The 19th-century philosopher Steiner read as the honest thinker who reached the edge of the spiritual world and could not cross it.
Franz Brentano in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's sustained portrait of the Austrian philosopher (1838 to 1917) as the representative tragic thinker of the late 19th century. In the lectures of GA 213, Human Questions and Cosmic Answers (1922), and in the third chapter of his book Von Seelenrätseln (1917), Steiner treats Brentano as a soul of Catholic and romantic origin whose rigorous psychology of intentional acts carried real moral seriousness yet stopped exactly at the threshold the science of spirit must cross. Brentano divided the soul into presenting, judging, and the phenomena of love and hate, and could find no will. For Steiner this missing will was the eternal in the soul itself, cut away by the natural-scientific method. The modern application is a marker: Brentano shows where ordinary consciousness ends and where anthroposophical, supersensible knowing must begin.
Franz Brentano was an Austrian philosopher and former Catholic priest whose empirical psychology Rudolf Steiner read as the most honest failure of the 19th century. Steiner admired Brentano's exactness and his refusal to pretend, then showed how his method, borrowed from natural science, quietly removed the will and with it the eternal part of the soul. Brentano stands in Anthroposophy as the thinker who reached the gate and turned back.
In Steiner's Own Words
He is characteristic of everything that a person has to seek and cannot find with the usual scientific method. He is characteristic of this because one must go beyond what he strove for with such an honest sense of truth. He is precisely one of those minds that show: humanity needs a spiritual life again that can intervene in everything. It cannot come from natural science. But this natural science is the fate of modern times in general, as it has become the fate of Brentano. For like the true modern Faust of the nineteenth century, Brentano sits first in Würzburg, then in Vienna, then in Florence, then in Zurich, wrestling with the greatest problems of humanity.
What it Means Today
Brentano's afterlife runs through phenomenology, the very tradition Steiner watched grow alongside his own work. In Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874), Brentano argued that every mental act is directed at an object, an act of intentionality, and that the soul could be studied as carefully as any natural phenomenon. His student Edmund Husserl built the Logical Investigations (1900 to 1901) and the whole phenomenological method on that single insight, and through Husserl it reached Martin Heidegger, Edith Stein, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The intentionality thesis is still the working ground of analytic philosophy of mind: Dan Zahavi and the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen continue Brentano's question of how consciousness reaches toward its objects.
Steiner's reading adds the part the academic lineage leaves out. Brentano's honesty, he said, ran aground because his method admitted only what conscious thinking could verify, and so it deleted the will, the one soul-power that carries us from before birth. Thalira synthesis: Brentano marks the exact coordinate where empirical psychology ends and the science of the spirit must begin, the threshold a phenomenology of intentional acts can describe but not cross. For a contemporary reader, his work is less a doctrine to adopt than a map of the boundary itself, drawn by a thinker too honest to paper over the gap.
Where to Read More
- Human Questions and Cosmic Answers, GA 213
- Find Riddles of the Soul at SteinerBooks
- Initiation into Hermetics by Franz Bardon: The Complete Review
- The Key to the True Kabbalah by Franz Bardon: Letters, Mantras, and Cosmic Language
- Marie-Louise von Franz: Fairy Tales, Alchemy, and the Feminine Unconscious