In this paper, I will present a philosophical system for which any border – epistemological or ontological – is an imagined border. This philosophical system, known as Monism of Thought, was devised in the late nineteenth century by the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner. The paper will briefly describe the primary dimensions of the epistemology and ontology that Steiner’s unique system establishes, refer to the ethics derived from it, and argue that his thought offers a philosophical substrate for thinking about the question of borders and the possibility of their absence, and also for the establishment of social practices that address this question.
Rudolf Steiner is now known primarily as the father of Anthroposophy, identified first and foremost with its educational system. However, the range of Steiner’s thought is much wider, and includes, apart from Anthroposophy, extensive philosophical thinking. In his philosophy, Steiner takes upon himself a weighty task: the phrasing of a unitary-monistic ontology based on an epistemology that represents an alternative to Kant’s epistemology and to its restriction of human consciousness to the knowledge of phenomena rather than the "thing-in-itself". On the basis of his epistemology, Steiner’s ethics establishes a necessary connection between morality and freedom, thus creating an alternative to Kantian ethics and the categorical imperative at its heart.
In the introduction to his book, Truth and Knowledge (Steiner, 1981), in which he establishes his epistemological system, Steiner argues that contemporary philosophy was suffering from an unhealthy faith in Kant. Along with recognition of the immense contribution of Kant’s method to philosophy and science, Steiner argues that a foundation that is sufficient for understanding the world and life can be laid only by adopting an opposing position. Steiner’s epistemology is termed Objective Idealism, and its roots are in his work on Goethe’s scientific method (Steiner, 1988, 2008) and his search for an epistemology on which this method could be founded. This epistemology views the laws of nature discovered in human consciousness as objective laws of nature itself, rather than as subjective laws of the human spirit, as Kant believed (Bergman, 1967, Hebrew).
In his book, The Philosophy of Freedom (Steiner, 1964), he continues to establish his epistemological system and argues that the borders of consciousness are imaginary. He defines the role of consciousness as a blend of two elements that belong equally to the things-in-themselves. According to him, these are the element of perception, which human beings receive from the outside, and the concept, which they receive from within themselves.
Through combining the perception and the concept of a certain thing, human beings are capable, according to Steiner (ibid.), of achieving complete knowledge of the thing. It should be clarified that Steiner does not argue that human beings are unlimited entities. Quite the opposite: the limitations of the human makeup cause the separation that people’s consciousness forms between perceptions and concepts. These limitations also condition the realm of perceptions that people receive from the world around them and the concepts that they can derive from it. At the same time, by uniting the perceptions with their relevant concepts, human consciousness overcomes the separation it creates. Furthermore, the borders of consciousness are not essential to it and through the process of the development of consciousness people can achieve a more complete – less limited – knowledge of the world and of themselves.
The annulment of the borders of consciousness relies on the annulment of borders also in the ontological dimension of Steiner’s philosophy. The perception of the separate existence of various elements in the world is an illusion, he argues, and is based on the nature and limitations of the human makeup. This ontological system describes a unified reality that lacks separation, distinction, and borders between items. The tree we perceive, for example, has no separate existence, and neither do people: the human individual is not detached from the world, argues Steiner (ibid); the individual is part of the world, and there exists a real connection between this part and the whole universe, which is only fragmented in our perceptions.
The real connection between the world’s various details – which human perception perceives as separate – is formed through a common element imbuing all of these details. Steiner (ibid.) calls this common element “thinking”. In his opinion, thinking is “a self-supporting, spiritual web of being” permeating the whole of reality, and this is what provides reality with its unitary form. People’s ability to know is based on the action of the thinking element within them: thus, people know themselves and the world through the same element that permeates the world and human beings and causes their unity. Unlike Kant (1998) – who seeks to analyze the faculty of understanding in order to examine the possibility of apriori concepts born in the understanding – for Steiner (1964), concepts and thinking represent “an internally coherent ideal content” with which the perceptions that appear separate in time and space are imbued. This conceptual content links the various objects that are subject to perception – and also both them and their perceiver – into one global unity.
The philosophical position that annuls the epistemological and ontological validity of borders establishes Steiner’s ethical system. According to this ethical system, known as Ethical Individualism, an ethical action – which is also, necessarily, free – is an action stemming from the conceptual dimension of the person’s being. This dimension is the unique way in which the unified conceptual content of the world sparks within a person. People are distinguished from others, according to Steiner, not due to their living in completely different spiritual worlds, but because each of them perceives – in a way that defines his or her uniqueness – different intuitions from the shared, united world of ideas. The unique content of personal selfhood, the person’s “I”, is anchored in the same domain that also establishes the person’s unity with the world. A human action that results from this content is, therefore, an action that is both ethical and free: on the one hand, it is based on the person’s unity with the world, and on the other hand, it stems from what defines the person’s individuality.
According to Steiner, a person is free “in so far as he is able to obey himself in every moment of his life. A moral deed is my deed only if it can be called a free one in this sense”. Our lives are composed of free and non-free actions, of course. We cannot, however, think out the concept of human beings completely without coming upon the free spirit as the purest expression of human nature. Indeed, we are human beings in the true sense only in so far as we are free. The viewpoint of free morality does not claim that the free spirit is human beings’ only form of existence; it merely sees it as their final level of development: Human beings remain in their incomplete state unless they take hold of the material for transformation within themselves and transform themselves through their own power. Nature makes human beings merely natural beings; society makes them law-abiding beings; only they themselves can make themselves free human-beings.
So, Steiner’s philosophy is based on a developmental concept that annuls – or, at least, greatly expands – the borders of human beings’ possible development and directs this development toward the “free spirit”. Unlike other objects of the world, in which the concept and the perception are united and are separate for human consciousness due to its limitations, regarding human beings the situation is reversed. The free spirit, which is the true concept of each person, is not objectively unified with the perception of that person; they have to be unified through the person’s actions. While regarding objects of the external world, people overcome their dual nature – which distinguishes concept and perception – by unifying them in the process of knowing, in a person’s moral life he or she must overcome this nature through the practical realization of the free spirit: For a human-being concept and percept are, at first, actually separated, to be just as actually united by him or her.
Steiner’s philosophical system, briefly presented here, connects a unified ontological approach with an epistemology that argues for the annulment of the borders of human consciousness, and with ethics that link the unity of the person and the world and the uniqueness of each individual to one source: it posits "thinking" as the spiritual dimension that imbues the world. This system connects “thinking”, “human being”, and “world” by positioning thinking as bearing the burden of the universal unity, such as defines the uniqueness of each person as an “I”, and such as enables the person’s ability to know. In his Anthroposophical thinking, Steiner continues to develop his unique approach, describing both the various aspects of the person’s unity with the world and the “I” as an individual being in which the person’s uniqueness is anchored.
Steiner’s philosophical and Anthroposophical thinking constitute a conceptual framework for applications in the areas of education, art, agriculture, and medicine. The approach arguing for the person’s unity with the world – and the uniqueness of each person, anchored in this unity – has been realized since Steiner’s time in various ways in these realms, and engenders many possibilities for rethinking the practices entailed in each of them.
Another application of Steiner’s thought, which has not been as developed as its other applications were, is his vision of the Threefold Social Order, which he published in 1919, at the end of World War I. This vision calls for the mutual independence of the three systems of which the social order is composed, in his opinion: the economical, legislative-constitutional, and educational-spiritual. The overlap between the boundaries of these three systems constitutes, according to Steiner, the origin of many social ills, and his vision calls for the abolition of this overlap and the existence of spiritual, political, and economical lives without mutual dependence (Steiner, 1966).
Instead of the uniform state – the one that centralizes the various facets of social life – Steiner proposes treating the social order as a body that establishes unity between three systems with different roles. The unity of the human being and the world has different features in each of this body's three systems, and each one of them enables the realization of each individual’s uniqueness in a different way. The distinction between these three systems – and their unity in the social order, so that none is subordinate to another – enables the realization in this body of three great ideals, without ensuing contradictions: freedom is the base for spiritual, cultural, and educational life; equality is the value upon which the legal and legislative system should be established; and fraternity is the ideal to which we should aspire in economic life.
Steiner’s Threefold Social Order vision proposes the social implementation of the unique connection that his thinking creates between the understanding regarding the unity of the human being and the world and the commitment to realizing the uniqueness of each human individual. To Steiner's dismay – and perhaps also unfortunately for mankind – his ambition for a political reorganization of Europe after World War I on the basis of this vision was not successful. Even among those involved in applying Steiner’s Anthroposophical thought, very few are familiar with his social vision, and even fewer seek ways of applying it. It appears that annulling the overlap between political, economic, and cultural borders is even more challenging than other offshoots of annulling the borders of either being or knowledge, or both, in his thought.
I wish to argue that the failure of Steiner’s Threefold Social Order vision actually opens the gate for varied applications of his thought in the social realm. This thought, whose main points I have presented here in brief, shapes a philosophical substrate upon which one can establish many aspects of study regarding the meaning, validity, and the possibility of annulling various borders on the ontological and epistemological level. Striving to realize the uniqueness of each person and anchoring this uniqueness in the unity of the human being and the world creates an ethical scaffolding for a range of practices answering the universal need for the nurturing of individual dimensions.
מאמר זה מבוסס על הרצאה שנתתי בכנס Imagined Borders, Epistemic Freedoms באוניברסיטת קולורדו בינואר 2020.
