The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Outlook

[ 1 ] The scientific worldview is based on the idea of evolution. Those who are imbued with this idea seek to understand the emergence of facts in the world. However, they are convinced that a fact that gives rise to another fact does not drive it forth because it is already preformed in it in a certain way. This worldview knows nothing of such purposefulness. It finds neither in reality nor in the idea that what comes later is already present in what came before “in potential” (cf. above $. 43 ff. [269 ff.]). This later is a new formation in the fullest sense of the word. Man now develops within himself, in relation to the things and events he encounters in the world, in art, in his actions, in his knowledge, a new world. He permeates reality with his ideas, with the formations of his inner life. Only such a worldview will think in terms of the idea of development, which also sees the creations of the spirit as completely new formations. Such a worldview will not search for ideas in human knowledge that already exist in some form in things, or that correspond to something actual in things (a “thing in itself,” a “will,” etc.). The adherent of such a worldview is aware that the ideal, the thought, has no other life than an ideal, a mental one. "In thinking, we hold the events of the world by a thread, where we must be present if something is to come about. And that is precisely what matters. That is precisely why things appear so mysterious to me: because I am so uninvolved in their coming into being. I simply find them there; but in my thinking, I know how they are made. Therefore, there is no more original starting point for observing all world events than thinking.“ (See my ”Philosophy of Freedom: Outline of a Modern Worldview," Berlin 1894) When I penetrate things with my thoughts, I add to them something that I have experienced in my own essence. The essence of things does not come to me from them, but I add it to them. I create a world of ideas that I consider to be the essence of things. Things receive their essence through me. It is therefore impossible to ask about the essence of being. In recognizing ideas, nothing that has permanence in things is revealed to me. The world of ideas is my experience. It exists in no other form than that which I experience. Even if the monkey gradually develops from marsupials, there is still nothing in marsupials that can be regarded as the essence of the monkey. Similarly, the essence of things that I develop in addition to things is not yet present in things in any way. Through his cognition, man continues the events that lie before cognition; but he does not extract anything from them. (I have attempted to present a worldview in accordance with the idea of development in this sense in my “Philosophy of Freedom.”) Anyone who, because we cannot penetrate things with our cognition, is led to agnosticism and speaks of “limits of cognition” appears like someone who denies the monkey's existence or speaks of the limits of its being because he cannot extract this being from the marsupials, but rather superimposes it as a new impulse of previous development. And just as little as the ideas of things, man cannot derive the ultimate motives of his actions from any external thing. He adds them as a new formation of the world. The idea of development thus gains a conception of freedom in that it allows human action to arise nowhere as a preformed entity, but as a free creation by man. In Germany, the beginnings of such a way of thinking can be found in J. Frohschammer (“Die Phantasie als Grundprinzip des Weltprozesses” [Imagination as the Basic Principle of the World Process], Munich 1877). He understands imagination as that which is expressed in the development of all things and processes. Since imagination is a creative principle, it can be used to develop an idea of development that believes not in the unfolding of what already exists, but in continuous new creations. Robert Schellwien (“Der Geist der neuern Philosophie,” 1895-1896) is also close to this way of thinking. In France, Emile Boutroux (born 1845) outlined a worldview that is in harmony with the idea of development (“De la contingence des lois de la nature,” Paris 1874; “De l'idée de loi naturelle,” Paris 1895). For him, too, the later is in no way present in the earlier; he considers it downright coincidental that the higher develops from the lower.

[ 2 ] Only through an idea of freedom in the sense of the concept of development can the weak-minded confession be overcome to which every view must come that seeks the essence of things not in man but outside him. Th. Ribot has put this weak-minded confession into words: “The ‘I’ states a fact, but it does not create it.” (“Der Wille” [The Will], Berlin 1893)