the senses. This is how Rudolf Steiner must have felt as a young man. Understandably, he followed everything people told him with great attention and curiosity, but they gave him no clues to the spiritual world that stood before him as a matter of course. It seemed to him, intuitively, that mathematical thinking and the exactness of geometry could be a model for a way of thinking that, free of sensory impressions, came close to the essence of natural phenomena. He received the presentations of school lessons dreamily. He only wakefully experienced what he himself performed, like the precise geometric drawings he made on Sundays, or what he actively engaged in.
He began to observe the way other people thought. He wanted to find out how they assessed the potential of thinking and how they interpreted the spiritual phenomena that he took for granted. The young Steiner used Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as a guide to gain confidence in his own thinking by practicing moving from simple, manageable concepts to ideas about nature. To be able to grasp the living spiritual perceptions in his soul in comprehensible and communicable thoughts, it seemed crucial to him that he establish a secure intellectual relationship to the essence of external nature. Real knowledge only seemed possible to him if he started from the activity of his own ‘I’, in which he saw the irrefutable experience of a spiritual being. This is why Fichte became a kindred spirit whose Wissenschaftslehre [Theory of Science] was worth rewriting. In this process, it became increasingly clear to Steiner that with this ‘I’, which could consciously observe its own previous thought activity, he had grasped a pivotal point of his worldview: in the activity of the ‘I’, which can see through its thought process with transparent clarity precisely because it is entirely its own, spiritual reality seemed to be instantly vouchsafed. This certainty also lent his other inner perceptions the character of reality.
Based on such experiences, he located true reality in the world of ideas—that which manifests in the sensory world and is accessible to every person in their inner being as a reflection of the spiritual.1 Then he wanted to show that by observing their own thinking, people can gain conscious access to the cosmos of ideas and thus be free. Everyone can set and pursue their own goals in freedom, independent of external laws.2
Goethe’s way of exploring nature led the young Steiner to a new level of cognition. The way Goethe built up a whole series of experiments on the same subject or observed hundreds of plant specimens in their development increasingly shaped the young Steiner’s style of perception and thinking. For him, the transformation of phenomena revealed the creative forces that he was able to observe alongside the sensory appearances. How comforting that Goethe did not attribute these different ways of “seeing” to a fundamental difference between sensory and spiritual perception, but saw a transition between the two. A kindred spirit had been found in Goethe, at last! Goethe demanded that scientists use their thinking solely to classify the many visible expressions of whatever they were investigating, without judgment, and that they allow themselves to be transformed by things in the process. Through disciplined observation and patient repetition, it is possible to create space in one’s own inner life for another living being to present itself in its dynamics. This “thinking with the eyes” is the basis of a science that does justice to the constantly evolving processes in living things.
After many years of inner observation of the spiritual world, Rudolf Steiner’s interest in sensory perception awoke. Could immersion in the details of a sensorially perceived object reveal what the soul could not discover in any other way?3 Did Steiner recognize what Maurice Merleau-Ponty went on to formulate in the 20th century? Merleau-Ponty described the activity of perception as a situation in which our body merges with a given. This is not intellectual judgment or a conscious act, but an involuntary “scan” or “walk along” in which specific contours are picked out from a wealth of changing impressions. Sensory perception gives us the certainty that its reality is irrefutably guaranteed before any separation into “subject” and “object,” and it gives us the place where this reality takes place—namely, inside or outside our consciousness. We know whether we are experiencing a sense perception or a hallucination. This is because we ourselves are part of this reality with our entire perceiving body. The paradox of perception is that as soon as we reflect on it and ask what “we,” what a “thing”, what a “perception” or what the “world” is, we become entangled in a labyrinth of contradictions.4
In the middle of his life, Steiner found his way to a philosophy of sensory experience of reality: that in perception we have access to the whole world, in which the visible is closely interwoven with the invisible.5 Only perception gives us the fullness of the particular—the uniqueness inherent in every concrete phenomenon. No detail is without significance for the whole: each lends it a different color, and we can experience the color changes with every observation we devote ourselves to.
At the end of his life, in a new edition of his early work, Grundlinien einer Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung [The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception], Steiner attributed equal importance to sensory and spiritual knowledge. Both types of knowledge require organs of observation—on one hand, the familiar sense organs, and on the other, the “lotus flowers” which have to be developed first, as soul organs. Both create reality in the act of cognition.6
This year, we bring you a series of articles titled “Rudolf Steiner as…” to honor the 100th anniversary of Rudolf Steiner’s death—sometimes an essay, sometimes simply a thought or reflection—always, an aspect of his being.
Translation Laura Liska
Footnotes
- Rudolf Steiner, Mein Lebensgang (1925) [The course of my life], Dornach 1975, Chapters II and III.
- Rudolf Steiner, Die Philosophie der Freiheit (GA 4) [The Philosophy of Freedom].
- Rudolf Steiner, Mein Lebensgang (1925) [The course of my life], Dornach 1975, Chapter XXII.
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Das Sichtbare und das Unsichtbare (1986) [The Visible and the Invisible], Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich 2004, pg 17f.
- Hans Rudolf Schweizer, Vom ursprünglichen Sinn der Ästhetik (1976) [On the original sense of aesthetics], Verlag Rolf Kugler, Oberwil-Zug (CH), pg. 7.
- Rudolf Steiner, Grundlinien einer Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung (1886) [The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception], Dornach 1999, pg. 137.
