When Healing Becomes Educating, Vol. 1 - Waldorf Research Institute

merely general names for individual objects (the way the term “horse” is the
general name for all individual horses)? Or is there a horse as such, i.e., the
idea “horse” as something that truly exists and is therefore real? The point
at issue was whether universals are nominal or real.
Those who considered ideas to have reality thought universals existed in
three forms: ante rem, in re and post rem. 2 Ante rem meant as a causal principle
prior to the things themselves, as the creative thought of God; in re meant
within things, as the cause generating their form; and post rem meant after
the things, in the individual human being’s comprehension.
The final victory in medieval times went not to the realists but to the
nominalists, who considered universals to be mere names.
Looking back, we have to be aware that the universals debate reflected
an age where thinking was primarily religious, with rational or “scientific”
views only of secondary importance. Today, the opposite is the case, with
thinking essentially scientific, and the search for wider views secondary to
this. We therefore have to use the opposite approach today, beginning not
with God but with the human being. The issues, then, are as follows:
1 Does the human being have the—even merely potential—ability for
causal perception where the individual object is concerned? This must
be the case if there are to be post rem universals, i.e., universals in
human compre hension;
2 Is it possible (and if so, how?) to use this ability to perceive a formgenerating
cause? This must be the case (in the widest sense) if
modern, mainly scientifically-oriented human beings are to be justified
in speaking of in re universals;
3 Is it possible to perceive connections between such form-generating
principles that follow specific laws? This must be the case if modern
human beings are to be able to see that the natural world reflects a
spiritual order and that ante rem universals therefore exist.
To take up the universals debate today, therefore, means facing up to
the three unspoken dogmas on which modern science is based. They are the
modern denials, the modern opposition to the three classes of universals in
medieval realism of ideas.
Both debates, the medieval one and the one which now at the end of
the 20th Century is becoming both possible and necessary, basically are
an attempt to use rational thinking to establish whether the reality of the
natural world and of the human being bases on the principle of Christian
trinity or not.
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