The world-outlook that grants reality to the idea, but only to ideas read from external things, taking reason as a self-sufficient source of truth.
Rationalism in Anthroposophy is one of the twelve world-outlooks Rudolf Steiner set out in Human and Cosmic Thought (GA 151, 1914). It names the standpoint of a thinker who has passed beyond bare Mathematism and now accepts that ideas are genuinely active in the world, yet grants reality only to ideas found in external, sense-given things, never to those an inner intuition or inspiration might supply. Reason and the discovered idea become the self-sufficient measure of what is true. Steiner fixed its place precisely: in his zodiac of thought Rationalism stands as Taurus, the one step between Mathematism below it and Idealism above it. He held it fully valid for its own province of reasoned, idea-bearing nature, and one-sided only when a soul makes this single key the master-key to every door of the world.
Rationalism, in Rudolf Steiner's survey of human thought, is the outlook that finds ideas at work in the world and treats the reasoning mind as competent to read them. It begins where the mathematical thinker asks why, if number is real in nature, other ideas should not be real too. The rationalist answers that they are, provided they are gathered from the outer, sense-perceptible world rather than spun from within.
In Steiner's Own Words
But someone may now think about it and, after having been a mathematician, say to himself: It cannot be superstition that the color blue has so many vibrations. The world is, after all, mathematically ordered. If mathematical ideas are realized in the world, why shouldn't other ideas also be realized in the world? Such a person assumes that ideas live in the world. But he only accepts those ideas that he finds, not those that he would grasp from within, for example through some kind of intuition or inspiration, but only those that he reads from external, sensory-real things. Such a person becomes a rationalist, and his worldview is rationalism.
What it Means Today
The standpoint Steiner labelled Rationalism is the metaphysical spine of the historical movement that bears the same name: the Continental rationalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. When Rene Descartes argued in the 1641 Meditations that the mind reaches certainty by clear and distinct ideas rather than by the testimony of the senses alone, when Baruch Spinoza built the 1677 Ethics on definitions and axioms in the manner of a geometry, and when Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz held that the great truths follow from the principle of sufficient reason, all three were doing what Steiner describes: granting the idea a reality of its own and trusting reason to find it. Anthroposophy honours that confidence and then asks a further question. Steiner's point in the 1914 lectures is not that the rationalist is mistaken, but that reason which reads only the ideas already lodged in external nature stops one step short. The thinker who also admits the ideas that rise from the moral and the inner life, Steiner notes in the same passage, has already become an idealist. So Rationalism marks a real and necessary station on the path of thought, valid for the lawful, idea-bearing side of nature, yet incomplete the moment it denies that the human interior is itself a source of genuine ideas. Read this way, the Enlightenment trust in reason is neither idol nor error but one of twelve legitimate windows, each opening on a different quarter of the same world.
Where to Read More
- Human and Cosmic Thought, GA 151
- Find Human and Cosmic Thought at SteinerBooks
- The Guide for the Perplexed by Maimonides: Complete Guide to Reason and Revelation
- Logos: The Divine Reason Behind All Things in Philosophy and Spiritual Tradition
- The Centaurs: Half-Man, Half-Horse and the Tension Between Instinct and Reason