Idea

The word idea (Greek: εἶδος eidos / ἰδέα idea "conception, image, pattern, model or archetype, idea") was first used by Plato in philosophical contexts to designate the "what" of things, their essence, their "in itself", and is derived from the Greek word for "to see, to behold, to recognise" (idein) and thus means: that which is seen. The idea refers first of all to a mental imagination, a thought or concept.

„Ideas are not qualitatively different from concepts. They are only more substantial, more saturated and more extensive concepts.“ (Lit.:GA 4, p. 57)

Ideas grasp the general, the universals, in contrast to the sensually appearing individual. In the sense of the Platonic doctrine of ideas, one could therefore say: Whenever we see, we idealise - and only through this do we recognise things for what they are, i.e. we lift in our consciousness, through idealisation, out of the given reality its actual essence. In the mind, we give the chaotic sensory data an ideal form, through which their true, spiritual reality is revealed, compared to which the mere world of the senses appears only shadowy. Plato spoke about this in detail in his "Politeia" in the famous allegory of the cave. Philosophising is based on a spiritual "seeing", a supersensible "vision" of pure ideas, a vision of ideas. The archetypal ideas exist independently of sensually tangible things, which owe their being and essence only to the participation (Greek: μέθεξις methexis) in the unchanging eternal ideas; they are only a transient imitation (Greek: μίμησις mimesis) of their imperishable spiritual archetypes. According to Aristotle, however, the human faculty of cognition is so limited that by far the most ideas can only be experienced in or on the manifold sensual things and can be lifted out of them by abstraction. Only the highest and most general ideas, such as those of mathematics, can be grasped purely intellectually. Thomas Aquinas later distinguished the universalia ante rem, which live before all individual things in divine reason, from the universalia in re, which work in things, and the universalia post rem, which are formed as concepts in the mind of man.

„What is called idea: that which always comes to appearance and therefore confronts us as the law of all appearances.“ (Lit.: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Maxims and Reflections)

Will is the idea that acts as a force

→ Main article: Will

Will is, one can also say, the idea that becomes really active, i.e. that acts as a force, as Rudolf Steiner already expressed it in his "Introductions to Goethe's Natural Scientific Writings". In this sense it is not a blind, i.e. lawlessly chaotically active, but spirit-filled will:

„Will is therefore the idea itself conceived as force. To speak of an independent will is completely inadmissible. When man accomplishes something, one cannot say that the will is added to the idea. If one speaks in this way, one has not grasped the concepts clearly, for what is the human personality, if one disregards the world of ideas that fills it? But an active existence. Whoever conceived it otherwise, as a dead, inactive product of nature, equated it with the stone in the street. But this active existence is an abstraction, it is nothing real. It cannot be grasped, it is without content. If one wants to grasp it, if one wants a content, then one obtains the world of ideas conceived in action. E. v. Hartmann makes this abstract a second world-constituting principle alongside the idea. But it is nothing other than the idea itself, only in a form of appearance. Will without idea would be nothing. The same cannot be said of the Idea, for activity is an element of it, while it is the self-supporting entity.“ (Lit.:GA 1, p. 197f)

The world of ideas

Ideas, like concepts, are formed through thinking, whereby Rudolf Steiner refers to more extensive concepts as ideas. The total of all ideas forms the world of ideas or world of thoughts.

„Through thinking, concepts and ideas come into being. What is a concept cannot be said with words. Words can only make a person aware that he has concepts. When someone sees a tree, his thinking reacts to his observation; an ideal counterpart is added to the object, and he regards the object and the ideal counterpart as belonging together. If the object disappears from his field of observation, only the ideal counterpart of it remains. The latter is the concept of the object. The more our experience expands, the greater the sum of our concepts becomes. The concepts, however, do not stand there in isolation. They join together to form a lawful whole. The term "organism", for example, joins the others: "lawful development, growth". Other concepts formed on individual things merge completely into one. All the concepts I form of lions merge into the overall concept of "lion". In this way, the individual concepts combine into a closed system of concepts in which each has its own special place. Ideas are not qualitatively different from concepts. They are only more substantial, more saturated and more extensive concepts....

The concept cannot be obtained from observation. This is already evident from the fact that the growing human being only slowly and gradually forms the concepts of the objects that surround him. The concepts are added to the observation.“ (Lit.:GA 4, p. 57)

In the highest sense, the idea is eternal and unique, as Goethe already expressed it. It incorporates the multitude of individual concepts into the indivisible wholeness of the cosmic order.

„The idea is eternal and unique; that we also need the plural is not well done. All that we become aware of and can speak of are only manifestations of the idea; concepts we utter, and in this respect the idea itself is a concept.“

– Goethe: Maxims and Reflections

Rudolf Steiner has emphatically emphasised that the "ideas" are neither to be misunderstood in the Platonic sense as free-floating, disembodied entities nor in the Aristotelian-Thomistic sense as forces effective in things. Rather, they are a free creative product of the human spirit, which would not exist anywhere if man did not bring it to manifestation in his consciousness through his activity of cognition. Only this "creatio ex nihilo", the "creation out of nothing" is appropriate for the spirit, which is in no way to be regarded as an "existing" anywhere in the world. Rudolf Steiner also emphasised this creative character of cognition quite clearly in the outlook with which his "Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert" (World and Life Views in the Nineteenth Century), published in 1900 and later expanded into "Die Rätsel der Philosophie in ihrer Geschichte als Umriss dargestellt" (GA 18), concludes:

„When I penetrate things with my thoughts, I therefore add to things something that is experienced in me according to its essence. The essence of things does not come to me from them, but I add it to them. I create a world of ideas that I regard as the essence of things. Things receive their essence through me. It is therefore impossible to ask about the essence of being. In the recognition of ideas, nothing at all is revealed to me that has any existence in things. The world of ideas is my experience. It exists in no other form than the one I experience.“ (Lit.: Rudolf Steiner: Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, Berlin 1900, p. 188)

The spirit works in all things, but only in the human being does it appear as an "idea" through his creative thinking. Truth is not something that already "exists" in the world, but something to be created freely and individually by the I - Rudolf Steiner had already advocated this point of view in his fundamental philosophical work "Truth and Knowledge" (1892):

„The result of these investigations is that truth is not, as is usually assumed, the ideal reflection of some real thing, but a free product of the human spirit, which would not exist anywhere at all if we did not bring it forth ourselves. The task of cognition is not to repeat in conceptual form something that already exists elsewhere, but to create an entirely new realm which, together with the sensuously given world, only results in full reality. Thus the highest activity of man, his spiritual creation, is organically integrated into the general world event. Without this activity, world events could not be thought of as a self-contained whole. In relation to the course of the world, man is not an idle spectator who figuratively repeats within his spirit what takes place in the cosmos without his intervention, but the active co-creator of the world process; and cognition is the most complete link in the organism of the universe.“ (Lit.:GA 3, p. 11f)

Hegel's philosophical view can very easily be misunderstood to the effect that he postulated a world of ideas independent of man, free-floating, as it were, and existing for itself. Hegel himself did little to dispel this misunderstanding. In contrast to this, therefore, two things must be noted: Firstly, the field in which thoughts occur is solely individual human consciousness; secondly, however, thought is based on its own inherent regularities, which is why it is always one and the same world of thought, common to all human beings, from which each individual, through his activity of thinking, draws the thoughts that occur in his consciousness. The appearance of thoughts brought about by thinking is therefore subjectively caused, but the thought content as such is objective.

„Hegel has an absolute trust in thinking, indeed it is the only factor of reality in which he trusts in the true sense of the word. However correct his view may be in general, it is precisely he who has deprived thinking of all prestige by the all-too-crass form in which he defends it. The way he has put forward his view is to blame for the hopeless confusion that has come into our "thinking about thinking". He wanted to make the significance of the thought, of the idea, quite clear by describing the necessity of thought at the same time as the necessity of facts. In this way he gave rise to the error that the determinations of thought were not purely ideal but actual. His view was soon taken to mean that he himself had sought thought as a thing in the world of sensuous reality. He never quite made this clear. It must be established that the field of thought is solely human consciousness. Then it must be shown that through this circumstance the world of thought loses nothing in objectivity. Hegel only brought out the objective side of thought; but the majority, because this is easier, see only the subjective; and it seems to them that the latter treated something purely ideal like a thing, mystified it. Even many scholars of the present day cannot be absolved from this error. They condemn Hegel on account of a defect which he does not have in himself, but which can certainly be put into him because he has not clarified the matter in question sufficiently.

We admit that there is a difficulty here for our judgment. But we believe that this difficulty can be overcome by any energetic thinking. We must imagine two things: first, that we actively bring the ideal world into existence, and second, that what we actively bring into existence is based on its own laws. We are, of course, accustomed to imagining an appearance in such a way that we only have to face it passively, observing. But this is not an absolute necessity. Unaccustomed as we may be to the idea that we ourselves actively bring an objective into appearance, that we, in other words, not only perceive an appearance but at the same time produce it, it is not an inadmissible one.

One need only abandon the ordinary opinion that there are as many worlds of thought as there are human individuals. This opinion is in any case nothing more than a long-established prejudice. It is everywhere tacitly assumed, without any consciousness that another is at least equally possible, and that the reasons for the validity of one or the other must first be considered. In place of this opinion, consider the following: there is only one thought-content at all, and our individual thinking is nothing more than a working of our self, our individual personality, into the thought-centre of the world.“ (Lit.:GA 2, p. 51f)

Literature

• Walter Heitler: Naturwissenschaft ist Geisteswissenschaft, Die Waage, Zürich 1972
• Karsten Massei: Zwiegespräche mit der Erde: Ein innerer Erfahrungsweg, Futurum Verlag, 2014 ISBN 978-3856362461
• Rudolf Steiner: Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, Verlag Siegfried Cronbach, Berlin 1900 pdf (1900)
• Rudolf Steiner: Einleitungen zu Goethes Naturwissenschaftlichen Schriften, GA 1 (1987), ISBN 3-7274-0011-0 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Wahrheit und Wissenschaft, GA 3 (1980), ISBN 3-7274-0030-7 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Die Philosophie der Freiheit, GA 4 (1995), ISBN 3-7274-0040-4 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Goethes Weltanschauung, GA 6 (1990), ISBN 3-7274-0060-9 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Spirituelle Seelenlehre und Weltbetrachtung, GA 52 (1986), ISBN 3-7274-0520-1 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Aus den Inhalten der esoterischen Stunden, Band I: 1904 – 1909, GA 266/1 (1995), ISBN 3-7274-2661-6 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org

References to the work of Rudolf Steiner follow Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works (CW or GA), Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach/Switzerland, unless otherwise stated. Email: verlag@steinerverlag.com URL: www.steinerverlag.com. Index to the Complete Works of Rudolf Steiner - Aelzina Books A complete list by Volume Number and a full list of known English translations you may also find at Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works Rudolf Steiner Archive - The largest online collection of Rudolf Steiner's books, lectures and articles in English. Rudolf Steiner Audio - Recorded and Read by Dale Brunsvold steinerbooks.org - Anthroposophic Press Inc. (USA) Rudolf Steiner Handbook - Christian Karl's proven standard work for orientation in Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works for free download as PDF.