Living Thinking: Lecture 2 — From the Act of Knowing to the Boundless Horizon of Wisdom
a summary (and interpretation of) Chapters 5–7 of Rudolf Steiner’s The Philosophy of Freedom
This post is an edited transcript of a video lecture from a series on Rudolf Steiner’s The Philosophy of Freedom, recorded for the Bay Area Waldorf Teacher Training Program during the spring of 2025. It covers Chapters 5–7—The Act of Knowing, Human Individuality, and Are There Limits to Knowledge?—in which Steiner develops his qualified monism through a sustained critique of both naïve and critical idealism.
The lecture follows his account of thinking as the activity that unites percept and concept into a living whole, the role of individualized mental pictures in forging that dynamic unity, and his argument that there are in principle no fixed limits to knowledge. Along the way, the lecture examines the relationship between perception, feeling, and thought; the distinction between self-percept and participation in the universal world-process; and the way Steiner’s broadened concept of the “percept” anticipates the possibility of spiritual observation.
Chapter 5: The Act of Knowing
Critique of Critical Idealism
Steiner opens this chapter by reiterating his criticism of critical idealism from the previous chapter. He argues that critical idealism ultimately depends on an assumption of the foundational reality of the sense organs, but reduces what those sense organs perceive to mental pictures rather than recognizing that the sense organs themselves are also mental pictures. Thus, critical idealism ends up refuting itself.
Steiner describes a dialectical process from naive realism to critical idealism. Naive realism is the view that most human beings start with, at least during our materialistic era—where what you see is what you get, and there's a suspicion of thinking as something as not as real as what we perceive with our senses. Critical idealism moves beyond naive realism through the recognition that the world we perceive is in some sense produced by our organization, that there are mental pictures that seem to mediate between us and something beyond those mental pictures. Here, "idealism" doesn't mean a positive world outlook, but rather refers to ideas or concepts—the notion that the world is mediated by mental pictures.
The Role of Thinking
With his emphasis on the necessity of thinking to weave individual percepts into some kind of intelligible whole such that we recognize things, Steiner begins by reiterating: "It is impossible to prove by investigating the content of our observation that our percepts are mental pictures." All of the processes that we might study through observation—whether brain processes or the processes of our senses converting physics into what we eventually experience in our soul—all of these are percepts. But it's only thinking that allows us to draw the connections between them and understand them.
Steiner then compares critical idealism to scientific materialism, noting that both assume there is some more real world beyond the world we experience through consciousness. But like Goethe, Steiner wants to make human subjectivity an instrument, and so he's not satisfied with this approach.
Two Variants of Critical Idealism
He divides critical idealism into two variants:
Transcendental realism: In this case, a form of critical idealism that assumes there is a more real world, a world of things in themselves, that we are in a dreaming relationship with. If we could wake up into that world, we would be really experiencing the things in themselves.
Illusionism: Assumes there is actually nothing beyond what we experience as our mental pictures, and that even our experience of ourselves is a kind of illusion—it's all a dream.
The Dream Analogy
Steiner takes up this comparison to the dream:
"Our dream images interest us as long as we dream and consequently do not detect their dream character. But as soon as we wake, we no longer look for the connections of our dream images among themselves but rather for the physical, physiological, and psychological processes that underlie them."
When we're actually dreaming, we're immersed in the dream and just experiencing what comes to us. It's only when we wake up that we begin to try and interpret it—whether as an expression of our physiology, some psychological event from the day prior, or a precognition. We don't typically try to understand the dream within the dream; we're experiencing it, not interpreting it. Only during our waking experience do we try to understand it, because when we're dreaming, we typically don't know that we're dreaming unless we're lucid dreamers.
However, Steiner points out that there is something which is related to mere perceiving in the way that our waking experience is related to our dreaming: "This something is thinking." Through thinking, we awaken to the conceptual relations or the meaningful relatedness between the things of the outer world that constitute a whole. When we're merely observing, we're sort of dreaming, not yet knowing how things are actually connected with each other until we reflect upon our experience or practice observing thinking.
The Reality of Concepts
In response to criticism from a naive realist position—that thinking is less real than what we perceive with our senses—Steiner writes:
"You say the leaves and blossoms exist quite apart from a perceiving subject, but the concept appears only when a human being confronts 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 leaves and blossoms can unfold. Just so, the concept of a plant arises when a thinking consciousness approaches the plant."
This harkens to the former chapter where Steiner described thinking as the last link in the chain of creation, and that the human as thinker has this vocation of completing the world through knowing it. The human is that creature who brings the concept to the percept and makes a new whole, a wakeful whole of the world.
Understanding Wholes Through Thinking
To illustrate the necessity of thinking in order to know the whole, Steiner points out that a plant is not just what it is before you but includes its whole life cycle. It's only through thinking that we can weave together these separate phases of its growth. It's thinking—or living thinking, imagination—that allows us to weave those separate observations into one whole and to then attune to the spirit or the idea that is bound up with what we're perceiving through our senses, uniting it all into one being.
The same principle applies to understanding a human being. Rather than believing we could know a person just based on having met them one time, limiting them only to that era of their whole life, through imagination or living thinking where we weave together a whole lifetime, we can really get to know that spirit. That spirit combines the concept—the more general concept or archetype of the human—with that individual human, because we only know things or ideas in particularized ways.
This relates to Waldorf education: Steiner's insistence that one educate with the whole lifetime of the student in mind is relevant here, as doing so requires being capable of this kind of living thinking.
Our Mental Organization and the World
Steiner emphasizes a crucial point: "It is not due to the objects that they are given to us at first without their corresponding concepts, but to our mental organization." Concepts are always abstracted out of a living whole that each creature is bound up with, and each creature is also itself a living whole—both percept and concept fused together, but in a dynamic way.
Because we are unique creatures that can think, things appear at first divided off. We introduce this gap; it's not characteristic of the world itself. The world is not actually a duality. "The separating off is a subjective act which is due to the fact that we are not identical with the world process but are a single being among other beings."
The Two-Sided Nature of Human Being
"The perception of myself does not take me beyond the sphere of what belongs to me." There's a distinction between perceiving ourselves (self-awareness) and determining ourselves by means of thinking. "Just as by means of thinking I fit any single external percept into the whole world context, so by means of thinking I integrate into the world process the percepts I have made of myself."
"In this sense I am a two-sided being. I am enclosed within the sphere which I perceive as that of my personality, but I am also the bearer of an activity which from a higher sphere defines my limited existence."
The Universality of Thinking
"Our thinking is not individual like our sensing 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."
He gives the example of a triangle: though we might grow into our individual recognition of the concept of a triangle through different experiences, the concept triangle is common for all of us. It's the same regardless of what word we use to designate the concept. By drawing on the world of concepts, we have this potential to find consensus or unity between human beings. We can bring our thinking into alignment with each other. If concepts weren't universal, then even though translation is never perfect, it would be impossible. The fact that we can intelligibly communicate with each other suggests that ideas do have some kind of transcendent or universal reality to them.
"In thinking we have that element given us which welds our separate individuality into one whole with the cosmos. In so far as we sense and feel and also perceive, we are single beings. In so far as we think, we are the all-one being that pervades everything."
Knowledge and Its Task
"This is the deeper meaning of our two-sided nature: we see coming into being in us a force complete and absolute in itself, a force that is universal, but we learn to know it not as it issues from the center of the world but rather at a point in the periphery. Were we to know it at its source, we should understand the whole riddle of the universe the moment we became conscious"—that would be a kind of divine omniscience. But we're limited; we only participate finitely as particular individuals in the universality of thinking.
The fact that our thinking reaches out beyond our separate existence and relates itself to the universal world existence gives rise to the fundamental desire for knowledge in us. Our infinite desire to know the world is a reflection of that.
Steiner then defines knowledge: "In thinking beings the concept rises up when they confront the external thing." It is that part of the thing which we receive not from without but from within—thinking or the concept comes not physically from within but spiritually from within. "To match up or to unite the two elements, inner and outer, concept and percept, is the task of knowledge." Knowledge is this dynamic participatory activity where we carefully attend to phenomena and thereby potentially receive the intuitions that help us to meaningfully understand the world and negotiate life.
Intuition as the Source of Thinking
"In contrast to the content of the percept which is given to us from without (including our experience of feelings and past ideas and memories), the content of thinking appears inwardly. The form in which this first makes its appearance we will call intuition. Intuition is for thinking what observation is for the percept. Intuition and observation are the sources of our knowledge."
"To explain a thing, to make it intelligible, means nothing else than to place it into the context from which it has been torn by the peculiar character of our organization."
Concepts are always abstractions to the extent that they are pieces of a larger living whole, and to explain something is to place it back into a larger context and to understand it in relation to other things. “This is only necessary because we are at the same time beings that perceive the world through our senses but also beings that can think”—there's this tension between the particularity of embodied perception and the capacity to think or participate in the cognition of universal ideas, and so then potentially unite the world again in wakeful knowledge.
Chapter 6: Human Individuality
The Nature of Percepts
If you've been carefully following this, the question might arise: what really is a percept if thinking is what determines the percept or makes it intelligible, puts it into connection with other things, and allows us to recognize it as some kind of discrete object?
Steiner writes: "The question asked in this general way is absurd. What is a percept? A percept emerges always as something perfectly definite, as a concrete content. This content is directly given and is completely contained in what is given. The only question one can ask concerning the given content is what it is apart from perception—that is, what it is for thinking. The question concerning the 'what' of a percept can therefore only refer to the conceptual intuition that corresponds to this percept."
What he's saying is that the question "what is a percept?" can only actually be answered by thinking. As I mentioned in one of the prior videos when the notion of the percept as a concept was introduced, articulating this abstraction is something that Steiner feels is necessary to articulate the process of perception and cognition so that we can distinguish these different elements of what goes into it—the objective world, the mental picture, and our subjective experience through thinking. But in reality, it's one living, integral process. If there is ever a percept without a concept, it is only ever provisional, temporarily lacking a concept. The notion of a pure percept is an abstraction that we can only entertain because of the situation of our organization splitting the world into two. But nonetheless, this abstract notion of the percept is key in Steiner's whole presentation of knowing the world because it allows us recognize the distinction between the world apart from our mental pictures.
Subjective and Objective Percepts
"To form a link between something subjective and something objective is impossible for any process that is real in the naive sense—that is, one that can be perceived. It is possible only for thinking. Therefore, what appears for our perception to be external to the percept of myself as subject is for us objective."
This brings us back to the mental picture. By maintaining the abstract notion of the percept prior to its conceptualization, its becoming intelligible through that, he's able to keep in view the objective world which we internalize in mental pictures that then modify our inner world, which he called in a former chapter our “self-percept.”
"The mental picture is therefore a subjective percept in contrast with the objective percept which occurs when the object is present in the field of vision." We see a rose and we attend to it—that's the objective percept. It's stimulating this mental image, being filtered through our organism. Then I remember that rose later on when I'm no longer standing before it—I have the subjective percept of the rose within me, and it's modified my inner world. I know that there's an objective percept because I have taken with me an echo of it in the form of the memory image of the rose.
Steiner says confusing the subjective percept (that memory image of the rose) with the objective percept leads to the misconception contained in idealism—that the world is just our mental picture. This mental picture, as we'll find out, internalizing through experience the outer world, is crucial for the act of knowledge and why it requires the participation of the individual—why, for instance, one would make main lesson books in Waldorf education rather than just receive information passively.
Returning to Naive Realism Through Thinking
He concludes the chapter by suggesting that a deeper understanding of the mental picture, which he'll be exploring in the subsequent chapters, will be necessary in order to understand how the process of knowledge is bound up with practical life.
In the addendum, Steiner goes back into that dialectic from naive realism, where we take the world as self-evident and don't really think that thinking itself has much to contribute, then realize that our organism is constituting to some extent the experience of the world that we have in the mental pictures that we perceive of it, and that there is some kind of potential disconnect between our mental pictures and the world that we may need to correct, arriving at critical idealism.
Steiner says that if we stay within critical idealism, we're closing ourselves off to that fundamental desire or craving for knowledge, which is a mark of our relationship with the life of the whole, with our still being part of nature even though separated out from it. He says the naive realism can be re-embraced if we recognize that "inside everything we can experience by means of perceiving, be it within ourselves or outside in the world, there is something which cannot suffer the fate of having a mental picture interpose itself between the process and the person observing it. This something is thinking. With regard to thinking, we can maintain the point of view of naive realism."
We can have a relationship with the real world; we can say that what we experience is the real world as long as we are also including our thinking activity within it, and that this thinking can help us to correct our perceptions as we go. This reaffirmation of naive realism—a qualified form of it that we can only embrace to the extent that we recognize that thinking is always at work in perception—seems to be a nod to Goethe, who in his famous exchange with the philosopher and poet Schiller claimed that he was able to “see ideas” in his practice of attending to the plant world. Steiner would say yes, Goethe could see ideas, not just with his physical eyes, but also and more indispensably, with the eye of the mind.
The Universal Cosmic Process
As Steiner alludes to at the end of Chapter 5, the subsequent chapters will be dedicated to further clarifying the nature of the mental picture so as to further illuminate what the pursuit of knowledge consists in, how one practically unfolds it in personal experience.
Steiner begins by saying: "In explaining mental pictures, philosophers have found the chief difficulty in the fact that we ourselves are not the outer things, and yet our mental pictures must have a form corresponding to the things." This is a problem for philosophers who subscribe to the critical idealist perspective, because if what we actually experience are only mental pictures of things in themselves, how is it, for instance, that we seem to be able to intersubjectively recognize similar things? Of course, there are preferences and differences of interpretation sometimes, but for the most part we tend to have a shared experience of the world.
Steiner wants to claim that this difficulty understanding the connection between the outer objects and ourselves is actually illusory. He says: "That section of the world which I perceive to be myself as subject is permeated by the stream of the universal cosmic process. To my perception I am in the first instance confined within the limits bounded by my skin. But all that is contained within this skin belongs to the cosmos as a whole. Hence, for a relation to subsist between my organism and an object external to me, it is by no means necessary that something of the object should slip into me or make an impression on my mind like a signet ring on wax. The forces which are at work inside my body are the same as those which exist outside. Therefore, I really am the things—not, however, I in so far as I am a percept of myself as subject, but I in so far as I am a part of the universal world process. This universal world process produces equally the percept of the tree out there and the percept of my eye in here."
He then takes up the pole of doubt and acknowledges that it's the physiological proofs that present the most difficult obstacles to embracing this view, because of how certain materialistic interpretations of them have inclined us to unconsciously understand the relationship between our organism and the world itself.
The example Steiner gives is the fact that an electric shock is perceived by the eye as light, by the ear as noise, by the nerves of the skin as impact, and by the nose as a phosphoric smell. Some would be led by these facts to conclude that what's really fundamental is the electric shock and not how our senses register it for our experience.
But Steiner says: "Those who from the fact that an electrical process calls forth light in the eye conclude that what we sense as light is only a mechanical process of motion when outside our organism forget that they are only passing from one percept to another and not at all to something lying beyond percepts." The metaphysical assumption behind the interpretation that Steiner's criticizing is that the world of physics, the electromagnetic forces—these are what's really real. But Steiner is saying actually what you're referring to as really real is just another field or another layer of the world of percepts that we may not be able to perceive directly with our senses, and yet which still relies upon our experience of the senses and what they allow us to indirectly observe through technological or mathematical extension.
He draws an analogy to another fact of our perception which is exploited by the movie industry or any film/video medium, which plays a succession of images at a certain rate that produces the illusion of motion. This rate works with something that's distinct about our perceptual organization which results in the illusion of motion. In demonstrating this, we're not really saying anything of substance about the relationship between our mental picture and the outer objects—whether it's of light from the electric shock or the illusion of motion from the succession of images at a particular frame rate—but rather we are just gaining more insight into the character of our particular organization.
Mental Pictures as Individualized Concepts
As Steiner writes: "A mental picture is nothing but an intuition related to a particular percept. It is a concept that was once connected with a certain percept." So I saw the rose, and now the concept of a rose is associated with that experience, that particular experience of that rose for me. "It is a concept that was once connected with a certain percept and which retains the reference to this percept. My concept of a lion, for instance, is not formed out of my percepts of a lion"—because intuitions come from the other end—"but my mental picture of a lion is very definitely formed according to a percept."
Every individual will have unique mental pictures from experience referring to the concepts that are universal. Thus, as Steiner concludes, the mental picture is an individualized concept. We can relate this again to the Waldorf method of having students make their own main lesson books, whereby students individualize concepts through personal experience, connecting concepts with definite percepts through art, through writing, through enacting the ideas in some kind of media.
The Role of Feeling in Knowledge
Steiner says we can be imbalanced in either direction. We can lack in the power of intuition and so not be able to really extract from our experiences the concepts that might help to recognize similar patterns in future situations—things we could avoid or things we might look for. Whereas someone who might have some facility for intuiting concepts and connecting them but who doesn’t have sharp sense organs or may just have little experience in life, may be sheltered, wouldn't really know how to practically implement those concepts or make them relevant to everyday experience.
But Steiner says there's another factor for creatures such as ourselves in the act of knowledge, and that is feeling. Because we are beings who can think and yet also have embodied, finite perception, we have self-consciousness. We have the participation in universal thinking which helps to illuminate the nature of objects in the world of percepts, but we ourselves are also a percept, and that thinking relates those objects to our subjectivity, our self-percept, our personal self-consciousness.
"We are not satisfied merely to refer the percept by means of thinking to the concept, but we relate them also to our particular subjectivity, our individual ego. The expression of this individual relationship is feeling, which manifests itself as pleasure or displeasure. Thinking and feeling correspond to the two-fold nature of our being to which reference has already been made. Thinking is the element through which we take part in the universal cosmic process; feeling is that through which we can withdraw ourselves into the narrow confines of our own being."
This might seem surprising for those of us who would think that something like empathy connects us with others, but as Steiner suggested in an earlier chapter, as thinking creatures there's always the mix of thoughts and feelings. Feeling includes the polarity of pleasure and displeasure, or sympathy and antipathy, and is a kind of reflection of our being—limited being with a need to survive, a need to be self-concerned. But because we are also thinking beings that have this possibility of attaining to a relationship through thinking with the whole in a wakeful way, through thinking we can produce mental pictures of the Good in others and even entertain the notion of a feeling that reflects our awareness of our potential unity—wakeful unity—with all things through thinking.
"One might be tempted to see in the life of feeling an element that is more richly saturated with reality than is the contemplation of the world through thinking. But the reply to this is that the life of feeling after all has this richer meaning only for my individual self. For the universe as a whole, my life of feeling can have value only if, as a percept of myself, the feeling enters into connection with a concept and in this roundabout way links itself to the cosmos."
True Individuality
"A true individuality will be the one who reaches up with his or her feelings to the farthest possible extent in the region of the ideal"—perhaps something like cosmic love or desire which reflects this understanding of ourselves as thinking beings who can potentially encompass the whole. This would require that we make a mental picture of that cosmic love by uniting the idea of it with our own feeling.
Steiner acknowledges the two-fold aspect to the uniqueness, the individual character of our mental pictures. There's the fact of our situatedness in time and space and how our personal experience in that context uniquely individualizes the concepts with reference to those particular percepts. But then he says also: "Each of us combines special feelings, and these in the most varying degrees of intensity, with his percepts. This is just the individual element in the personality of each one of us. It is what remains over when we have allowed fully for all the determining factors in our surroundings."
One might connect this with the earlier mention of the characterological dimension of our organization—what is unique about each personality. But with Steiner's whole characterization of thinking and perception, this wouldn't need to be conceived as something that's inwardly determining our behavior, but something that, through active thinking, we artistically cultivate by attuning feeling to certain concepts of our choosing, such that through our feeling there is this connection made between ideals and the living of life.
As Steiner writes: "Feeling is the means whereby, in the first instance, concepts gain concrete life and relate us to the outer world through which we bring our ideals into the world itself."
Chapter 7: Are There Limits to Knowledge?
Dualism vs. Monism
Steiner opens this chapter by rehashing his characterization of dualism and then putting that into connection with his monistic alternative—a qualified monism. In comparison to the materialist, spiritualist, or their incoherent combination which reify the apparent duality that is introduced by our organization—this duality is overcome through the act of knowledge defining his qualified monism—the bringing together of percept and concept through the individualized concept, the mental picture, which forges a new unity between the human subject and the world.
As Steiner writes: "Thinking then overcomes this particularity of the percepts by assigning to each percept its rightful place in the world as a whole." Again, implicit in this is the human desire to know, which is this expression of our belonging to the world. But our organization separates us out from it, being both a perceiver and a thinker, but through thinking and thinking's connection with feeling, we can forge that unity once again. This would be an ongoing process, never completely finished, and so this is one reason why Steiner can claim that there are in principle no limits to knowledge.
The Critical Idealist's Error
Impassable barriers to knowledge only exist, in Steiner's view, for critical idealists who follow Kant in claiming that we don't actually have access to the real world of things in themselves, but only to our mental pictures as conditioned by our organization.
Steiner compares the critical idealist dualism to his monism by describing the former as issuing in a kind of doubling of the more simple relationship between percept and concept: there’s the object in itself (the thing as it is “out there,” beyond our perceptual tabulations), then the way in which it is constructed and appears in our consciousness, and then the true concept that corresponds to it, which is all we can supposedly claim to know.
"With this," says Steiner, "the dualist therefore splits up the process of knowledge into two parts. The one part, namely the production of the perceptual object out of the thing in itself, he conceives of as taking place outside consciousness, whereas the other, the combination of the percept with the concept and the reference of the concept to the object, take place according to him within consciousness."
As Steiner says: "The objectively real process in the subject by means of which the percept comes about, and still more the objective relations between things in themselves, remain for such a dualist inaccessible to direct knowledge. According to him, man can obtain only conceptual representations of the objectively real."
This is again the mistake of refusing to recognize that thinking is what determines the relationship between percepts, assuming that there is something more “real”—but also like the percepts themselves in the sense that they are considered to be something “out there” rather than something that's put forth through thinking.
The Problem with "Real" Principles
As Steiner writes: "The ideal principles which thinking discovers seem too airy for the dualist, or insubstantial, and he seeks in addition real principles with which to support them." So the dualist isn't that far off from the naive realist who doesn't really believe that thinking is anything substantial, but rather the only things that can exist are what can be perceived.
If anything else does exist—for instance, Steiner gives the example of the concept of a species—the naive realist is actually forced to believe in something immaterial in the sense that the tulip that one perceives with their senses somehow maintains its existence in what is referred to as heredity, even when it is not actually present. The tulip passes away, but something persists, as evidenced by the fact that more tulips will arise in the future. So the naive realist is forced to embrace something like the idea of the tulip but conceives it in the register of percepts or material bodies—it's just displaced somehow, into genes, for instance. This also applies to the conceptualizing of things like physical forces.
Steiner concludes: "The imperceptible forces which proceed from the perceptible things are in fact unjustified hypotheses from the standpoint of naive realism, for which that is most real which can be perceived through the senses."
Metaphysical Realism
Steiner says this self-contradictory theory leads to what he calls "metaphysical realism." By metaphysical realism, Steiner here means something specific—a certain view which seems very similar to what he referred to as transcendental realism earlier. As he describes it, metaphysical realism posits "in addition to the perceptible reality, an imperceptible reality which it conceives on the analogy of the perceptible one"—basically saying that in addition to the world that we perceive, there is a world beyond the world that we can perceive of forces that gives rise to this one.
But Steiner is critical of this. As he said over and over, the relationship between various levels of the perceptible world—whether they're indirectly perceivable like electricity or the various manifestations of quantum physics, or what we can actually perceive with our senses—those connections are only made explicable by thinking. It's not the case that one class of percepts gives rise to another class of percepts—that one has ontological priority over another. They do have connections with each other, but those relationships can't be explained in terms of percepts, because the processes that we can study in my brain, for instance, are just as much mental pictures as what I experience in my soul.
As Steiner says: "The purely ideal relationship is then arbitrarily made into something similar to a perceptible one"—that's the mistake that he is constantly trying to bring our attention to. "If we are to avoid the contradiction of imperceptible percepts, we must admit that the relationships which thinking establishes between the percepts can have no other mode of existence for us than of concepts."
Laws of Nature as Ideal Connections
He then describes the monism that he's offering as a combination of one-sided realism with idealism into a higher unity, in the sense that it recognizes that our organization presents the world to us in mental pictures, but that thinking can clarify the relationship between those mental pictures and bring us back into a relationship with the world by clarifying the relationship between our self-percept and the world of percepts without.
Then he says something really interesting: "Monism replaces those imperceptible forces that belong to the fields of physics and what have you but are theorized according to the perceptible world—these are replaced by ideal connections which are gained through thinking." He says: "The laws of nature are just such connections. A law of nature is in fact nothing but the conceptual expression of the connection between certain percepts." So we could say that the laws of nature reflect certain habits of thinking or patterns of thinking in the mind of the cosmos.
There are No Limits to Knowledge
We're then brought back to the question of the limits of knowledge. As Steiner writes: "The question concerning the limits of knowledge exists only for naive and metaphysical realism, both of which see in the contents of the soul only an ideal representation of the real world."
For naive realists, ideas are just imitations of what is really real out there in sense perception, but they forget or overlook the fact that it's only through thinking that we're able to recognize the connections between what we perceive in the outer world. Whereas the critical idealist or metaphysical realist thinks that the mental pictures that we have within ourselves are images of another real world that isn't disclosed in sense perception and that we only have indirect access to. So for both, there are limits to knowledge.
As Steiner writes: "For these theories, what exists outside the subject is something absolute, founded in itself, and what is contained within the subject is a picture of this absolute but quite external to it. The completeness of knowledge depends on the greater or lesser resemblance between the picture and the absolute object. A being with fewer senses than man will perceive less of the world, one with more senses will perceive more. The former will accordingly have a less complete knowledge than the latter."
But because thinking is essential for knowing the world—articulating the differences between things and placing them in context—it's not the case that having more senses would mean that one knows more or knows more correctly, but rather how each organism is constituted with their various sense organs merely gives a unique window onto the world that still nonetheless requires thinking to draw those percepts into a kind of intelligible relationship with each other.
Knowledge as a Human Affair
"For monism," he says, "the situation is different. The manner in which the world continuum appears to be rent asunder into subject and object depends on the organization of the perceiving being. The object is not absolute but merely relative with reference to this particular subject. Bridging over the antithesis, therefore, can again take place only in the quite specific way that is characteristic of the particular human subject or thinking creature."
"As soon as the 'I,' which is separated from the world in the act of perceiving, fits itself back into the world continuum through thoughtful contemplation, all further questioning ceases, having been but a consequence of the separation." Very interesting here that for Steiner, questions are the means by which we forge a unity with the world, and that act of forging is itself what knowledge means.
Now, even though he mentions this earlier in the chapter, his claim that there are no real limits to knowledge makes more sense. What might otherwise seem like a quite arrogant claim actually ends up appearing more realistic and practical, a more sober understanding of what knowledge means, closer to everyday life than armchair knowledge.
"It follows from the concept of the act of knowing as we have defined it that one cannot speak of limits to knowledge. Knowing is not a concern of the world in general but an affair which man must settle for himself. In our knowledge we are connected with questions which arise for us through the fact that a sphere of percepts conditioned by place, time, and our subjective organization is confronted by a sphere of concepts pointing to the totality of the universe. My task consists in reconciling these two spheres with both of which I am well acquainted. Here one cannot speak of a limit to knowledge. It may be that at any particular moment this or that remains unexplained because through our place in life we are prevented from perceiving the things involved. What is not found today, however, may be found tomorrow. The limits due to these causes are only transitory and can be overcome by the progress of perception and thinking."
Knowledge as Collective Spiritual Striving
This confidence reflects Steiner's conviction that we are really part of the world and that knowledge is not this complicated process of inwardly mirroring the world or reproducing something that's “really real” about the world in our souls, taking in information, but rather that it consists in this dynamic process of attending to the world as it discloses itself in our perception for our observation and then reflecting on the relationship between ourselves as the observer/questioner and the things. So it always comes down to: what is it that we're seeking to know, and how can we constantly vary our position and look at it from as many different angles as possible?
It seems implicit that for Steiner the act of knowledge is not just an individual enterprise but a collective one as well—one that the evolution of our whole species and its history and all of our cultural activities are bound up with. As he says in an earlier chapter, remembering that knowledge is this pursuit to bridge over the apparent duality introduced by our organization: "This feeling makes us strive of desire to bridge over this antithesis, and in this bridging lies ultimately the whole spiritual striving of mankind. The history of our spiritual life is a continuing search for the unity between ourselves and the world. Religion, art, and science follow, one and all, this aim."
All of these disciplines might converge when we conceive of knowledge this way. Knowledge then isn't just about having the abstract armchair collection of information about the world, but having a kind of wisdom—a living wisdom that binds us to the world in a new wakeful unity and perhaps informs how we may now consciously direct the future of human evolution.
The Expanded Concept of Percept
In the addendum of this chapter, Steiner takes up the pole of doubt again and addresses the metaphysical dualist tendency to construe knowledge as this endeavor of trying to get to know what's “really real” through the indirect disclosure of it in our mental pictures—that this world of quantum physics is more real than the manifest world that we perceive with our senses.
Steiner acknowledges that "man's being quite concretely is determined not only by what his organization presents to him as an immediate percept"—what I see of a plant through my senses—"but also by the fact that from this immediate perception other things are excluded," like ultraviolet light or other things, perhaps even beings. "Just as it is necessary for life that in addition to the conscious waking state there should be an unconscious sleeping state, so for man's experience of himself it is necessary that in addition to the sphere of his sense perception there should be another sphere—in fact a larger one—of elements not perceptible to the senses but belonging to the same field from which the sense percepts come."
What he's saying is that even these indirectly perceptible percepts, percepts that we don't have directly through the senses, like electricity—they're still part of the world of percepts. So he's acknowledging this large sphere of percepts that we can only come to indirectly, but once we become aware of them—for instance, the notion of gravity, that things fall to the Earth—even though we can't see it with our eyes, it nonetheless enters into the realm of observation or perception to the extent that we've made it intelligible through concepts. This is something that we have as a gift through the striving of humanity as a whole, the pursuit of science. I didn't discover gravity—someone else did—but thanks to their discovery, we can all individualize the concept by running through experiments which demonstrate it to us in mental pictures.
Then Steiner says something that I think is really important for anyone who's interested in seeing the connection between the Philosophy of Freedom and Steiner's later anthroposophical, more esoteric dispensation. He says: "It is to be remembered too that the idea of percept developed in this book is not to be confused with the idea of external sense percept, which is but a special instance of it."
Remember, even ideas, once they've already been thought and are now a kind of mental image for us, those also are included by Steiner within this concept of percept. Percept is anything that we can observe. So we can potentially—maybe through Steiner's anthroposophical training meditations—expand the range of what we can perceive, perhaps even to to realities of soul and spirit.
"The reader will gather from what has gone before, but even more from what will follow, that percept is here taken to be everything that approaches man through the senses or through the spirit before it has been grasped by the actively elaborated concept." What he means by "before it has been grasped by the actively elaborated concept" is that it's something that we might have an observation or an experience of before we've understood it, before we've been able to bring the corresponding concept to it and make sense of it. Like when you have a dream and you're wondering what it meant—you've met the percept of the dream, but you don't know how to understand it yet. You don't have the corresponding concepts that would make it intelligible for you yet. The same is true of potential spiritual experiences outside of the dream realm.
"Senses as we ordinarily understand the term are not necessary in order to have percepts in soul or spirit experience. It might be said that this extension of our ordinary usage is not permissible of the word percept, but such extension is absolutely necessary," he claims, "if we are not to be prevented by the current sense of a word from enlarging our knowledge in certain fields."
So his innovation in the notion of percept—which philosophers have been doing throughout history, altering the way we think about certain concepts by using them in poetic or novel ways (a good use case of Owen Barfield’s take on “poetic diction” as conducive of knowledge—might enable us to include within the range of possible observation much more than what is delivered by the senses.