ONE must, according to Steiner, begin by suspending everything one knows about human knowledge. This involves bypassing that which has already been determined by others through the process of cognition and means adopting a starting-point that has not yet become a factor of knowledge. This is what Steiner describes as the “immediately-given,” the first impression that comes to us from the external world:

What thus passes initially through our minds and what our minds pass through—this incoherent picture which is not yet differentiated into particular elements, in which nothing seems distinguished from, nothing related to, nothing determined by, anything else, this is the Immediately-Given. On this level of existence—if the phrase is permissible—no object, no event, is as yet more important or more significant than any other. The rudimentary organ of an animal, which, in the light of the knowledge belonging to a higher level of existence, is perhaps seen to be without any importance whatever for the development and life of the animal, comes before us with the same claim to our attention as the noblest and most necessary part of the organism. Prior to all cognitive activity nothing in our picture of the world appears as substance, nothing as quality, nothing as cause or as effect. The contrasts of matter and spirit, of body and soul, have not yet arisen. Every other predicate, too, must be kept away from the world-picture presented at this level. We may think of it neither as reality nor as appearance, neither as subjective nor as objective, neither as necessary nor as contingent. (p.147)

At the very beginning, therefore, one’s theory of knowledge must not be centred on either Kant’s “things-in-themselves” or the four epistemological categories discussed by Von Hartmann.

Steiner asks us to imagine an intelligent being entering the world for the first time and being confronted by the “immediately-given” attributes that present themselves to him. One might argue that a baby comes into the world in a similar fashion, but of course he or she lacks the appropriate thought-processes that serve cognitive activity. There is not, as Steiner concedes, any human being who is ever in a position to weigh-up the “immediately-given” in an impartial or passive manner, so as one might expect in order to establish a starting-point for a theory of knowledge one must adopt a more hypothetical approach. Von Hartmann, at least, believed that the philosopher is capable of employing such methodology in his quest for knowledge, but Steiner disagrees on the basis that the world has already been quantified. Once again, our intrepid Anthroposophist is keen to avoid any presuppositional course of action:

We have no right to accept these predicates without question. On the contrary, we must carefully extract them from out of the world-picture, in order that it may appear in its purity without any admixture due to the process of cognition. In general, the dividing line between what is given and what is added by cognition cannot be identified with any single moment of human development, but must be drawn artificially. But this can be done at every level of development, provided only we divide correctly what is presented to us prior to cognition, without any determination by thinking, from what is made of it by cognition. (p.148)

A critic might argue that such artificiality is almost like substituting one a priori for another, but Steiner’s process is designed to be an act of creation rather than something which is merely received or passed down.

The Austrian understands that his talk of a “world-picture” could be interpreted as yet another result of cognition, meaning that what he identifies as the external world is already a conceptualisation, but he contends that such an approach is nothing more than a form of “guidance” for the benefit of advancing a new analysis for the purposes of identifying where knowledge actually begins:

Nobody who is about to occupy himself with epistemological problems, stands at the same time at what we have rightly called the starting-point of knowledge, for his knowledge is already, up to a certain degree, developed. Nothing but analysis with the help of concepts enables us to eliminate from our developed knowledge all the gains of cognitive activity and to determine the starting-point which precedes all such activity. But the concepts thus employed have no cognitive value. They have the purely negative task to eliminate out of our field of vision whatever is the result of cognitive activity and to lead us to the point where this activity first begins. (p.148)

It is a case of trial and error, but error is overcome once it has been shown that the cognitive process has not relied on any kind of preconception and this includes prejudging whether something is “true” or “false” at the outset. The entire point of Steiner’s enquiry is not to glean as much “pure” and “unadulterated” knowledge as possible, but to investigate knowledge itself.

By encountering the content of the “world-picture” through sensations, intuition, dreams, visions, representations and ideas we eventually begin to see how one “percept” relates to another:

A Theory of Knowledge which starts from the assumption that all the experiences just enumerated are contents of our consciousness, finds itself confronted at once by the question: How do we transcend our consciousness so as to apprehend reality? Where is the jumping-board which will launch us from the subjective into the trans-subjective? For us, the situation is quite different. For us, consciousness and the idea of the “Ego” are, primarily, only items in the Immediately-Given, and the relation of the latter to the two former has first to be discovered by knowledge. We do not start from consciousness in order to determine the nature of knowledge, but, vice versa, we start from knowledge in order to determine consciousness and the relation of subject to object. (p.150)

This raises the question of how a subject without prior knowledge has the ability to distance him or herself from the object, i.e. to view oneself as being separate from the Whole, but differentiation involves moving beyond a merely passive analysis of the external world and discovering those points where it becomes possible to create an identification with human cognition. As Steiner explained previously, things are not received from the outside world in the way that a finished loaf of bread might be said to precede a lump of shapeless dough, it is up to us to intuitively fashion what we discover in nature:

If everything were merely given, we should never get beyond the bare gazing outwards into the external world and a no less bare gazing inwards into the privacy of our inner world. We should, at most, be able to describe, but never to understand, the objects outside of us. Our concepts would stand in a purely external, not in an internal, relation to that to which they apply. If there is to be knowledge, everything depends on there being, somewhere within the Given, a field in which our cognitive activity does not merely presuppose the Given, but is at work in the very heart of the Given itself. In other words, the very strictness with which we hold fast the Given, as merely given, must reveal that not everything is given. (p.150)

In this way, Steiner claims, things reveal themselves to us as they really are. Not in a presupposed way, as something a priori, but actively willed into definition. Whether such an interpretation is “true” or “false” is neither here nor there, it is a two-way process that relies on the startling discovery of a homogeneity between man and the outside world.

This is rather similar to the “intellectual intuition” that one finds in Platonism, said to be perfectly encapsulated by the ecstasy of the poet. In German Romantic philosophy, on the other hand, Schlegel discusses the importance of an “intellectual intuition” that relates to how creativity can become a a way of using self-knowledge to approach the Absolute. Similarly, it was Schelling who believed that the medium of art can function as the basis for “intellectual intuition” and that nature works through the artist with conscious intent. On this matter, at least, Steiner would agree.

In response to the contention that a subject which actively forms concepts from “percepts” is dependant on the Ego, Steiner retorts that we should completely dismiss from our minds the notion that there is a cognitive agent. Indeed, his theory of knowledge rests on no more than perceiving that which is “immediately-given” and then forming concepts and ideas on the basis of an identification with the external world.

Art: Hilma af Klint, On the Viewing of Flowers and Trees (1922)