The evolution of Philosophy: From pre-socratics to post-kantians

By Rudolf Steiner and David De Angelis

INDEX


FROM THE AUTHOR'S PREFACES TO THE VARIOUS EDITIONS

TO NAVIGATE THE EXHIBITION GUIDELINES

THE WORLDVIEWS OF GREEK THINKERS

THE LIFE OF THOUGHT FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE CHRISTIAN ERA TO JOHN SCOTUS OR ERIGENA

WORLDVIEWS IN THE MIDDLE AGES

WORLDVIEWS IN THE MODERN ERA OF THE EVOLUTION OF THOUGHT

THE AGE OF KANT AND GOETHE

THE CLASSICS OF WORLD AND LIFE CONCEPTION

THE REACTIONARY WORLDVIEWS

RADICAL WORLDVIEWS

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stargatebook
• Release date: Sep 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9791220849302

Rudolf Steiner

Nineteenth and early twentieth century philosopher.

Book preview

FROM THE AUTHOR'S PREFACES TO THE VARIOUS EDITIONS

(1914)

One will not find in this book much that one expects in a history of philosophy. To me, however, what mattered was not so much the exposition of all philosophical opinions as the description of the development of philosophical problems. For such a description it is not necessary to expose a philosophical opinion that occurs in history, when the essential of this opinion has been characterized in other correlation.

(1918)

I would like to add a few words about a problem that more or less consciously presents itself to the soul of anyone who reads a book like this. It is the problem of the relation which exists between philosophical study and immediate life. All philosophical thought which is not postulated by life is condemned to sterility, though it may for some time attract the man who loves to reflect. Fruitful thought must be rooted in the processes of evolution which humanity has had to go through in the course of its historical becoming. And whoever wishes to expound, from whatever point of view, the history of the evolution of philosophical thought, must start from a thought imposed by life. It must be the concepts that, translated into the conduct of human life, give vigor to the human being, guide his intellect and can give him advice and help in all the tasks imposed on his nature. The philosophical systems around the World have come into being because humanity needs such concepts. If we could direct our lives without them; never would a man be truly, intimately authorized to think about the riddles of philosophy. An epoch that does not admit such a way of thinking only shows that it does not feel the need to shape human life in such a way that it appears to conform on all points to its manifold tasks. But this aversion takes its revenge in the course of human evolution. Life is saddened in such epochs. And people do not realize this, because they do not wish to know anything about the needs that reside in the depths of their souls and that do not satisfy them. The following epoch makes this dissatisfaction more visible. The grandchildren, in their impoverished way of life, find again the consequences of the negligence of their ancestors. The negligence of the preceding epoch has determined the imperfect life of the epoch, which follows and in which these grandchildren are placed. Philosophy must stand in the whole of life; one may sin against this requirement, but the sin must necessarily produce its effects. One can understand the process of the evolution of philosophical thought, the appearance of the enigmas of philosophy, only when one understands what is the task of philosophical contemplation of the world in the creation of a complete, full essence of humanity. Inspired by this feeling, I wrote my work on the evolution of the enigmas of philosophy. I have tried to prove, through the exposition of this process, in an evident way, that this feeling is intimately justified. Philosophical contemplation must be a vital necessity, and yet human thought, as it evolves, does not give us a single solution, but rather multiple and apparently entirely contradictory solutions to the riddles of philosophy. Many historical reflections would like to explain these important contrasts with an entirely external representation. But they are not convincing. If the truth is to be found, one must consider this evolution much more seriously than is generally done. One must come to the conclusion that there can be no thought capable of solving altogether all the riddles of the world. Rather, in human thought, each discovered idea becomes in short order a new puzzle. And the more important the idea, the more luminous it is for a given epoch, the more enigmatic and doubtful it becomes for the next epoch. He who wishes to examine the history of human thought from a point of view in conformity with truth, must admire the greatness of the idea of one period, and be able, at the same time, to see, with the same enthusiasm, this idea reveal itself as incomplete in a subsequent epoch. He must also be able to think that the mode of representation in which he expresses himself will be replaced by another in the future. And this thought must not prevent him from fully recognizing the justness of the contemplation he has arrived at. The disposition of mind which imagines that the imperfect concepts of the past are abolished by the perfect thoughts which come to light in the present is unfit to understand the philosophical evolution of mankind. I have attempted to understand the process of the development of human thought by grasping the significance of the fact that one epoch is in philosophical contrast to the preceding one. What ideas make such an understanding mature has been said in the introductory explanations. The ideas are such that they must necessarily provoke multiple opposition. At the first examination, they will appear as if they had come to me at once in the spirit and as if I had wanted, by means of them, to fantastically upset the whole way of expounding the history of philosophy. I only hope that the reader will recognise that these ideas have not been first fashioned and then imposed on the study of philosophical evolution; they have been acquired in the way in which the naturalist discovers the laws of his sciences. They are derived from the observation of the evolution of philosophical thought. And one has no right to reject the results of observation because they contradict representations which are believed to be correct, because they correspond to certain inclinations of thought, but which are not justified by observation. The superstition - for such representations are nothing else - that, in the historical evolution of mankind, there cannot exist forces which reveal themselves at a given epoch in a particular way, and which dominate, in a manner conforming to reason and law, the evolution of human thought, will oppose my exposition. But this was imposed on me, because the observation of this evolution had proved to me the existence of such forces, and because that same observation proved to me that the history of philosophy becomes a science only when it is not afraid to recognise such forces. It seems to me that one can take a fruitful position at the present time in the face of the enigmas of philosophy only if one knows the forces that have dominated these past epochs. And even more than in any other branch of historical study, in the history of thought the only possibility is to let the present spring from the past. In grasping the very ideas that correspond to the needs of the present, one finds the principle of that way of seeing things which throws a true light on the past. To those who fail to attain a point of view of world-conception which truly corresponds to the forces which give impetus to our age, the significance of the spiritual life of the past also escapes them. I do not wish here to resolve the question whether in the other fields of historical investigation there can be a fruitful dissertation which is not founded on a view of present conditions. On the ground of the history of thought, such an exposition will necessarily be sterile. Here the object of study and immediate life must be in direct relation. And the life, in which thought becomes the practice of life, can only be the present life. With this introduction, I would like to have made known the feelings from which this dissertation on the enigmas of philosophy was born.

(1923)

With the present book I have set out to bring to light what in the conceptions of the world, shaped in the course of history, presents itself in such a way to the present-day observer that his own feeling, when he sees the philosophical enigmas presented to his consciousness, is deepened by the feeling experienced before him by previous thinkers in the face of those enigmas. Such a deepening has something satisfactory for the inquirer into philosophy. The effort of his soul becomes more intense, since he sees what forms this aspiration has assumed in human beings to whom life has given points of view similar or not to his own. In this way I wanted to be of some use to those who need, in order to complete their thinking, a picture of the evolution of philosophy. Those who, following the path of their own thought, would like to feel themselves in unison with the spiritual work of humanity. require such a complement. It is required by him who wishes to see that his conceptual work springs from a general, human need of the soul. He can see this when the essentials of the systems which seek to explain the world are presented to his eyes. But for many scholars this vision has something oppressive about it. Doubt creeps into their souls. They see successive thinkers in disagreement with their predecessors as well as with their continuators. I would like my representation to be such as to dispel this impression, replacing it with another. Let us examine two thinkers. At first, the contrast between them strikes one in a painful way. But let us closely examine their thought. It will be seen that the one considers a domain of the world, entirely different from that considered by the other. Let us suppose that in the latter there has developed the soul disposition which directs attention to the way in which thought is created in the intimate process of the soul itself. For him, the enigma lies in the fact that this inner process of the soul must act, in a decisive way, on the essence of the outer world, recognizing it. This point of departure gives a special colouring to all his thought. He will express himself in a powerful way on the creative thought. All that he will say will be colored idealistically. Another one directs his gaze to external phenomena, which fall under the senses. The thoughts by which he affirms this process, recognizing it, do not penetrate into his consciousness with independent force. He will give to the enigma of the world such a shape as to make it fit into a circle in which the very roots of the world penetrate into the world of sensibility and of remembrance. With the hypothesis of the historical evolution of the conception of the world which results from such an orientation of thought, we can overcome what is negative about these conceptions and see how they support each other.

On this basis the outline of my dissertation was constructed. I did not want to conceal the contradictions that can be seen in the evolution of the world, but I also wanted to show what even in the contradictions had some value. If in this book the positive is highlighted and not the negative, I can only be blamed by those who fail to see how fruitful this perception of the positive is.

My method of expounding individual worldviews has its origin in my orientation towards spiritual contemplation. He who only wants to fabricate theories about the spirit will never need to move into the mentality of a materialist. It will be enough for him to expose all the legitimate accusations that can be made against materialism and to present this system of thought in such a way as to reveal its unwarranted sides. He who wishes to attain spiritual contemplation cannot proceed in this way. With the idealist, he will have to think idealistically, with the materialist, materialistically. Only in this way will the capacity be awakened in his soul which will then be expressed in spiritual contemplation. One could also observe that with such a treatment, the content of a book loses its unity. This is not my opinion. The more one lets the apparitions themselves speak, the more faithful one is to the historical truth. To combat materialism or to caricature it cannot be the task of a historical exposition. It has its own limited legitimacy. One does not follow a false path if one represents materialistically the process of material relations in this world. Only he who does not recognize that in tracing material relations one is led to the contemplation of the spirit is deceived. It is a mistake to suppose that the brain is not the condition of the thought which studies that which falls under the senses; but it is another mistake to suppose that the spirit is not the creator of the brain by which it reveals itself in the physical world as the creator of thought.

TO NAVIGATE THE EXHIBITION GUIDELINES

If we try to investigate the spiritual work done by man in search of a solution to the riddles of the world and the problems of life, the studious soul is always imposed again on the words, written as a motto in the temple of Apollo: Know thyself. The fact that the human soul, when confronted with these words, feels a certain impression, is the foundation for the understanding of a concept of the world. The essence of a living organism implies the need for it to feel hunger; the essence of the human soul, having reached a certain stage of its development, generates a similar need. This is expressed in the need to ask life for a spiritual good which corresponds, like food to hunger, to the inner need of the spirit: Know thyself. This impression can strike the soul in such a way that it thinks: I am not a human being in the true sense of the word if I cannot forge in myself a relationship with the world which has know thyself" as its fundamental character. The soul may even come to regard this impression as an awakening from the dream of life in which it was immersed before being awakened by the above experience. In the first period of his life, man develops in such a way that the power of memory grows within him, by means of which he later remembers his experiences up to a certain moment of his childhood. What he was before this moment, he feels as a dream of life, from which he has been aroused. The human soul would not be what it should be if, from the dark impressions of childhood, this power of memory did not come to emerge. Similarly, the human soul, at a further stage of existence, may think of the experience expressed in the words, Know thyself. It may feel that an animic life which has not been awakened by the dream through this experience does not correspond to its dispositions. Philosophers have often insisted that they are very embarrassed when they have to define what philosophy is, in the true meaning of the word. It is certain, however, that in it we must recognize a particular form of fulfillment of this need of the soul that gives us the order: Know thyself. And we can know this human need as we know what hunger is, though perhaps one would be very embarrassed if one were to give a satisfactory explanation of hunger. A kindred thought lived in the soul of J.G. Fichte when he said that the species of philosophy each man chooses for himself depends on the species of man he is. Animated by these thoughts, we can examine the attempts that have been made throughout history to find solutions to the riddles of philosophy. In these conati, we shall see revelations of the human essence. For although man strives to silence his interests completely when he speaks as a philosopher, even in a philosophy there appears immediately what the human personality can become, a commodity the expansion of its own original forces. Seen in this light, the study of philosophical creations can raise certain expectations about the enigmas of the world. We may hope to derive from this study some data about the character of the development of the human soul. And the writer of this book believes that he has found such data by traversing the philosophical systems of the West. In the evolution of human endeavour towards philosophy there appeared to him four clearly distinct epochs; and the differences between these epochs seemed to him as characteristic as those which divide the species in every kingdom of nature. This fact led him to recognize that the history of the philosophical evolution of mankind shows the presence of objective spiritual impulses, independent of men, which develop in the course of time. And what men create as philosophers appears as the manifestation of the evolution of these impulses, which act beneath the surface of external history. The conviction imposes itself that such a result arises from the unscrupulous consideration of historical facts as a natural law from the examination of natural facts. The author of this book does not believe that he has allowed himself to be tempted by a party taken towards an arbitrary reconstruction of historical evolution. But the facts compel the admission of such results. In the evolutionary process of the philosophical endeavor of mankind one can distinguish epochs, each seven or eight centuries long, in each of which there reigns, beneath the surface of external history, another spiritual impulse, which radiates in a certain way into human personalities and whose evolution determines that of philosophical thought. What is the testimony of facts in favor of this distinction of epochs will result from the book itself. The author wishes, so far as he is able, to let the facts speak for themselves. Here, however, certain guidelines should be drawn which did not determine the considerations from which this book originated, but resulted from them. One might think that these guidelines would have been more rightly placed at the end of the book, since only the content of our exposition proves their truth. Instead, we wanted to put them before as a preliminary warning, because they legitimize the internal structure of the exposition. Although they were for the author the result of his investigation, they naturally presented themselves to his spirit before the exposition and regulated it. For the reader it may be of some importance to know, not only at the end of the book, why the author represents things in a certain way, but to be able already, during his reading, to form a judgment on this way according to the author's points of view. But only that which refers to the intimate articulation of the deductions must be exposed here. The first epoch of the evolution of philosophical conceptions begins with Greek antiquity. It can be traced historically and distinctly back to Ferecides of Syrus and Thales of Miletus, and ends with the period when Christianity appeared. The spiritual effort of mankind in this epoch assumes a character essentially different from that of earlier times. It is the epoch of the awakening intellectual life. Before, the soul lived in figurative (symbolic) representations of the world and of being. However hard one tries to listen to those who want to see the life of philosophical thought already developed in the pre-Hellenic age, unscrupulous study does not allow this. Authentic philosophy, expressed in the form of thoughts, must be brought into being in Greece. What in the reflections on the world, in the East and in Egypt, was akin to the element of thought, was not - if carefully considered - true thought, but image, symbol. In Greece was born the effort to recognize the correlations of the world by means of what today we call thought. As long as the human soul represents cosmic phenomena by means of images, it feels intimately connected with them; it feels itself a member of the cosmic organism, it does not think of itself as an independent entity, separate from this organism. When thought without images awakens in the mind, it feels the separation between the world and the soul. Thought becomes its educator towards independence. But the Greek experiences thought differently from the man of today. This is a fact that can easily be overlooked. However, it must be taken into account for an exact view of Greek thought. The Greek feels thought as we today feel a perception, as we experience the sensation of red or yellow. Just as we attribute a sensation of those or of sound to an object, so the Greek sees thought in the world of objects and adhering to it. The thought of this time is therefore still the bond which unites the soul to the world. The separation between the soul and the world is not yet complete, it barely begins. The soul experiences thought within itself, but it still imagines that it has received it from the world, and therefore hopes, through the process of thought, to discover the enigmas of the world. It is under such conditions that the philosophical evolution which began with Ferecides and Thales takes place, reaches its apogee with Plato and Aristotle, and then declines until it comes to an end at the time of the foundation of Christianity. From the depths of spiritual evolution the life of thought flows into human souls and gives birth there to philosophies which educate them to feel their independence in the face of the external world. At the time of the birth of Christianity a new epoch begins. The human soul can no longer feel thought as a sensation provoked by the external world. It feels thought as a creation of its own, intimate being: an impulse, far more powerful than the conceptual life, radiates in souls from the depths of spiritual evolution. Self-consciousness is now awakened in humanity in a way that corresponds to the nature of this self-consciousness. What men had hitherto experienced was but the prodrome of what may be called, in its fullest sense, inwardly experienced self-consciousness. It may be hoped that a future study of the evolution of the spirit will give to this epoch the name of awakening of self-consciousness. Only then, for the first time, does man feel the full extent of his soul life as I in the true sense of the word. The whole importance of this fact is obscurely perceived, rather than felt in a conscious way, by the philosophical spirits of this age. Philosophy demonstrates this character until Scotus Erigena (died A.D. 880). The philosophers of this epoch are really plunged with the philosophical thought into the religious representation. Through this representation, the human soul, which in its nascent self-consciousness sees itself placed entirely upon itself, acquires an awareness of its incorporation into the life of the world organism. Thought becomes a simple means of expressing the conception, drawn from religious sources, of the relationship between the human soul and the world. The life of thought, framed in this conception, nourished by religious representations, grows like the sprout in the earth until it emerges. In Greek philosophy, the life of thought explains its forces, guides the human soul until it perceives its independence. Then there erupts, from the depths of the life of the spirit, a manifestation of a kind essentially different from the life of thought. It fills the soul with a new inner experience and reveals to it that it is in itself a world resting upon its own centre of gravity. Self-consciousness is first experienced, not yet conceptually understood. Thought then develops hiddenly in the warmth of religious consciousness. Thus flowed the first seven or eight centuries after the foundation of Christianity. The following epoch shows an entirely different character. The philosophers in vogue again feel the power of thought awakening. The soul has intimately corroborated the independence which it has experienced for some centuries. It begins to search for what is its most proper faculty, and finds that it is the life of thought. All other data come from without, but the soul creates thought from the depths of its own essence, and in this creation it is present with full consciousness. There arises in it the impulse to conquer, by means of thought, a knowledge which can explain the relation of the soul to the world. How can anything be expressed in the life of thought that has not merely been contrived by the soul? This is the problem posed by the philosophers of this epoch. The intellectual currents of nominalism, realism, scholasticism, and medieval mysticism reveal this fundamental character of the philosophy of this period. The human soul seeks to investigate the life of thought from its character of reality. With the