Die Grundfrage der Erkenntnistheorie

(lit.: The Fundamental Question of Epistemology, with Special Reference to Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre)

A forty-eight-page doctoral thesis arguing, against Kant's followers, that the mind is not locked inside its own pictures of the world.

by Rudolf Steiner103 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Die Grundfrage der Erkenntnistheorie mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre
First published: 1891(aged 30)
Original language: German

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Overview

On 26 October 1891 the University of Rostock made Rudolf Steiner a doctor of philosophy, with the lowest passing grade, rite, for a thesis of forty-eight pages submitted to Heinrich von Stein, the university's professor of philosophy. Steiner was thirty and working in Weimar on the great edition of Goethe. The thesis takes on the theories of knowledge built on Kant, which were then the orthodoxy of German universities, and charges them with shutting the mind inside its own representations, unable ever to reach a world outside them. Steiner accepts that the world first appears to us as a mere given, a picture with no connections in it. He denies that we are stuck there. In thinking, he argues, we produce the content ourselves and so know it from the inside; knowing is the act that joins thought to the given, and it completes reality rather than copying it. He reads Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, the doctrine of science built on the activity of the self, as the closest earlier attempt, and faults it for leaving that activity with nothing to work on. He closes by blaming every quarrel between worldviews on the same mistake: people try to know things before they know what knowing is. A year later Steiner added a preface and a new chapter, dedicated the result to Eduard von Hartmann, the philosopher of the unconscious, and published it as Wahrheit und Wissenschaft, subtitled as a prelude to a philosophy of freedom. In English the book is known as Truth and Knowledge.

Key concepts

What does the thesis mean by the given?

The world-picture as it appears before any judgement has been made about it. It holds no objects and subjects, no causes, not even the knowledge that it is my representation; all of those are later results of thinking. The thesis insists on beginning here because any richer starting point already smuggles in a theory, which is exactly the fault it finds in Kant's followers.

What must a theory of knowledge without presuppositions avoid?

Any assumption about what knowing yields before knowing itself has been examined. It may not open by declaring the world a representation, by positing things in themselves, or, as Kant did, by taking it that synthetic judgments a priori exist and need explaining. It may only take up the immediately given and then look inside it for the point where knowing can begin.

Where, according to the thesis, does knowing begin?

At the one place in the given that we do not merely receive: concepts and ideas. They appear within the world-picture like everything else, yet we bring them forth by our own activity, so their connections are known to us from within. From that point knowing reaches the rest of the given, by finding for each part of it the concept that belongs to it.

Why is knowing called a completion of reality rather than a copy?

Because the given alone is a disconnected half, and the concepts that belong to it do not arrive with it but have to be produced by thinking. Joining the two does not make a duplicate of an outside world inside the head. It brings the full reality of the thing about for the first time, which is why the thesis treats knowing as a real act and not a reflection.

What is wrong with Kant's founding question, on the thesis's account?

It is not a first question at all. Asking how synthetic judgments a priori are possible assumes, first, that mathematics and pure natural science contain such judgments, and second, that their necessity cannot come from experience. Both are claims about knowing that have not yet been tested, so Kant's theory of knowledge rests on the very thing it ought to examine.

What did Fichte's doctrine of science leave out?

The content of the I's activity. Fichte rightly held that knowledge rests on an act in which the self posits itself, but he never said what that act does, so his system turns without anything to work on. The thesis proposes the missing piece: the I's activity is knowing itself, the joining of concept to given, and with it the Wissenschaftslehre would find its ground.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Knowing What Knowing Is

Can a theory of knowledge begin without assuming what it sets out to prove? The thesis charges Kant and his heirs with smuggling in their conclusion, and asks what a start with no presuppositions would look like.

Epistemology, the thesis says, has to examine what every other science takes for granted: knowing itself. Kant failed that test at the outset, because his question, how synthetic judgments a priori are possible, already assumes that such judgments exist and that experience cannot supply them. His successors made the same move with another premise, treating it as settled that the world is only our representation. The closing chapter widens the charge to philosophy at large: its quarrels arise because people try to know things before they know what knowing is.

epistemology
methodology
kant
a priori knowledge
presuppositions
dogmatism
idealism
representation
objectivity
subjectivity
categories
certainty

Enter a dialogue

The Given and the Act of Knowing

If the world first arrives as a picture with no connections in it, how does anyone get past the picture? The thesis answers that in thinking we produce part of the given ourselves, and there knowing begins.

Steiner strips the world back to what is immediately given, before anything has been judged about it: not yet objects, not yet a self, not even my representation. Within that picture one thing differs from the rest. Concepts and ideas appear too, but we bring them forth ourselves, so we know from the inside how they hang together. Knowing is the act that joins concept to given, and it completes reality instead of copying it. Fichte, the thesis argues, saw that everything rests on an activity of the I, yet never said what that activity does.

the given
thinking
concepts
cognition
perception
knowledge
experience
reality
consciousness
self-consciousness
fichte
fichtean idealism
empiricism
agency
judgment
metaphysics

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 103
distinct concepts: 117
by passages held, corpus-wide: #496

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “cognition” and “epistemology”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 23 pairings. 79 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
cognition	epistemology	16
epistemology	methodology	13
epistemology	perception	12
epistemology	idealism	11
consciousness	epistemology	9
epistemology	knowledge	9
epistemology	experience	8
cognition	idealism	4
knowledge	methodology	4
cognition	perception	3
consciousness	perception	3
cognition	consciousness	2
cognition	knowledge	2
cognition	methodology	2
idealism	perception	2
cognition	experience	1
consciousness	experience	1
consciousness	idealism	1
experience	idealism	1
experience	perception	1
idealism	knowledge	1
knowledge	perception	1
methodology	perception	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1891 Die Grundfrage der Erkenntnistheorie (Die Grundfrage der Erkenntnistheorie mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre) you are here DE
1894 The Philosophy of Freedom (Die Philosophie der Freiheit)
The philosophical centre of Steiner's work, written in his Weimar years before any theosophy, and the book he kept sending later readers back to.
DE
1895 Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom (Friedrich Nietzsche, ein Kämpfer gegen seine Zeit)
Written between The Philosophy of Freedom and the Goethe book, while Steiner still counted himself among Nietzsche's allies and before his dealings with the Nietzsche Archive turned sour.
DE
1897 Goethe's World View (Goethes Weltanschauung)
The last book of Steiner's Weimar years and the summing-up of his work as Goethe's scientific editor; The Philosophy of Freedom supplied its theory of knowledge.
DE
1901 Mystics of the Renaissance and Their Relation to Modern Thought (Die Mystik im Aufgange des neuzeitlichen Geisteslebens)
The first book to come out of Steiner's lectures for the theosophists, still written in the voice of the naturalist philosopher of the 1890s; Christianity as Mystical Fact followed from the next course.
EN
1902 Christianity as Mystical Fact (Das Christentum als mystische Tatsache und die Mysterien des Altertums)
The book that marks Steiner's turn from philosophy to esoteric Christianity, given first as lectures to the Berlin theosophists in the months before he became their leader.
EN
1904 How to Know Higher Worlds (Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten?)
The practical companion to Theosophy: that book describes what the trained seer claims to see, this one the training that is meant to lead there.
DE
1904 Theosophy (Theosophie)
Begun two years after Steiner took charge of the German theosophists, and the systematic foundation that his later accounts of initiation and cosmic evolution build on.
DE
1910 An Outline of Occult Science (Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriß)
The fullest single statement of Steiner's cosmology, begun inside the theosophical movement and revised under anthroposophy through four prefaces from 1909 to 1925.
DE
1911 The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind (Die geistige Führung des Menschen und der Menschheit)
Steiner's second book on the figure of Christ, nine years after Christianity as Mystical Fact, and one that carries the account far deeper into esoteric claims.
EN
1919 The Threefold Commonwealth (Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage in den Lebensnotwendigkeiten der Gegenwart und Zukunft)
Composed for the months after the German revolution, and Steiner's chief written statement on society; it reached English readers within a few years as The Threefold Commonwealth.
DEEN

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