Du Bois-Reymond's 1872 verdict that certain questions are forever closed. Steiner reads it as Scholasticism with the revelation half quietly deleted.
The Ignorabimus in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's diagnosis of the phrase Emil du Bois-Reymond made famous in 1872, ignoramus et ignorabimus, we do not know and we shall not know. The Berlin physiologist declared that the relation of matter to consciousness lies permanently outside science. In the lecture of 5 August 1921 at Dornach, published in GA 206 as The Dual Form of Cognition During the Middle Ages, Steiner argues that this verdict is not a discovery of natural science but an inheritance from medieval Scholasticism. The Schoolmen held two cognitions: reason bound to the sense world, and supersensible content received through revelation preserved in dogma. Modern science kept the first half and dropped the second, then read the resulting gap as a boundary in nature rather than a boundary in method. Anthroposophy treats that gap as a training problem, not a wall, which is why the Ignorabimus marks where Steiner's path of knowledge begins.
The Ignorabimus is the shortest sentence in which the nineteenth century closed its own door. Du Bois-Reymond spoke it before the assembly of German naturalists and physicians at Leipzig in 1872, and it hardened into a settlement: measure the sensory world, leave the rest alone. Steiner accepted the honesty of the restriction and refused the finality, tracing the whole gesture back to the lecture halls of medieval Paris and Cologne.
In Steiner's Own Words
This second element has simply been omitted. But the fundamental conviction relating to one side of cognition, to that side which refers to the world of the senses, this fundamental conviction has been maintained. What had thus developed in the course of the nineteenth century, then changed in such a way that it appeared, for instance, in the famous Ignorabimus of du Bois-Reymond, in the early seventies. The scholastic thinkers used to say: Human cognition, which is permeated by the intellect, is only connected with the external world of the senses, and everything that the human being is supposed to know in regard to the super-sensible world must be given through the revelation which is preserved in the dogmas.
What it Means Today
The Ignorabimus did not die with du Bois-Reymond. It reappeared in analytic philosophy of mind in 1989, when Colin McGinn published Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem? in the journal Mind and answered no, on principle. McGinn's argument is that human cognition is closed to the solution the way a dog's cognition is closed to arithmetic: the property that links brain tissue to felt experience exists, is perfectly natural, and lies outside the range of concepts our faculties can form. Six years later David Chalmers named the same territory the hard problem of consciousness in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, and the position McGinn had staked out acquired the label new mysterianism.
Read beside GA 206, the resemblance is exact. McGinn keeps the Scholastic first half, reason working on what the senses deliver, and he has no second half to appeal to, so the missing cognition becomes a fact about the universe rather than a fact about untrained faculties. Steiner's objection is not that McGinn is pessimistic. It is that the boundary is being read in the wrong place. Thalira synthesis: cognitive closure describes the ordinary intellect accurately and then quietly promotes that accurate description into a law of nature, which is precisely the move Steiner traced back to Cologne and Paris. The anthroposophical answer is developmental rather than argumentative. Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition are put forward as trainable modes of cognition, which turns the Ignorabimus from a verdict about the world into a description of an untrained starting point.
Where to Read More
- The Dual Form of Cognition During the Middle Ages, GA 206
- Find The Riddles of Philosophy at SteinerBooks
- Ignoramus et ignorabimus on Wikidata [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]