At the stage of Inspiration, Steiner replaced the logical pair right and wrong with the living pair healthy and sick, life-promoting and life-destroying.
Right and Wrong as Healthy and Sick in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's account of what happens to the categories of logic when cognition rises from Imagination to Inspiration. Speaking at Stuttgart on 3 September 1921, in the cycle published as Anthroposophy: Its Roots of Knowledge and Fruits of Life (GA 78), Steiner argued that the abstract pair richtig and unrichtig, correct and incorrect, is lifted out of its abstractness at that threshold and replaced by a more concrete pair: gesund and krank, healthy and sick, lebenfördernd and lebentötend, life-promoting and life-destroying. An imagination is not judged true or false the way a syllogism is judged. It is met as something that either quickens the spiritual world or works into it in a sickening, deadly, paralyzing way. The predicate change is not decoration. It is the reason seasoned spiritual researchers stop saying right and start saying healthy when they describe what they meet beyond the threshold.
Right and wrong as healthy and sick names the moment in Steiner's path of knowledge when truth-predicates give way to health-predicates. Below the threshold, a thought is correct or mistaken. Above it, an imagination is a living thing that either promotes life or destroys it. Steiner treated this not as a metaphor but as an observation about how the spiritual world answers a researcher's approach.
In Steiner's Own Words
And so the logical distinction between “right” and “wrong” is lifted out of its abstractness when one ascends from imagination to inspiration. One can no longer relate to the world, which one now recognizes as a spiritual outer world, by using the terms “right” or “wrong” in the same way that one has rightly learned to use them at a previous stage of knowledge. These terms are transformed into something much more concrete, namely into what one now experiences in the illuminating imaginations. In contrast to these, one cannot say “right” and “wrong” in the same way as one does with the ideas of intellectual life; but now, precisely in this spiritual-soul realm, more concrete ideas arise: one is “healthy,” the other is “sick”; one is life-promoting, the other is life-destroying.
What it Means Today
The thinker who came closest to Steiner's point from outside anthroposophy was Georges Canguilhem, a physician and historian of science whose 1943 Strasbourg medical thesis, Essai sur quelques problèmes concernant le normal et le pathologique, was expanded in 1966 and issued in English by Zone Books as The Normal and the Pathological in 1989. His case was that health is not a statistical average and disease is not a measurable deviation from one. The living organism institutes its own norms, and health is its capacity to go on instituting new ones when conditions change. Sickness, read that way, is a narrowing of that capacity, a life with less room to move. He was arguing against a nineteenth-century physiology, drawn largely from Claude Bernard, which treated the pathological as ordinary function shifted along a quantitative scale.
Thalira synthesis: Canguilhem reached that result by studying nineteenth-century medicine, Steiner by watching what happens to a researcher's vocabulary above the threshold. What Canguilhem established for the body, Steiner had already claimed for cognition, that a knowing which meets living content must judge by vitality rather than by correspondence, and that the change of vocabulary is itself the evidence the meeting occurred. The practical use is diagnostic. When a meditative image presents itself, the first question is not whether it is correct, but whether dwelling on it leaves thinking more mobile or more fixed.
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