Rudolf Steiner’s Theory of Cognition: A Key To His Spiritual-Scientific Weltanschauung

Abstract

Ever since the Enlightenment, the educated classes of Western civilization have
experienced an increasingly unbridgeable gulf between faith in a transcendent spiritual
reality and faith in natural science. The source of the divide appears to spring from our
internal experience as knowing subjects influencing, or being influenced by, external
objects and events. Various metaphysical solutions to this dualistic dilemma have been
promulgated over the past two centuries from hard-nosed positivism to Romantic
Idealism, all of which have been deemed unsatisfactory for one reason or another. Rudolf
Steiner’s response was to develop a Weltanschauung (worldview or world conception)
that harmonized the findings of natural science with the reality of the spiritual worlds.
This dissertation applies a multidisciplinary approach to understanding Steiner’s
spiritual-scientific Weltanschauung. It begins with a study of Steiner’s biography in
context, using his theory of psychological and spiritual development as a framework.
Steiner was a theosopher and a philosopher trained in the natural sciences—a unique
combination in fin de siecle Europe. His mysticism was driven by lifelong clairvoyant
perceptions of the dead and other spiritual beings. Were these experiences fictive or
factual? Like Swedenborg’s clairvoyant perception of a Stockholm fire 247 miles away,
Steiner empirically validated his perceptions and then tried to construct a philosophical
proof of supersensible cognition.

The foundation of Steiner’s Weltanschauung is his three-stage theory of ordinary
cognition, which is an objective idealist revision of Kant’s epistemology. Steiner’s initial
goal was to convince the elites of his day that intuitive thinking is at the heart of ordinary
cognition. If true, then supersensible cognition, which is also founded on intuition, must
be possible. However, to achieve the three higher stages of knowledge, esoteric initiation
is required.

The study concludes with an assessment of the Hermetic sources and motivations
of Steiner’s anthroposophical Weltanschauung, as well as an assessment of the success of
his project to save Western civilization from the most pernicious effects of materialistic
modernity.