The act of knowing : Rudolf Steiner and the neo-Kantian tradition

A central claim of Kantian critical idealism is that our knowledge is limited to appearances, and that we cannot show we have knowledge of things-in-themselves. All of our knowledge of the given world is mediated to us through the sensory intuitions of space and time, and our intellect is discursive rather than archetypal. As a result, we cannot know things spontaneously, and we cannot have holistic knowledge of natural phenomena. Although unmediated knowledge by way of intellectual intuition must be counted as a rational possibility that is not a capacity we possess. Similarly, while an archetypal intellect must be a rational possibility, according to Kant we do not have one. Rudolf Steiner is well known as an educator. In his early career Steiner was trained as a natural scientist, took a doctorate in neo-Kantian philosophy and sought to demonstrate that we do have direct access to knowledge of essences. Steiner was greatly influenced by Goethe and Fichte and attempted to overcome the limit Kant placed upon possible knowledge by adapting Goethe's concept of the archetypal phenomenon to claim that we do possess an intellectus archetypus and by extrapolating from Fichte's argument for intellectual intuition to argue for what he calls “intuitive thinking”. This dissertation examines Steiner's arguments as a series of disjunctions from the propositions of the critical philosophy. The thesis of the dissertation is that Steiner is ultimately unsuccessful in his attempts to establish the capacities for an intellectus archetypus and intuitive thinking from within the context of critical idealism, but that his work opens up ways in which neo-Kantian scholarship may be further developed