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

therefore inevitably reject anthroposophy, where contradictory views are
held. “Working out of anthroposophy” is therefore doomed to fail where
modern science is concerned.
A scientific revolution, with individual specialist fields taking new
forms, will only be possible when a new approach is used in anthroposophy,
and that is “working towards anthroposophy” (in my view a Platonic element).
Then at last we shall have a new universals debate in biology and
medicine in relation to anthroposophy, and it will be possible for humanity
as a whole to find the true way that leads to the medicinal plant.
Scientific debate at the end of the 20th Century
Rudolf Steiner’s epistemology
Having taken a look at the karmic encounter between Platonists
and Aristo telians, something which according to Steiner is or should be
characteristic of the present situation in anthroposophy, I’d now like to go
back to the methodological fusion of Platonism and Aristotelianism.
One contribution to the historical evolution of philosophy, which
I omitted when discussing the evolution from Plato to Wittgenstein,
definitely merits attention. Wittgenstein’s end point was also the call for
a new beginning, and such a beginning had been made a few years before
Wittgenstein when Rudolf Steiner published his books on the principles of
knowledge.
It is not possible to go into detail here, and I assume that these works
are essentially known. Let me briefly refer to the following important aspects
in Steiner’s efforts to find a new approach:
• Steiner aimed for an unconditional approach to the theory of
knowledge and to science. He found it in what he called the “purely
given,” i.e., sen sory perceptions not penetrated by thought or put in a
particular order; 15
• Considering the “purely given,” we discover the vast extent to which
every day observations (even more so scientific findings) are based on
thinking. 16
With these two aspects, Steiner rehabilitated the rank of sensory
percepts and restored reality to the thought element which had become
obscured in the universals debate. The central statement in his theory of
knowledge is: “The act of cognition is the synthesis of percept and concept;
percept and concept together represent the object as a whole.” 17
At this point, a vital question arises, at least in the present context.
Is Steiner’s approach sufficiently stable to stand up to a new universals
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