Steiner’s first lecture of the First Scientific Lecture-Course, the so called, ‘Light course’, given in Stuttgart, on the 23rd December 1919, can be read here and it can be listened to here
He explains how the natural scientists of his day proceeded. They were interested in categorising, looking for causes behind phenomena, and observing phenomena to arrive at the ‘laws’ of nature. Goethe did not proceed in this way. He was not interested in looking for and speculating about unknown causes or categorisation. He looked at nature and observed how it was forever changing and studied this metamorphosis in great detail. He wished to stay within the observable to ask what it could tell him without speculating about any laws or hidden world behind the one observed.
The natural science are forever looking for pointwise forces to explain life. But, according to Steiner, life cannot be explained in this way. Life is formed out of the universal peripheral forces. These forces are not the same as the mechanical pointwise forces which are open to measurement. Steiner explains it thus:
Say you were studying the play of forces in an animal or vegetable embryo or germ-cell; with this method you would never find your way. No doubt it seems an ultimate ideal to the Science of today, to understand even organic phenomena in terms of potentials, of centric forces of some kind. It will be the dawn of a new world-conception in this realm when it is recognized that the thing cannot be done in this way, Phenomena in which Life is working can never be understood in terms of centric forces. Why, in effect, — why not? Diagrammatically, let us here imagine that we are setting out to study transient, living phenomena of Nature in terms of Physics. We look for centres, — to study the potential effects that may go out from such centres. Suppose we find the effect. If I now calculate the potentials, say for the three points a, b and c, I find that a will work thus and thus on A, B and C, or c on A’, B’ and C’; and so on. I should thus get a notion of how the integral effects will be, in a certain sphere, subject to the potentials of such and such centric forces. Yet in this way I could never explain any process involving Life. In effect, the forces that are essential to a living thing have no potential; they are not centric forces. If at a given point d you tried to trace the physical effects due to the influences of a, b and c, you would indeed be referring to the effects to centric forces, and you could do so. But if you want to study the effects of Life you can never do this. For these effects, there are no centres such as a or b or c. Here you will only take the right direction with your thinking when you speak thus: Say that at d there is something alive. I look for the forces to which the life is subject. I shall not find them in a, nor in b, nor in c, nor when I go still farther out. I only find them when as it were I go to the very ends of the world — and, what is more, to the entire circumference at once. Taking my start from d, I should have to go to the outermost ends of the Universe and imagine forces to the working inward from the spherical circumference from all sides, forces which in their interplay unite in d. It is the very opposite of the centric forces with their potentials. How to calculate a potential for what works inward from all sides, from the infinitudes of space? In the attempt, I should have to dismember the forces; one total force would have to be divided into ever smaller portions. Then I should get nearer and nearer the edge of the World: — the force would be completely sundered, and so would all my calculation. Here in effect it is not centric forces; it is cosmic, universal forces that are at work. Here, calculation ceases.
This lecture was given just over a century ago and so the terminology is a bit dated and science has made a vast amount of progress since then, but his points still stand.
The difference between Goethe’s scientific method and the standard methods of natural science is the same difference that separates the practice of Euclidean geometry from that of projective geometry. In the former, lengths and angles are measured and calculated, in the latter there are no measurements as such, it is concerned with the mobility and transformation of form as it is expressed between point and plane.
Goethe takes natural science beyond its self-imposed limits just as projective geometry takes Euclidean geometry beyond its limits.
Feel free to read or listen to the lecture linked to above and comment as you see fit.
So in your opinion colours can have quantities but not qualities? Or are you saying that they do have qualities but studying them will tell us nothing about reality?
In what way am I deluded?
Not from their own sole perspective. We can report our perceptions and those reports can be used to build hypotheses. See my link to Dennett.
Well, you see the problem.
I think there are ways of describing colours both quantitively and qualititively. How else would colour matching and paint blending work.
You said it youself:
Dennett’s idea here is a step towards Barfield’s idea of “final participation” as progressing from an “onlooker consciousness”. Final participation is a position in which the perceivers knows that they perceive and their standpoint has a great deal to do with how the perception is interpreted. The object under study can never be isolated from the perceiver.
Good question.
I decided through a process of learning, memory retrieval, thinking and visual perception. My idea “dog”, my visual image of the hairy moving object coming out of my neighbours house, and my memories of this happening in the past all come together to allow me to make this confident assertion.
CharlieM, You don’t think the main element was learning to call a dog (the reality on the end of a lead) a dog (the word)? We perceive the world through our senses but categorise and share the experiences linguistically.
Just because stuff happens to you, doesn’t mean you have much control over it. And don’t be so greedy over them nuts. You got plenty.
…chemistry is geared towards producing life in all its various forms.
Okay. But the general population seem to be slow to grasp the implications of quantum mechanics. Searching for fundamental physical reality involves recognising the polarity of point-wise, infinitesimal, matter and plane-wise, infinite, peripheral, fields. It took quite a lot of probing in the direction of the point before the periphery became apparent and exclaimed, “remember me, I’ve been feeling a bit neglected”.
I don’t see why they shouldn’t be compatible. Didn’t Epicurus believe in matter as particulate and multiple while the void was an infinite unity? One could not exist without the other.
They aren’t compatible for the following reason: a naturalist is someone who accepts contemporary fundamental physics as their ontology. But contemporary fundamental physics shows that the very idea of ‘atoms’ as tiny little billiard balls, colliding with each other, is completely mistaken. Therefore, a naturalist should not be an Epicurean.
This interpretation of the history of physics looks like sheer nonsense to me. But whatever, enjoy your nonsense. It seems to give you intellectual sustenance, and we all need that.
As for me, I’ve read enough Steiner from your many voluminous quotes that I have no interest in reading any more.
CharlieM,
I think it will not surprise you that I am in agreement with Helmholtz. In that article, “Goethe’s Scientific Researches,” Helmholtz remarks as follows:
Interestingly, Helmholtz goes on to point out that one of the reasons why Goethe thought that Newton’s theory of light was absurd was that in Goethe’s time, electricity had not yet been discovered, and as a result, no one was in the slightest position to start figuring out how nerves work.
In any event: my view is that despite Goethe’s towering genius as a poet and phenomenologist of nature, he was not in any sense a scientist. The scientific attitude as represented here by Helmholtz consists of inquiring how external objects cause our sense-impressions, rather than taking sense-impressions as disclosing how things really are.
But does it follow, therefore, that a Helmholtzian psycho-physicist must regard the world of the senses as unreal, as illusion? Absolutely not! This is, I think, the real error of the whole Steinerian project: to infer that if the world of the physicist is regarded as what’s ultimately real, then the world of the phenomenologist (the world as experienced) is illusory. This does not follow.
A Helmholtzian psycho-physicist can (and should!) regard the world of the senses as objectively real but also relative to a perspective. The world of the senses that the poet intuits and the phenomenologist describes is exactly how external objects appear to animals with our kind of evolved neurophysiology. It is not illusory or ‘mere appearance’.
In fact I suspect that Steiner’s error here is not understanding the crucial difference between Erscheinung and Schein. Schopenhauer also makes this blunder. The former, Erscheinung, is appearings — how things look to beings that have minds like ours. The latter, Schein, is illusion. These are not at all the same kind of thing. The fact that the cover of my book only looks blue to me because I have trichomatic vision does not put the color of the book’s cover in the same category as mirages or hallucinations.
The difference between the world of immediate sense-perception and the world of scientific models is neither that the former is ‘illusion’ and the latter is ‘real’ nor the inverse, that the world of the senses is what is concrete and real and the latter is mere abstraction.
Rather, the difference is between reality as seen from a very limited perspective and reality as seen from a more encompassing, more inclusive perspective.
In the the book you have brought to my attention (thanks for that), the authors:
They do believe in the “primacy of physics and physicalism in the loosest sense”.
As far as I can tell Ladyman believes space at its most fundamental is brought to light in quantum mechanics and time at its most fundamental is revealed by general relativity. That makes sense to me and ties in nicely with my understanding of the polarity between point and plane.
I do think that Ladyman places great faith in modern science and is quite selective in the things he questions and doubts. But I’m sure I’ll enjoy taking a closer look at that book and making an attempt at understanding their arguments.
And that is why “regulatory” genes need to tightly regulated themselves.
Taking a look at some of Susan Oyama’s ideas, she has been saying the same things that I have said more recently here. She is no supporter of genetic determinism nor of gene centrism.
In Nature = f(nurture): A review of Oyama’s The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution Bryan Midgley and Edward Morris wrote:
They quote her directly saying:
I’m not sure how you stand on the subject of inheritance and the role of genes.
There have indeed been some prominent holistic thinkers throughout history.
Math(s) is the tool, fractal patterns are what is observed. Fractals can be seen throughout the natural and human world. We can marvel at the ubiquity of these self-similar patterns repeating through many levels. We can see that there is a lawfulness to these patterns without trying to discover any hidden causes behind them.
In the recipe analogy the genes are the list of ingredients but they do not contain the instructions as to how the dish is prepared and cooked. The organism uses the genes at its disposal to “cook” itself. Self-basting turkeys have nothing on us 🙂
Can you give me an example of naked (isolated) DNA in nature? I’m here to learn.
Even in viral uncoating The DNA is not “naked”.
You are the expert so I’m waiting to be convinced.
Okay. So when text shows up as blue, it is a link. For instance, the word “wrong” in the comment you are replying to. If you click on the link, you will find information that answers your question.
Are you now?
Yes, and this is where the analogy breaks down, since the genes do contain the instructions as to how the dish is prepared: the gene products act on each other. I did point this out to nonlin upthread.
Studying cause and effect is a good way to go about understanding physics and mechanics, but is it the best way to go about understanding life? Quite often living processes are so convoluted, teleological and interdependent that trying to work out causes only leads to confusion. It might help when trying to understand precise particulars, but not when trying to understand life in general.
No, it was intended as a general comment to anyone who may be reading this.
Yes, there is a fair bit of difference between studying form geometrically and studying it algebraically. Algebra comes more to the fore when people begin to think more abstractly. The theorem of Pythagoras can be learned through just using arithmetic on the measurements of lengths without having any recognition of what they stand for. Symbols can be manipulated and answers obtained without any thoughts about the reality behind them.
Hmm. Does reality need a rule book? We model reality, sometimes very accurately, using mathematics. Does that explain reality?
And you know this because your interpretation is accurate?
It is helpful in that it places in context the Greek thinkers around the time of Anagagoras. According to Barfield, by the time of the appearance of the pre-Socratic philosophers “participatory consciousness” was reaching the end of its existence as the mainstream position. This was the beginning of the consciousness that lead to our modern everyday consciousness. In pre-historic times it would not have occurred to the average person to enquire as to what the sun was made of. They knew that the sun was the being that gave them and all the creatures around them life. It was Ra, Surya, Helios, whose light was the bringer of life.
Plato can be seen as the fulcrum, the turning point. Before him Socrates and the pre-Socratics, still connected to an age of myths and stories which told of a world everywhere populated by beings that controlled natural events and processes. And after him Aristotle who inspired the modern thinkers to ask questions about how the physical world was constructed and came to be.
I’ll just note that Steiner never used the term “original participation”. That phrase was coined by Barfield.
I would say that Pyrrhonism brought doubt to a new level.
Fair point.
Look at the history of anything and you will find all sorts of examples of decline and ascent. One empire declines and falls and another comes to the fore. The amount of people living in the countryside declines while urban populations grow. Don’t you think it useful to look at overall trends in developmental processes?
Are you sure about that? Rather than looking at the image cast at one specific distance from the prism, look at the coloured rays as they progress away from the prism.
Here is a video of demonstrations of how light can be manipulated using prisms and mirrors. The experimenter calls the well known light spectrum, the Newton spectrum, and the complimentary spectrum the Goethe spectrum. His experiment with the two mirrors shows how the purple (magenta) ray of the Goethe spectrum is also seen to be monochromatic.
He says::
Light is primal. What we can see as colours has been produced by light but it is not light. What we can measure as electromagnetic waves has been produced by light but it is not light. Light is invisible and undetectable in itself. What is detectable is the image or effect of its interaction with material substance.
He references the Norwegian physicist Tolger Holtsmark who has been quoted as saying:
Light is as different from its image as you are from your reflection in a mirror.
Yes, yes I am.
I even linked back to our previous discussion on this very subject, in which I was responding to your ‘magenta ray’ video. As I wrote then:
and
So your citing that same video to support your assertion that rays do not spread out equally is just sad.
You are saying that because I am a human with the ability to perceive, this disqualifies me from talking about human perception?
According to Dennett colour vision is an illusion and we have a manifest illusion of consciousness.
On this subject Steiner has this to say:
Here Steiner is telling us in his long winded way that Dennett has no right to speak of neurons and brains as he does. The illusion that is my eye transmits to the illusion that is my brain a representation of the illusion that I experience as red.
If consciousness and colours are illusions then so are brains and bodies.
There are a few things that Dennett says that I could agree with. For instance:
He believes that human conscious is as different from animal consciousness as language is from bird song. “You can’t tell lies or write poetry in birdsong. It does not have the representational power.”
He disapproves of the habit of comparing intelligent animals such as crows and octopuses to humans. He designates this as the “Beatrix Potter syndrome”.
He believes that locomoting organisms such as plankton and jellyfish, are pretty much out of control. A shark is a controller, it controls itself, but we human beings are autonomous in a very strong sense. We can become responsible, moral agents and free will is something we can strive to achieve.
That is a progression which I would agree is evident.
And would you say that it is a delusion to concentrate on the study the organisms living in a particular area without concerning oneself with their genomes? Simply studying how they interact.
No, I’m not. I should have said brought together in my mind. I am not conscious of my brain processes while I am engaged in perceiving and even after the event when I bring it up in memory. I have never seen my brain nor felt my brain.
Because of the concepts I have gathered through experience.
Yes, though this applies to any entity. Any sentient entity is incapable of comprehending, deconstructing, constructing an entity equally complex as itself. I may have already mentioned this.
CharlieM,
You’re wearing out my scroll wheel. Why not just précis whatever points you think the text is making and just provide the link? I’m not the first to complain about walls of text.
I don’t believe you. Where did you get the word “dog”? How do you associate it with canis familiaris? How do we categorize dog from not-dog. There’s more to it, I feel.
I’m sure Epicureans had a variety of beliefs about particulars as do naturalists, so It’s possible that some people thought of themselves as both. There have been plenty of naturalists around who thought in terms of protons and electrons as billiard balls. But it’s not a point I would spend much time arguing over.
One of the things I’m thinking of here is the centuries of the dominance of Euclidean geometry before projective geometry began to show up. Another is the way that matter was dealt with as though space and time were just the backdrops in which it operated.
As is your right.
Because most of his lectures were transcribed (which he was reluctant to sanction), there is a tremendous amount of material available. I think he would have preferred it if only his written works were made available for future reading.
I’m not convinced that they are all that different.
Not being a bird, I’m unable to evaluate that. Maybe the birds have love songs. How could we tell?
I think Dennett is overstating what he knows.
I’ll grant the possibility that Steiner was reasonably well-informed about the contours of neo-Kantian epistemology and 19th century neurophysiology. But epistemology and neurophysiology have advanced significantly since then.
I do think, based on my own extensive study of Kant and of neuroscience, that “naive realism” must be abandoned as a theory of perception. But I don’t think that what Steiner calls “critical idealism” is the only other game in town.
My own view is a version of what’s called “critical realism”: we do not experience things in themselves, but we can know them. (In this respect the rationalists, especially Spinoza, were basically right.)
The trick is to demystify the intellect, so that instead of “intellectual intuition”, we can tell a story about how communities of inquirers can, via increasingly more sophisticated technology and increasingly sophisticated language (i.e. advanced mathematics), construct progressively better models of things in themselves, so that our best scientific theories can be understood as asymptotically approximating the noumenal.
It is true that accepting this means giving up on a very clumsy “experience = knowledge” classical empiricism, but I’m happy with that. I’m probably much closer to neorationalism than to any kind of empiricism these days, at least with regard to theoretical philosophy.
In practical philosophy (ethical and political theory) we must take into account the human good; in theoretical philosophy we must reach for a broader and deeper vantage point than that which is ‘human, all too human’.
The difference between how Goethe proceeded and how Helmholtz proceeded is informative of the contrast between a holistic outlook and a reductionist outlook.
Helmholtz would like to separate everything out into cause and effect, From the observed world he imagines behind it a world of spinning atoms and forces which is taken to be the fundamental reality. But this sub microscopic world can only be modelled using mental pictures taken from sense experience. Take away the mental pictures and all that is left is pure mathematics.
Goethe proceed in the opposite direction. He doesn’t want to speculate on what is behind the senses. He wants to use his senses in a way that they will display more than they at first reveal. How does he do this? By using his thinking mind. If he gathers together as many sense experiences in time and space of the object under study he can then use his mind to interrelate all these experiences and by this means get an overall view of the natural processes as they take place in reality. He went far beyond just accepting what his senses were telling him.
So these were two contrasting methods of enquiry, the former reductive and the latter connective.
That is not what Steiner inferred. He was more concerned that the sub microscopic world of the physicist, because it can only be imagined in terms of macroscopic entities, would be thought of as being like that in reality. Rather than accusing physicists of believing the macro world to be illusionary he saw the danger of them portraying the sub microscopic world appearing to be just a miniaturized version of the macroscopic world.
Reality comes in stages when the subject makes connections which gives a meaningful contextual whole her or his sense experiences.
In order to judge Steiner on these matter you would be required to read and understand what he is saying in his basic books such as “The Philosophy of Freedom”, at the very least. I know you are not prepared to do this.
Sure, if you want to use the words “holistic” and “reductionist” in a way that doesn’t make sense.
Mental pictures are a useful crutch when teaching science to children in schools, but that doesn’t describe how physicists or psychologists go about their business as scientists. In doing science, what matters are the law-governed or law-like relations between the components of the model that explains the data that have been collected in measurements.
Yes, I get that. I have read Goethe, you know. I understand his method as a poet and as a lover of nature. What we’re arguing about is whether this method deserves to be called scientific.
I’ve read every passage of Steiner’s you have posted or linked to.
I understand quite well the historical context in which he’s writing because I have read Helmholtz and Schopenhauer, so I’m actually in a good position to determine whether his contributions to philosophy are worthwhile.
I don’t think they are, because I don’t think he understands the epistemological issues that he’s talking about. I think his description of “critical idealism” shows a fairly basic misunderstanding of Kant, and I think that he doesn’t understand why naive realism is badly confused.
Direct realism may be good for art but it’s bad for epistemology. Either Steiner doesn’t see the difference, or he doesn’t care. Neither is a good look.
Your link did not actually use the term “naked DNA” but it does seem that competent bacteria do consume DNA fragments that are lying around. And there seems to be plenty of it. And as Craig Venter has said it is an inert chemical and so it would just be lying around at the mercy of external forces.
Yes. And searching “naked DNA” has convinced me that it wherever you look DNA is there.
For instance From the video, “Science Happy Hour: Naked DNA in Seawater” Dr. Jesse Ausubel relates that they sampled water from an area in the vicinity of New York and they found 60 000 bits of DNA in one quarter cup of water. He tells us that DNA is everywhere. It is in ponds, rivers, lakes, oceans and in the air. Now I would class this as organic waste. But nature never wastes any of her produce, so unlike the ocean’s plastics, I’m sure it will be getting consumed and recycled by all sorts of organisms.
I seem to recall someone mentioning that the fluid around cells has been found to contain sections of DNA floating around. I don’t remember who it was, it could have been J-Mac or Phoodoo.
So is it legitimate to distinguish living DNA from dead DNA?Naked DNA can do nothing in isolation, burst a cell open and even fragments of chromatin can do nothing, they are inert, dead. But these fragments can be and are being used by living organisms. An extreme example is Deinococcus radiodurans. Again Craig Venter tells us it can take 3 million rads of radiation and not be killed. Its chromosome gets blown apart, but after 12 to 24 hours it stitches its genome back together exactly as it was before, and it starts replicating again.
Jumbled up DNA floating free is incapable of doing anything in isolation but an organism is capable of taking its jumbled up DNA and bring it back to life.
Genes contain the templates for making strings of amino acids. Coordinating the processes comes from a higher level.
It helps. Are there really such a thing as parallel lines? Do they ever meet?
With your focus on collimated light you seem to think what I am talking about is due to chromatic aberration. It has nothing to do with that.
The image shown below has been taken from this article. The white I am talking about can be seen at position ! and this is with a parallel beam of light. It would seem that Newton was aware of this.
They say in the article:
The beam can be narrowed further and the central white area would get smaller accordingly but it would not disappear completely.
The article also goes into detail about the production of magenta from the dark spectrum with an accompanying image.
Why did Newton arrange his experiment to position his equipment at the point where all the colours were spread with no black or white showing on the cast image (position 2) taking no account of the other positions?
So you leave no room for degrees of comprehension? We can either comprehend fully or not at all?
May I suggest you alternate the finger you use to scroll. That way your fingers get a good workout while you ignore the text. You’ll soon be opening ring pulls with ease using any finger you like. 🙂
There definitely is a great deal to it. While using the word “dog” to signify the entity in front of me I have knowledge of a multitude of concepts even if they are not focused in my consciousness at the time. Concepts such as language, speech, mammal, living being, quadruped, quantity, classification, mental image, senses, symbol, communication, reflection and so on. I gather all these concepts through life experiences. On the other hand I know that the dog cannot and indeed has no need to communicate all of these concepts to others.
I don’t think you are giving self-conscious, rational, reflective thinking its due.
I’m sure they do have love songs. But what evidence do you have that they can analyse these songs, understand how they form the notes, know the processes by which other animals hear the song, give meanings to the individual notes in the same way that individual words in poetry have their own meanings?
And maybe you are understating what knowledge has been gained through experiences with and experimentation on animals.
to Kantian Naturalist,
I would prefer to give your comments some thought before responding, so I’ll mull over what you say overnight and do my best to reply tomorrow.
I do know that Steiner has said that when he was at school he realised that the teacher of one subject was just reading straight out of the text book. So he got hold of Kant’s, “Critique of Pure Reason” (If my memory serves me well), tore the pages out and interleaved them into the textbook so he could study it in class and catch up with the subject of the lesson at his convenience. I have no doubt that he did take the time to study Kant intensively.
Splutter! Well, we agree on one thing: this has nothing to do with chromatic aberration. Your lack of understanding of basic optics is duly noted.
Yes, he was, and he noted that it was the predicted consequence of inadequately collimated light. I am curious about the grey area in your image. Does it actually exist?
The image below has been taken from the wall of my basement. The adequately collimated light I am talking about can be seen to the left. You will note that ROYGBIV can be seen at all distances from the prism.
You should check out what people can do with diffraction gratings!
Of course I am. However, neither you nor Dennett are giving bird songs their due.
I have no doubt that human language is far more valuable than bird songs — if you evaluate from a human perspective. But what if you evaluate from a bird perspective.
My real point is that we do not have absolute standards by which we can settle such questions.
It helps whom (as my pedantic retired English teacher friend would say)?
No. Therefore they can neither meet nor not meet. Cretan logic for you.
Fair point. But I have always argued against binarism. In our understanding, we approach reality asymptotically. Degrees of accuracy, with a pie-slice of ignorance. Trouble us we don’t know what we don’t know and can’t know what we can’t know.
CharlieM,
Well, you could try italic tags instead of blockquote (which I find less easy to read in long passages). You could emphasize phrases that you thought pertinent, add line-breaks.
Your reference to ring-pulls reminds me of an event long ago that happened to me in Portsmouth involving a dead cat, cans of beer, family relationships, the Royal Navy and fleas. I’ll spare you.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
No but it was what he was criticising for using the same reasoning that I have attributed to Dennett above.
And Steiner argues in “The Philosophy of Freedom” that we can be naive realists about one thing, and only one thing, that we experience; and that is thinking. Why? Because under normal circumstances we arrive at the concept of an entity separately from our perceiving it. We must join the two together. I see a dog but I cannot know it’s a dog without having the concept “dog”. With thinking the perception and the concept of it are one and the same thing. We add nothing new through the concept.
Maybe it’s possible that it is a mistaken way of picturing the world to make the division, as Kant did and you are doing, between “thing” (phenomenon) and “thing-in-itself” (noumenon).
Steiner believes that this came about through a one-sided Platonism.
He believed that Descartes like Bacon suffered from this one-sided Platonic mode of thought. It brought about a doubt in impartial observation of nature. People who thought like Descartes wished to derive all knowledge from pure reason as it was believed the senses can deceive us. Their system was supposed to be built up similar to that of Euclidean geometry, built up from simple, true premises. In his Ethics Spinoza takes a number of conceptions and builds up a system of reasoned truths. For him the essence of reality is expressed in thought and reason; reality cannot be derived from sense perception. Kant also mistrusts the world of sense perception.
Steiner attributes to Kant three preconceptions
1. There exists necessary truths through thought which are free from experience.
2. Experience cannot give necessary truths.
3. Through thought ideas are added to single perceptions.
Kant believed that it is humans who bring spatial and temporal order to the objects of perception. He is only aware of impressions not the objects in themselves. We are only aware of our own sensations and our knowledge is limited to them. Plato believed that essential, eternal truth lay in the ideas, Kant believed that ideas only give us a limited knowledge. So for Kant, the ideas of freedom, immortality, and the divine world order can only be gained through faith. Kant believes the ideas are restricted to the mind, Goethe believed the ideas are in the perceived world if only the mind would grasp them.
Steiner concludes:
Goethe took his empirical studies of the outer world and continued this empiricism into his inner world. For him his ideas were not something that he had created, they were inner discoveries which have more objectivity than anything he could perceive in nature. His rationalism was at the same time empiricism.