UNDERSTANDING that concepts and ideas are “given” also leads us a subsequent stage in which we can begin to learn more about the cognitive process itself.

Thus far, Steiner’s examples have been very selective in terms of limiting what we receive from the “world-picture” – actually dividing it in two – and this is the result of his attempt to grasp the nature of knowledge. Nonetheless, it is important to

bear in mind that the part which we have divorced from the Given still continues, quite apart from our postulate and independently of it, to stand in a necessary connection with the world as given. This fact determines the next step forward in the Theory of Knowledge. It will consist in restoring the unity which we have destroyed in order to show how knowledge is possible. This restoration will consist in thinking about the world as given. (p.154)

That we are thinking about the external world, he contends, actually restores its fullness in terms of our cognition actively facilitating a synthesis. Concepts and ideas, therefore, “transmute” the world as a result of our thought-processes introducing a sense of order to what appears to us as chaos. At the same time, it is impossible to demonstrate the act of thinking simply because to demonstrate implies that some form of thinking is already taking place. Facts may be demonstrated, certainly, but attempts to demonstrate thinking itself means falling into the trap of presupposition.

Steiner’s methodology in relation to the role of active thought on the chaos of the “immediately-given” is as follows:

First, thinking selects certain details out of the totality of the Given. For, in the Given, there are strictly no individual details, but only an undifferentiated continuum. Next, thinking relates the selected details to each other according to the forms which it has itself produced. And, lastly, it determines what follows from this relation. The act of relating two distinct items of the world-content to each other does not imply that thinking arbitrarily determines something about them. Thinking waits and sees what is the spontaneous consequence of the relation established. With this consequence we have at last some degree of knowledge of the two selected items of the world-content. Suppose the world-content reveals nothing of its nature in response to the establishment of such a relation, then the effort of thinking must miscarry, and a fresh effort must take its place. All cognitions consist in this, that two or more items of the Given are brought into relation with each other by us and that we apprehend what follows from this relation. (p.155)

Whilst Kant derives his a priori system from the laws that govern the actual process, for Steiner it is the act of thinking which leads to the discovery of such laws and that only by connecting one thing to another can we unearth the “given” relationship between them. Rather than accept Kant’s presuppositional a priori in the way that a child might inherit a rugby ball from his father, Steiner suggests that it is only from thinking that natural principles reveal themselves to us. This, as we saw in the last chapter, is a creative act.

If these active thought-processes are to bring about a more “scientific” picture of the world, the

content of every cognition cannot be fixed a priori in advance of observation (in which thinking comes to grips with the Given), but must be derived completely and exhaustively from observation. In this sense, all our cognitions are empirical. Nor is it possible to see how it could be otherwise. For, Kant’s judgments a priori are at bottom, not cognitions, but postulates. On Kant’s principles, all we can ever say is only this, that if a thing is to become the object of possible experience, it must conform to these laws. They are, therefore, rules which the subject prescribes to all objects. But, we should rather expect cognitions of the Given to have their source, not in the constitution of the subject, but in that of the object. (p.156)

Steiner’s insistence that the “immediately-given” depends on the activity of thought in order to blossom into a more comprehensive assessment of reality demonstrates that without cognition we would have to be content with an incomplete picture of the external world. The “immediately-given” is said to conceal something greater that is only made whole when we discover it for ourselves.

The workings of human cognition thus result in a synthesis, or unifying process, which allows us to intuit reality as it really is.