Steiner's counsel for the limits of knowledge: do not resign before an unanswerable question, live with it inwardly until the soul develops a spiritual sense of touch.
Soul-Touching at the Boundaries of Knowledge in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's instruction for what to do when thinking reaches a question it cannot answer. Ordinary cognition meets points where neither the outer world nor the soul's own resources respond; the physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond called seven of them world riddles, and Steiner countered that one could cite hundreds. His counsel, given in the Berlin lectures of 1917 to 1918 published as The Eternal in the Human Soul (GA 67), is not resignation but repetition: raise the question again and again, live with it inwardly and not only logically, and attend to what it stirs in the soul. Carried by the consciousness soul, this patience turns the boundary from a wall into a surface, and a spiritual sense of touch (geistiger Tastsinn) begins to form against it, the first organ of supersensible perception. Consciousness studies still circles the same riddles today.
When Steiner told his Berlin audiences what a limit of knowledge is for, he inverted the scientific etiquette of his age. Soul-Touching at the Boundaries of Knowledge names the practice he set against resignation: the researcher stays at the unanswerable point, holding the question until the soul stops arguing and starts perceiving, the way a simple organism first learns the world by pressing against it.
In Steiner's Own Words
This image of the sense of touch can be applied to the spiritual experience that must occur in the spiritual researcher. Faced with such limits of knowledge, he allows them to live out in his soul, allowing them to have their own validity. Then it is as if the inner life does not encounter a physical outer world, but rather a spiritual world, and a spiritual sense of touch really develops, then differentiates further and wants to become what, in a figurative sense, Goethe called the eyes and ears of the spirit. However, there is a long way from dealing with such borderline questions of cognition to what I have called seeing consciousness in my book “The Riddle of Man.” But this seeing consciousness can be developed.
What it Means Today
The boundary Steiner worked with has a precise modern address. In 1872 Emil du Bois-Reymond told the Congress of German Naturalists and Physicians in Leipzig that the question of how matter produces consciousness ends in ignorabimus: we shall never know. His 1880 Berlin address widened the verdict into seven world riddles. Steiner's Berlin lectures answered that verdict directly, and the argument has outlived them both. At the first Toward a Science of Consciousness conference in Tucson in 1994, the philosopher David Chalmers separated the tractable questions of brain function from the one du Bois-Reymond had flagged, and his 1995 paper, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, named it the hard problem. Thirty years on, the hard problem remains open, and the field's most productive act has been Steinerian in form if not in intent: it kept the question alive instead of declaring it meaningless. Thalira synthesis: the Ignorabimus tradition reads the hard problem as a verdict, consciousness studies reads it as a research program, and Steiner reads it as an organ in the making, a place where the soul, pressed patiently against what it cannot think, begins to touch what it will later learn to see.
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