As a foundation of spiritual science we have to come to the substance of thinking. Every-day thoughts, also scientific thoughts, are just images – whether true or not, right or not. This is the characteristic of intellectual thinking. We don’t have to make greater discretion in the word ‘thinking’. Every thought is an image and it has no being at all. That is why lies are so easily told, because they seem not to be real. One can think and speak whatever seems to come in handy. Thinking has no substance, no ‘matter’, it produces images.
We have seen that this lack of substance has to do with the lack of willpower in thinking. Even hard thinking in science gives only a very small little bit of will in our thoughts. They drift away like the air. Thoughts, in their best form – in science – are images of form, of notion and they are opposite to matter, to substance. Outside, the things are material; inside, in my thoughts, there is only form. Even if I were to succeed in understanding everything there is in the world, if I had found the complete realm of forms, I would be missing something: matter. This is the Aristotelian position. Aristotle couldn’t find a bridge between form and matter. All the same, he pointed at this bridge in his writings about God, about the unmoved mover, about actuality. But this point didn’t become substantial itself.
And so human history had to work through many ways of thinking, to see a young man in the last years of the 19th century, who found the solution, which is not an image itself again, but which is a world miracle, an enormous step in the development to true humanity.
Of course, the big world hasn’t seen this, and where it has been seen it has been fought against heavily. Only very few people have understood it and still fewer have followed the challenge. Maybe the time has now come to change that…
The young man, Rudolf Steiner, found that Fichte gave in his philosophy the missing link. He described the human I. And he perceived that the I can become active through its own will. But he failed to describe clearly what kind of activity the I can ‘will’. Steiner found the answer: The I posits thinking. Here is not meant the associative thoughts that come and go, but the true thinking, by means of which we come to knowledge. The ‘nature’ of the I is the setting for thinking and the positing of notions, of concepts. Thus Steiner could write:
‘The I is freely able to become active of itself, and therefore it can also produce the category of cognition through self-determination; in the rest of the world, by objective necessity the categories are connected with the given corresponding to them. It must be the task of ethics and metaphysics to investigate the nature of this free self-determination, on the basis of our theory of knowledge. These sciences will also have to discuss whether the I is able to objectify ideas other than those of cognition. The present discussion shows that the I is free when it cognizes, when it objectifies the ideas of cognition. For when the directly given and the thought-form belonging to it are united by the I in the process of cognition, then the union of these two elements of reality — which otherwise would forever remain separated in consciousness — can only take place through a free act.‘ (GA 3)
But this was not the only thing. This kind of unfolding thoughts out of free-ness could still produce only forms and never matter. But Fichte was the philosopher who could accomplish addressing the riddle of form and matter. Because the I is not only form, it is something real – although modern philosophy contradicts this and posits it in the realm of ‘just an image’. We don’t have to believe that the I is something real from the beginning, we can try to find the concept of the I. But by doing so, the I has to become strong, much stronger than it naturally is. And by this becoming stronger, it becomes a substantial thought, the first form that brings forth its matter. That is not a theory anymore, it can be perceived. And this perception goes beyond all other perceptions in our life. I could begin to sing a hymn here. And maybe I should really do that and count the blessings, the mercy of the I that finds its form and brings on its matter, here, in an article next week
Not yet translated in EnglishThe substance of thinking by Mieke Mosmuller
Een reactie
Dear Mieke,
Not long ago I came across the chapter ‘The Categories of thinking’ on page 103 in the book “The Individuality of Colour” by Elizabeth Koch/Gerard Wagner (original German title is „Die Individualität der Fabre“) in which the authors stated that in the lecture cycle (of January 1914) R.Steiner did extend the 10 Aristotelian Categories to 12 and related them to the 12 zodiacal aspects.
They referred to 5 lectures of R.Steiner, indicating just Berlin, January 1914. However, in GA 151 (which relates to that cycle titled ‘Human and Cosmic Thought’) one can see only 4 lectures where R.Steiner presents only 12 World Conceptions, but I was not able to find in them R.Steiner’s covering of the 12 Categories .
I wonder whether you could help me to find where and how R.Stener exactly expressed (in original German) those twelve categories (including those two which he added) and how they are actually written in German?
So far, I could find only 8 Categories exactly expressed in German by R.Steiner in his lecture given in Dornach on 22 April 1924, GA 233a:
«Wenn ich es Ihnen aufschreibe, sind sie ebenso abstrakt wie:
1. …
2. Quantität, also Menge
3. Qualität, Eigenschaft
4. Relation
5. Raum
6. Zeit
7. Lage
8. …
9. Tun
10. Leiden
Da haben Sie eine Anzahl von Begriffen. Lernen Sie mit diesen Begriffen, die zuerst Aristoteles dem Alexander vorgeführt hat, lernen Sie mit diesen Begriffen dasselbe vollführen, was Sie gelernt haben mit
, dann lernen Sie aus Qualität, Quantität, Relation, Raum, Zeit, Lage, Tun, Leiden -, aus dem lernen Sie lesen im Kosmos.
[…]
Tief esoterisch ist der Sinn, der lebt in diesen acht, oder man kann sie auch auf zehn erweitern, in diesen acht oder zehn einfachen Begriffen. Und wir lernen eigentlich immer mehr in diesen einfachen Begriffen leben, aber wir müssen streben, sie so lebendig in der Seele zu erleben, wie man in der Seele lebendig erlebt das Abc, wenn man eben einen reichgegliederten, geisterfüllten Inhalt hat.»
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Anmerkung: Diese beiden Kategorien fehlen im Vorlesungsprotokoll:
1. Entität
8. Zustand [Entität an sich selbst vorgenommen hat]
Look forward to hearing from you.
With kind regards
Yuriy Yurchenko
family doctor, St.Petersburg, Russia