AS we have seen, the formulation of a concept by way of thought is something that goes beyond mere observation. The “perceived object” is thus associated with an “ideal object” that remains even after the former is no longer seen, just as one’s failure to observe the motion of the second billiard ball as it is struck does not hinder one’s ability to speculate about the likely outcome. The second ball, regardless whether it is physically observed or not, is therefore an example of the “ideal object” that results from thinking.

Steiner considers ideas and concepts to be one and the same thing, even though the former may be regarded as a more developed example of the conceptual process. Unlike with Hegel, who makes ideas and concepts into the foundation of his philosophy, Steiner believes that everything must begin with thought. Similarly, he disagrees with Herbert Spencer’s (1820-1903) claim that the mental process by which we first hear a sound and then witness the cause of a sound – which, in the Englishman’s example, was a partridge noisily emerging from a hedgerow – is how we perceive something. As Steiner demonstrates, this rather simplistic analysis is somewhat unsatisfactory:

When I hear a noise, my first demand is for the concept which fits this percept. Without this concept, the noise is to me a mere noise. Whoever does not reflect further, hears just the noise and is satisfied with that. But my thought makes it clear to me that the noise is to be regarded as an effect. Thus it is only when I combine the concept of effect with the percept of a noise that I am led to go beyond the particular percept and seek for its cause. The concept of “effect” calls up that of “cause,” and my next step is to look for the agent, which I find, say, in a partridge. (pp.33-34)

It is not perception that explains such a phenomenon, but the activity of thought to which it is conjoined.

Steiner now turns his attention to the origin of thought itself, i.e. the actual thinker who is doing the thinking. After all, it is he (or she) who adds conceptualisation to observation with the result that one’s consciousness in relation to an external object evolves into self-consciousness of the thinking subject. The thinker has transcended the initial stages of human perception in terms of contemplating the thought-process as something which, to use Steiner’s expression, “makes an object of itself as subject”.

Without thought, the thinker cannot differentiate himself from the objects he perceives and yet when the individual appears to apply a concept to a table lamp or bowl of oranges we should not assume that it is the subject which makes this possible but thought itself. Steiner elaborates:

The subject does not think because it is a subject, rather it conceives itself to be a subject because it can think. The activity of consciousness, in so far as it thinks, is thus not merely subjective. Rather it is neither subjective nor objective; it transcends both these concepts. I ought never to say that I, as an individual subject, think, but rather that I, as subject, exist myself by the grace of thought. Thought thus takes me out of myself and relates me to objects. At the same time it separates me from them, inasmuch as I, as subject, am set over against the objects. (p.34)

The categories of “subject” and “object” are therefore presented as purely conceptual devices with no real basis in reality, something Steiner had inherited from the German Romantic philosophy of Schelling, Hegel and various other Absolute Idealists.

Steiner is also interested in the way a perceived object enters into dialogue with thought. Prior to the application of thought itself an individual is clearly prone to the immense array of sense-datum that is provided by the five organs of sight, sound, touch, taste and smell, but soon begins to form concepts about the possible interconnections that exist between one object and another. As for the relationship between sensory information and the conscious subject, Steiner applies to the former the term “percepts” in order to differentiate it from perception. In other words, to merely perceive something it is not the same as the actual object of the process itself. This latter, of course, involves gaining direct knowledge of our thought-processes.

Steiner’s subtle interpretation of percepts relies – like all men and women who require their five senses to function normally – on being able to extract a “mathematical” and “qualitative” analysis from an observation and this is something that is necessarily subjective:

The recognition of the subjective character of our percepts may easily lead us to doubt whether there is any objective basis for them at all. When we know that a percept, e.g., that of a red colour or of a certain tone, is not possible without a specific structure of our organism, we may easily be led to believe that it has no being at all apart from our subjective organisation, that it has no kind of existence apart from the act of perceiving of which it is the object. (p.36)

The origins of this theory lie with the Anglo-Irish philosopher, George Berkeley (1685-1753), who stated that once we become aware of the subjective nature of the perceptive process we begin to doubt the existence of anything other than the conscious mind. Steiner, however, contends that to entertain such a view inevitably means that once you remove the act of perceiving nothing remains of the percept. On the contrary, he says, things do exist independently of perception in the sense that an object is based on a number of percepts that have been associated with one another:

If we follow this view to its logical conclusion, we are led to the assertion that the objects of my perceptions exist only through me, and only in as far as, and as long as, I perceive them. They disappear with my perceiving and have no meaning apart from it. Apart from my percepts I know of no objects and cannot know of any. (p.37)

Steiner’s own position rests on the view that we are nonetheless aware of the role of a percept as it is being perceived and, thus, aware of its nature.

On the other hand, being conscious of oneself as the thinking subject means actively pinpointing something permanent amid the endless comings-and-goings of percepts and conceptualisations. After one becomes aware of an object, one also becomes aware of the self observing the object and this leads to the formulation of an idea in relation to the object itself:

I should never have occasion to talk of ideas, were I not aware of my own Self. Percepts would come and go; I should let them slip by. It is only because I am aware of my Self, and observe that with each perception the content of the Self is changed, that I am compelled to connect the perception of the object with the changes in the content of my Self, and to speak of having an idea. (p.38)

The process involving the manner in which the self is changed by an object, Steiner informs his readers, is discussed to the extent that it completely overshadows the more important matter of how the object manages to facilitate this change. An argument that was popular at the time Steiner was writing The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity insists that one knows nothing of the object that one perceives, only that there is an awareness of having been affected. In other words, that we are merely conscious of our own ideas.

This is the Kantian notion that our knowledge of the world is based purely on our conceptualisations of external objects and that the objects are not really the “things-in-themselves” and therefore remain beyond the realms of human comprehension:

What is here put forward as an immediate and self-evident truth is, in reality, the conclusion of a piece of argument which runs as follows. Naïve common sense believes that things, just as we perceive them, exist also outside our minds. Physics, Physiology, and Psychology, however, teach us that our percepts are dependent on our organisation, and that therefore we cannot know anything about external objects except what our organisation transmits to us. The objects which we perceive are thus modifications of our organisation, not things-in-themselves. (p.39)

As far as Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) himself was concerned, the world has a dual nature. The first aspect, the phenomenal, is comprised of everything we actually know about it through empirical investigation, whilst the second, the noumenal, is an unknowable dimension that is nonetheless crucial for the application of moral law and practical action. As far as his critics are concerned, whilst it is perfectly acceptable for there to be a realm in which scientific and philosophical knowledge are recognisably apparent, the second notion implies that there is a comparatively more mystical and ethical dimension that can only be accessed through intuition. Indeed, even the idea of moral law is anathema to many people and yet Kant strongly believed that it helps to complement the rational side of our nature.

Freedom, according to Kant, is located outside of the phenomenal realm and its presence within the noumenal allows us – given that we acquire the ability to access it – to fulfil a practical necessity. This, inevitably, opened the door to metaphysics and the idea of a meeting between the philosophical and the spiritual. The only way to make use of the noumenal, Kant argued, is to actually suspend what the phenomenal tells us about more abstract factors such as being, knowing, identity, time and space.

The Kantian would argue that when we smell a pleasant odour or experience the sensation of heat, that which Steiner calls percepts simply rely on what our biological organisation is telling us. For example, the vibrations we know as “sound” or the nerve fibres that detect “cold” are considered to be a subjective reaction to events happening in the external world. Put simply, sense-datum only tells us about the state of our own bodies and not about the “things-in-themselves”. They do not provide us with knowledge of the external world, therefore, but merely determine our percepts. This has a basis in science, too, and physiology has shown that

there can be no direct knowledge even of the effects which objects produce on our sense-organs. Through his study of the processes which occur in our own bodies, the physiologist finds that, even in the sense-organs, the effects of the external process are modified in the most diverse ways. We can see this most clearly in the case of eye and ear. Both are very complicated organs which modify the external stimulus considerably, before they conduct it to the corresponding nerve. From the peripheral end of the nerve the modified stimulus is then conducted to the brain. Here the central organs must in turn be stimulated. The conclusion is, therefore, drawn that the external process undergoes a series of transformations before it reaches consciousness. (p.40)

This is akin to receiving second-hand information that appears in the consciousness in the form of sensations, so concepts such as “hot” and “cold” have nothing whatsoever in common with the actual processes that take place in the brain as a reaction to external stimuli. This, Steiner discovered in Eduard von Hartmann’s 1889 work, Fundamental Problems of Epistemology, in which it is claimed that the subject receives nothing more than “modifications of his own physical states”.

Meanwhile, Steiner himself is of the opinion that when we receive these sensations by way of the five senses they already represent a cohesive unity of the processes which have shaped them. This amalgamation, he suggests, is directly attributable to the soul and has the effect of transforming the sensation that enters our consciousness into “primary datum”. At the same time, the external stimuli which began the entire process is “lost” as it makes its way to the brain and from there to the soul.

Despite outlining some of its main precepts, Steiner is committed to a full dismantling of the Kantian theory of Transcendental Idealism – or what he terms “Critical Idealism” – and its view that one’s experience of objects is based on how they appear to us in the form of representations, rather than as they really are both in and of themselves:

For as soon as I see clearly that my sense-organs and their activity, my nerve- and soul-processes, can also be known to me only through perception, the argument which I have outlined reveals itself in its full absurdity. It is quite true that I can have no percept without the corresponding sense-organ. But just as little can I be aware of a sense-organ without perception. From the percept of a table I can pass to the eye which sees it, or the nerves in the skin which touches it, but what takes place in these I can, in turn, learn only from perception. And then I soon perceive that there is no trace of similarity between the process which takes place in the eye and the colour which I see. I cannot get rid of colour sensations by pointing to the process which takes place in the eye whilst I perceive a colour. No more can I re-discover the colour in the nerve- or brain-processes. I only add a new percept, localised within the organism, to the first percept which the naïve man localises outside of his organism. I only pass from one percept to another. (p.41)

Critical Idealism, from the Steinerian perspective, makes the error of assuming that sensations such as “sweetness” or “warmth” are but modifications of the ideas “tongue” and “hand” respectively. The theory of percepts, as formulated by the Austrian himself, cannot be reconciled with Critical Idealism on the basis that it allows no room for what he regards as their “objective character”.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), too, comes in for a degree of criticism as a result of declaring in his 1818 The World as Will and Representation that the world itself is nothing more than an idea that mankind brings into consciousness. Indeed, Schopenhauer was adamant that external objects such as the sun and moon do not exist in any tangible form and that what we see around us is merely the result of that which comes to us in the form of sense-datum. In other worlds, that the universe is just a concept that is known only through the five-fold media of hand, eye, tongue, ear and nose. Needless to say, Steiner strongly disagrees on account of the fact that the organs that collect such data are themselves percepts:

Using Schopenhauer’s vocabulary in his own sense, I might maintain against him that my eye which sees the sun, and my hand which feels the earth, are my ideas just like the sun and the earth themselves. That, put in this way, the whole theory cancels itself, is clear without further argument. For only my real eye and my real hand, but not my ideas “eye” and “hand,” could own the ideas “sun” and “earth” as modifications. Yet it is only in terms of these ideas that Critical Idealism has the right to speak. (p.43)

This philosophical failure to connect percept with “idea” leads Steiner to search for another means of acquiring knowledge about the world.