How We Lost the Thread: Modern Philosophy from Descartes to Steiner

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The cord that held for fifteen hundred years

Walk with me for a few minutes through the country we have been walking at speed.

It begins, for our purposes, in Athens. Two thinkers. Plato, who looked up toward the eternal Forms and saw thinking as participation in the divine order of things. Aristotle, who looked down into the natural world and saw thinking as the natural unfolding of the logos already present in what is. Between them they established the Western practice of thinking as connection to reality, not as private representation. The ground they laid, the recognition that thinking is a real activity touching real things, was what every later thinker either continued or broke.

For fifteen hundred years after them, their ground held. Christian Europe received the Greek inheritance, married it to Hebrew prophecy, and produced a synthesis that extended from Augustine to Aquinas. In that synthesis, the human being was body and soul and spirit. The cosmos was creation, history, and redemption. The mind touched reality because reality itself was the work of intelligence.

This synthesis had limits. It was hierarchical. It enforced its unity through coercion. It knew nothing of the three social spheres as distinct. But it did not make the mistake we are still paying for. It did not cut the cord.

The stove-room: where the cord was cut

The cord was cut in a stove-room in 1619. Descartes, locked inside his own thinking, decided that the thinking was a substance and the world was a substance and the two were separate. After that moment, every Western philosopher has been trying either to bridge the gap he created or to live inside it.

This is the central event in modern Western philosophy. Almost everything that came after, from Locke to Wittgenstein, from Spinoza to Sartre, can be read as a response to the Cartesian split.

Goethe and the quiet continuation

Something, however, continued quietly along a different path. Goethe, working between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in the middle of the Cartesian-Kantian dominance, did not write philosophy in the ordinary sense. He wrote poetry, plays, a novel or two, and a large body of natural-scientific work that his own contemporaries mostly failed to recognise as science.

In this scientific work, Goethe did something the mainstream tradition could not do. He practised a mode of knowing in which the researcher does not stand outside the phenomenon measuring and quantifying. Instead the researcher patiently contemplates the phenomenon until its inner lawfulness begins to show itself from inside. He called this method living observation. He applied it to plants, to bones, to light, to colour. His results were frequently wrong in specific particulars. His method was right in a way that has taken two centuries for science to begin to recognise.

The British sand and the Continental geometry

The British reached across the Cartesian gap with the hand of sensation. Locke said the mind is a blank slate on which experience writes. Berkeley said there is nothing but minds and their ideas. Hume said there is not even a self doing the experiencing, only a bundle of impressions bound by custom. Each was more consistent than the last, and by the end of the British line the world had been dissolved into perception and the knower dissolved into habit. The stream, in the British current, had run into sand.

The Continentals reached across with the hand of reason. Spinoza said the two substances must be one, and called it God or Nature. Leibniz said they must be many, and called them monads. Each constructed a brilliant architecture. Neither touched what happens when a person actually thinks. The stream, in the Continental current, had run into geometry.

Kant's verdict and the idealist refusal

Kant, in Königsberg, took the whole situation in hand and delivered a verdict. The knower cannot reach the thing in itself. The categories of the mind constitute the world as it appears to us, and the world as it is in itself lies forever beyond our knowing. The moral law stands above the categories, a voice from elsewhere that issues commands the phenomenal self must obey.

Kant was the most rigorous of them all, and his verdict should have ended the story. It was then that the stream did something unexpected.

After Kant, the German idealists Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel refused the verdict. Each of them, in his own way, tried to walk past the Kantian wall. Fichte said the I posits itself, and in positing itself produces the not-I; the wall is something the knower erects and can walk through. Schelling said nature itself is a form of spirit, unconscious at first and waking to itself in the human; the wall is a moment in a larger movement. Hegel said the wall must be included in the dialectic and overcome in the final synthesis; the wall is real but not final.

Each of them saw something more than Kant. None of them finished. Hegel closed his system at the last possible moment, folding the three-ness into the state. The stream, in the idealist current, had almost arrived. Then it collapsed back upstream into unity.

After Hegel: the fragmentation

After Hegel, the fragmentation was severe. Schopenhauer kept Kant's phenomenalism and added the will beneath all phenomena, a dark substrate of hungry striving. Feuerbach kept Hegel's dialectic and collapsed it into anthropology, saying that God is the human essence projected outward. Marx kept Feuerbach's move and collapsed it further into economics, saying the human essence is the way we produce our means of subsistence and everything else is superstructure. Each step took more away. Each step kept less of the original stream.

Nietzsche, late in the nineteenth century, saw the fragmentation and tried something desperate and beautiful. He refused the whole trajectory, declared the death of the God who had underwritten the old synthesis, and called for a revaluation of all values. He came closer than Marx to what living thinking actually feels like from the inside, because he wrote in the mode of thinking-as-it-happens rather than thinking-as-conclusions-reached. His physical collapse in 1889 stopped him before he could build.

The quiet continuations the mainstream missed

In America, across the same decades, another quiet recovery was happening. Emerson and Thoreau, working in New England, wrote essays and books that do not read like philosophy in the continental sense but carry, in a different key, the same perception that Goethe had carried. Emerson's Self-Reliance and The Over-Soul are written in the mode of a person who knows, from the inside, that thinking is a real activity touching real things, that every honest human being has direct access to what he called the Over-Soul.

In Russia, near the end of the nineteenth century, a third quiet line appeared. Vladimir Solovyov wrote works on the integral knowledge of the whole human being, on the possibility of a free theocracy united with scientific reason, on the positive meaning of love. Nikolai Berdyaev, a generation later, wrote on freedom, on the spiritual meaning of history, on the creative act as the deepest vocation of the human person.

Meanwhile, quietly, a different path was opening. Brentano, in Vienna, proposed that all mental acts have an object; thinking is always thinking-of-something. Husserl, Brentano's student, developed this into phenomenology: the method of returning to the things themselves, describing how they actually appear in experience without forcing them through inherited categories.

Heidegger, Husserl's student, took the phenomenological method and directed it at the question of Being itself. He reached depths no one else had reached. He also became entangled with one of the twentieth century's totalitarianisms, and the entanglement was not an accident. The unity-that-kills found him, as it has found so many brilliant thinkers who could not distinguish the three spheres.

Completing the walk

Meanwhile, about a century ago, quietly, a thinker working on the Continent took the whole stream in hand. That thinker had read all of the others. That thinker had written a survey of the Western philosophical tradition from beginning to the present day, in which each thinker was placed with precision and each stopping point was named. Then, having placed them all, that thinker did not write another philosophy book.

That thinker wrote books on how a human being develops the inner capacities required to receive what the tradition had only half-glimpsed. That thinker wrote books on how a society could organise itself around the three spheres the tradition had missed. That thinker wrote books on how education, art, agriculture, medicine, and economic life could be renewed by taking seriously what Descartes had cut, what the Greeks had half-seen, what Hegel had almost let live.

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