THE fact that Critical Idealism views the perceptual world as an “ideal world” in which that which is unknown to us acts on the soul, means that the philosophy itself – which Steiner nonetheless describes as a “truth” – seems incapable of realising that our quest for knowledge should not concern the ideas present in the soul but, instead, be directed towards those things which which lie outside of our consciousness.

The fact that we cannot obtain this knowledge directly, means that it must be gleaned indirectly. This mean that the seeker must be

concerned, not with the connection of his conscious percepts with one another, but with their causes which transcend his consciousness and exist independently of him, whereas the percepts, on his view, disappear as soon as he turns his sense-organs away from the things themselves. Our consciousness, on this view, works like a mirror from which the pictures of definite things disappear the very moment its reflecting surface is not turned towards them. If, now, we do not see the things themselves, but only their reflections, we must obtain knowledge of the nature of the former indirectly by drawing conclusions from the character of the latter. (p.44)

There are some Idealists, Steiner reminds us, who consider those who pursue such knowledge to be deluded either on the basis that they are willing to accept a false reality or that they have seen through the illusion and withdrawn from the world entirely. However, to deny the existence of the world is to refute one’s own personality and this – from Steiner’s perspective – is the ultimate outcome of the German philosophy that was advanced by Fichte and others during the nineteenth century:

Whether he who believes that he recognises immediate experience to be a dream, postulates nothing behind this dream, or whether he relates his ideas to actual things, is immaterial. In both cases life itself must lose all scientific interest for him. However, whereas for those who believe that the whole of accessible reality is exhausted in dreams, all science is an absurdity, for those who feel compelled to argue from ideas to things, science consists in studying these things-in-themselves. The first of these theories of the world may be called Absolute Illusionism, the second is called Trans-cendental Realism by its most rigorously logical exponent, Eduard von Hartmann. (p.45)

The “transcendental” component comes into play when it is decided that nothing whatsoever can be known about “things-in-themselves” and that advancing indirect theories about them means having to go beyond the purely subjective. Transcendental realism, therefore, is the view that objects in space and time exist independently of our experience of them.

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Returning to the complex matter of thought, Steiner asks how it may be related to perception:

It makes no difference whether or not the percept, as given to me, has a continuous existence before and after I perceive it. If I want to assert anything whatever about it, I can do so only with the help of thought. When I assert that the world is my idea, I have enunciated the result of an act of thought, and if my thought is not applicable to the world, then my result is false. Between a percept and every kind of judgment about it there intervenes thought. (p.46)

As we discovered in Part Two, it is usually the case that one becomes so thoroughly engrossed in an object that one forgets to consider what happens during the thought-process itself. This is why thought is regarded as something that is completely separate from the object, merely performing the role of observer. The theories that arise during the activity of thought are then assumed to be a product of the mind, although Steiner contends that we have no right to suppose that the world and its content is a finished product that has no need of our cerebral speculation about its actual nature:

Does not the world cause thoughts in the minds of men with the same necessity as it causes the blossoms on plants? Plant a seed in the earth. It puts forth roots and stem, it unfolds into leaves and blossoms. Set the plant before yourselves. It connects itself, in your minds, with a definite concept. Why should this concept belong any less to the whole plant than leaf and blossom? You say the leaves and blossoms exist quite apart from an experiencing subject. The concept appears only when a human being makes an object of the plant. Quite so. But leaves and blossoms also appear on the plant only if there is soil in which the seed can be planted, and light and air in which the blossoms and leaves can unfold. Just so the concept of a plant arises when a thinking being comes into contact with the plant. (p.47)

To imagine that perception is the be-all and end-all of human activity, therefore, and that the intellectual fruits of our conceptualising have little relation to the true character of the things we perceive, is to assume that the objects themselves are static and incapable of change and, thus, subsequent re-interpretation through the application of thought. Similarly, it would be equally foolish to imagine that the appearance of an object by way of perception amounts to the thing itself. After all, Steiner says, the concept does “not belong” to the thing:

If I throw a stone horizontally through the air, I perceive it in different places at different times. I connect these places so as to form a line. Mathematics teaches me to distinguish various kinds of lines, one of which is the parabola. I know a parabola to be a line which is produced by a point moving according to a certain well-defined law. If I analyse the conditions under which the stone thrown by me moves, I find that the line of its flight is identical with the line I know as a parabola. That the stone moves exactly in a parabola is a result of the given conditions and follows necessarily from them. The form of the parabola belongs to the whole phenomenon as much as any other feature of it. (p.47)

It is the combination of perception and thought which makes objects “real” and this is a result of mental organisation. Whilst perception and thought are separated in the event that one is merely a spectator, without the addition of the latter there would be no genuine apprehension of the object at all.

This is not to suggest that we are capable of comprehending everything we see, of course, as we occupy a different time and space to what we perceive and it is this which enables us to retain the subjective principle of individuality. The same cannot be said for the objects we perceive in the world, as they are connected to everything around them and this is why – purely for the sake of convenience – we tend to separate one thing from another:

Our eye can seize only single colours one after another out of a manifold colour-complex, our understanding only single concepts out of a connected conceptual system. This isolation is a subjective act, which is due to the fact that we are not identical with the world-process, but are only things among other things. (p.48)

Steiner makes an important distinction between our ability to perceive external objects as something other than ourselves and the self-consciousness which remains an altogether internal process. However, despite the fact that self-observation takes place in a closed system this does not mean that thought is prevented from associating us with what Steiner calls “the order of the world-process”. Indeed, whilst self-consciousness involves being centred on one’s own personality within a particular sphere the comparatively more superior and wide-ranging faculty of thought deals with one’s finite existence:

Thought is not individual like sensation and feeling; it is universal. It receives an individual stamp in each separate human being only because it comes to be related to his individual feelings and sensations. By means of these particular colourings of the universal thought, individual men are distinguished from one another. There is only one single concept of “triangle.” It is quite immaterial for the content of this concept whether it is in A’s consciousness or in B’s. It will, however, be grasped by each of the two minds in its own individual way. (p.49)

The idea of a triangle, to use Steiner’s example, is not constantly reshaped or reinterpreted by each individual mind that encounters it but retains its universal character. It is here that the principle of individuality, something that is highly-prized in the context of Steiner’s work, reaches out to the cosmos in its quest for knowledge. Percept and concept are united as One.

Becoming conscious of the Absolute, in other words, takes us beyond the more isolated perception that is brought to us by way of the senses. Without utilising the activity of thought, this would be impossible as there would be no desire for knowledge:

All attempts to discover any other principle of unity in the world than this internally coherent ideal content, which we gain for ourselves by the conceptual analysis of our percepts, are bound to fail. Neither a personal God, nor force, nor matter, nor the blind will (of Schopenhauer and Hartmann), can be accepted by us as the universal principle of unity in the world. These principles all belong only to a limited sphere of our experience. Personality we experience only in ourselves, force and matter only in external things. The will, again, can be regarded only as the expression of the activity of our finite personalities. (pp.49-50)

Steiner takes particular umbrage with Schopenhauer’s insistence that “abstract” thought is incapable of facilitating a universal principle and that unless we detach ourselves from unrealistic notions of an “external” world we shall never understand the workings of the cosmos. To accept the world as a mere “idea,” as Schopenhauer does, means accepting that none other than the knowing subject is capable of attaining such knowledge. Steiner juxtaposes this view with his own, claiming that the German’s very construction of world-as-idea is itself an idea in the sense that his philosophy has a particular interpretation of what lies beyond the purely subjective. As Steiner points out, Schopenhauer

considers himself entitled by these arguments to hold that the will becomes objectified in the human body. He believes that in the activities of the body he has an immediate experience of reality, of the thing-in-itself in the concrete. Against these arguments we must urge that the activities of our body become known to us only through self-observation, and that, as such, they are in no way superior to other percepts. If we want to know their real nature, we can do so only by means of thought, i.e., by fitting them into the ideal system of our concepts and ideas. (p.50)

The internal thought-process that allows us to add concepts and ideas to the external percept is intuition. Just as observation is necessary for one’s encounter with the percept, so too is intuition essential for the manner in which thought makes sense of it all. As far as Steiner is concerned, this is done with a view to achieving unity with the world and without intuition providing us with context we would simply be in possession of a disordered array of fragmentary perceptions obtained solely from observation.

Whilst thought enables us to conceptualise the various percepts and mould them into something comprehensible, Steiner tells us that it is impossible to know how a percept originates out of the “non-perceptible”. The fact that percepts are concrete, therefore, means that we can only analyse the given relations between them in conceptual terms. When we observe an object and subsequently include it within our field of vision, it does not become part of what Fichte might regard as the “Ego-in-itself” but alters the perceiving subject:

The idea is, therefore, a subjective percept, in contrast with the objective percept which occurs when the object is present in the perceptual field. The false identification of the subjective with this objective percept leads to the misunderstanding of Idealism: The world is my idea. (p.53)