This article presents an examination of the critique of Kant’s epistemology by the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy. Steiner was once accused of presenting this critique in a disorganized manner across his various philosophical works; however, his aim was not to critique Kant’s epistemology per se, but to develop fundamental and coherent and foundational epistemological foundations. He believed this was possible on the condition of breaking free from the vicious cycle of concepts within Kant’s theory of knowledge and through the scientific elaboration of the foundational approaches to cognition in Goethe’s philosophy.
The primary goal of this article has been to classify and systematically analyze the most significant concepts of Kant’s epistemology that Steiner targets in his critique—either rejecting them, as in the case of the “thing-in-itself,” or imbuing them with new content, such as the concept of “experience.” According to Steiner, the failure of traditional theories of knowledge stems from their lack of a basis in the study of the nature of cognition, and the question “what is cognition?” does not precede the question “what is cognition?” Thus, we first address how Steiner defines cognition in “Truth and Science.” We refer to Kant’s classification of the cognitive process sensory, judgmental, and rational and note that, for Steiner, the sensory aspect is considered not as cognition but merely as perception. According to him, cognition begins with conceptual observation, while he views the observation of the thinking process as the highest form of cognition.
We also examined the genealogy of Kant’s theory of knowledge according to another of Steiner’s works, “The Secrets of Philosophy,” and highlighted the contradiction that, according to Steiner, Kant resolved by accepting the limits of cognition, leading to subjectivism and dualism. We then demonstrated how Steiner reveals the errors of dualism in “The Philosophy of Freedom” and characterizes it as a necessary intermediate stage to be overcome in the process of cognition. The world is given to us as duality, while cognition processes it into unity. Kant’s “thing-in-itself” is nothing but an empty abstraction; the supposed separation of consciousness from the “thing-in-itself” is an illusion. In cognition, the boundaries between essence and phenomenon dissolve, and the phenomenon presents itself to us as a manifested essence. Even if it presents itself to us as an idea, this is only at the initial stage of simple perception and observation of the phenomenon, whereas in the cognitive process, the impartial and objective nature of thought connects and unifies the diversity of perceptions and observations, resulting in ideas being recognized and ceasing to be merely ideas.
In this article, we also explored the differences between Kant’s and Steiner’s understandings of “experience” as defined in Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” and Steiner’s “The Epistemological Foundations of Goethe’s Worldview,” demonstrating the new content that Steiner attributes to this concept, arguing that thinking should also be regarded as a fact of experience. We illustrated how Steiner describes the process of thinking becoming unrecognized due to the focus on the object, asserting that without thought, the image of the world cannot be considered either objective or complete, and that it would be entirely arbitrary to regard the sum of what we know about an object solely through perception as a complete whole, while the result of thoughtful observation is seen as something additional that has no connection to the object itself.
Theres is an attempt to show how Steiner refutes Kant’s approach that limits cognition based on the capacities of the human spirit, asserting that our spiritual organization inherently includes the ability for fully adequate knowledge of things; otherwise, knowledge would be impossible.