Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

lectures on Aquinas published as The Redemption of Thinking, Steiner describesthinking as mainly a dynamic, creative activity, in contrast to Kant, who heldthat the main use of thinking is to portray the given, sensory world. Steinersays, “The primary reason for the existence of thinking is not that it shouldmake pictures of the outer world, but that it should bring to full developmentbeing. That it portrays to us the outer world is a secondary process”(Redemption). Like Steiner, Emerson seeks “original relation” (Nature, “Introduction”).He seeks a starting point for epistemology that neither assumesthat the content of experience is as we perceive it, nor that it is always beingfalsified by thinking. The first position he calls naive (or uncritical) realism;the second, naive rationalism (Truth and Knowledge, and passim).A proper starting point for a theory of knowledge must be neitherobjective, in the sense of ignoring a human knower, nor subjective, in thesense of being untrustworthy. It must be indubitable, yet pertain to theknower. In order to find a starting point for epistemology, Steiner wantsto separate the directly given world picture from that which is derived bythinking. He says, of course, we never consciously experience this directlygiven world picture because we are always adding our consciousness andits contents. But we can take our world picture and deduct from it what weourselves have added and thereby arrive, in principle if not in fact, at thisdirectly given.Before we continue, notice that Steiner, like Emerson, is not an idealist.Though sensory data cannot provide a starting point for epistemology, itis not because they are sensory but because our thinking itself is uncriticallymixed in with them, whereas the starting point for epistemology must bedirectly given, not just hypothesized or deduced to be directly given. In fact,Steiner gives an example of an error that many would say was a sensoryerror but that he shows is actually an error made by cognition, not by observation.The moon on the horizon appears larger than at the zenith. This,you say, is an error; the moon doesn’t change size as it rises and sets, so mysenses have deceived me. The error, however, is not in the observation—themoon does indeed appear larger in one position, smaller in the other. Theerror comes in the interpretation that this variable appearance of the moonmeans that the moon actually changed size. This is the error, and cognitionmakes it, not observation.Though Steiner exposes the naive rationalism of ascribing such anerror to observation when it should be ascribed to interpretation, Steiner isnot a naive realist. He is not a logical positivist. Like Goethe, whose scientificworks he edited as a young man, Steiner cherishes empiricism, but his greatcontribution is to identify thinking itself as an unrecognized field for obser-179