In supersensible cognition Steiner replaced the logical pair true and false with the lived pair healthy and sick: truth is experienced as health, error as disease.
What is Truth as Health, Error as Illness?
Truth as Health, Error as Illness in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's rule that the categories of supersensible knowledge are not logical but vital. Stated in the lecture Jesus or Christ, given at Oslo on 29 November 1921 and collected in The Reality of the Higher Worlds (GA 79), the rule says that what the sense world labels with the abstraction true must be had in the supersensible world as health, and what the sense world labels untrue or incorrect must be had there as disease. Steiner calls healthy and sick Erlebnisse, experiences, not concepts: the researcher does not judge a supersensible perception correct, he undergoes it as growth or as deformation. The term belongs to Steiner's epistemology rather than to his medicine, though it stands behind the anthroposophic clinical work begun with Ita Wegman at Arlesheim in 1921. Its practical use today is a discipline of cognitive hygiene: the knower's own condition is part of what is known.
Truth as Health, Error as Illness names the moment where Steiner's theory of knowledge stops behaving like logic. In ordinary science a judgement is checked against a rule and pronounced right or wrong. In supersensible research, Steiner said, no such rule is available; the researcher meets a perception the way an organism meets a condition, and reads it as growth or as inhibition.
In Steiner's Own Words
In organic nature, we recognize health as a principle of growth and development; we recognize sickness as deformation, as an inhibition of normal development. But we do not speak of healthy and sick when we apply logical categories. When we ascend from ordinary objective knowledge to that which anthroposophical spiritual science applies, then we must begin to speak of healthy and sick. … What in the world of sense-perception we designate by the mere abstraction 'true', we must have in the supersensible world as health. And what in the world of sense-perception we designate as 'untrue', as 'incorrect', we must have in the supersensible world as disease.
What it Means Today
The nearest modern parallel is a physician who became a philosopher. Georges Canguilhem submitted a medical thesis in 1943, Essai sur quelques problèmes concernant le normal et le pathologique, read in English as The Normal and the Pathological. He was arguing against the nineteenth-century position, carried by Auguste Comte and Claude Bernard, that disease is the normal state shifted up or down a scale, a quantitative deviation a laboratory can measure. Against it he set the claim that health and disease are qualitative, and that the living being is normative: an organism institutes its own norms, and health is the margin by which it tolerates the infidelities of its surroundings and sets new norms after injury. Disease is not less life on the same scale, it is narrowed life, life with the margin gone. Canguilhem carried that argument into the Sorbonne, where Michel Foucault was among those he shaped.
Steiner had made the same move one storey higher, and twenty-two years earlier, in Oslo. Where Canguilhem refused to let health be a measurement, Steiner refused to let it stay in the body. He moved the normativity into the act of knowing, so a supersensible perception is met as growth or inhibition rather than scored right or wrong. In the same lecture he says atheism is not a logical inaccuracy but an illness, meant as a description of the organism rather than an insult.
Thalira synthesis: the two thinkers describe one boundary from opposite sides, Canguilhem showing that the organism judges, Steiner showing that the judge is an organism.
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