Intuitive Thinking As a Spiritual Path

62 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path

pictures, the Kantian view draws the conclusion not that
there is no existence independent of these mental pic-
tures, but only that the subject cannot directly receive
such an existence into itself. This view then concludes
that only through “the medium of its subjective thoughts
can it imagine, fantasize, think, cognize, or even perhaps
fail to cognize” this existence.^5 This (Kantian) view be-
lieves it is saying something absolutely certain, some-
thing that is immediately evident without any proof.
The first fundamental proposition that the philos-
opher must bring to clear consciousness consists in
the recognition that our knowledge does notinitially
extend beyond our mental pictures. Our mental pic-
tures are the only things that we know directly,
experience directly; and just because we experience
them immediately, even the most radical doubt can-
not tear from us our knowledge of them. By con-
trast, the knowledge that goes beyond our mental
pictures—I use this expression in its widest sense,
so that it includes all psychical events—is not safe
from doubt. Hence, at the start of philosophizing,
all knowledge that goes beyond mental pictures
must be explicitly posited as open to doubt.

5. Otto Liebmann,On the Analysis of Reality, p.28. Liebmann (1840–

1912. was a leading Neo-Kantian. Steiner describes his works as “veri-
      table models of philosophical criticism. Here a caustic mind ingeniously
      discovers contradictions in the worlds of thought, reveals as half truths
      what appear as safe judgments, and shows what unsatisfactory elements
      the individual sciences contain when their results appear before the high-
      est tribunals of thought... .” (The Riddles of Philosophy).