The paradox of scientific objectivity impeccably expressed by Steiner in GA 83/1. According to modern parlance, one can read "consciousness" instead of "thinking". Basically, this is the hard problem of consciousness, but much better put, because it opens to the reason behind the problem.
Today [according to today's science] we are practically obliged to simply accept the perceptions given us by observation and experiment and to work them up into natural laws, as they are called. In processing experiments and observation, we certainly make use of thought, but we use thought only as a means to organize the phenomena so that, through their own existence, they reveal to us their inner coherence, their regularity. And we make it our mission to add nothing to what we can observe in the external world through our thinking. We see this as an ideal of scientific thinking, and rightly so.
Under these conditions, what has become of human thinking?
It has actually become the servant, a mere tool of research. Thought, as such, no longer has anything to say when it comes to investigating the laws governing phenomena in the world. This presents a paradox I wish to point out. Thought, as a human experience, is effectively excluded from the relationship that the human being enters into with the realities of the world. It has become a purely formal aid for comprehending realities. Within science, it is no longer something self-revealing. The significance of this for the inner life of man is extraordinarily great. It means that we must look upon thinking as something which must retire, wisely and modestly, when it comes to considering the external world, and which represents a kind of private current within the life of the soul.
And if one then asks: "How can natural science itself approach this kind of thinking?" then one arrives at the paradox. Then one comes to say to oneself: "If thinking has to confine itself to the arranging of natural processes and can intervene only formally in clarification, compiling and ordering, then thinking is not within the natural processes themselves". Then it becomes paradoxical if we nonetheless - now from the perspective of natural science - raise the scientifically legitimate question: how can we, based on the laws of natural science, understand thinking as a manifestation of the human organism?
And there is nothing else we can say today, if we are impartial and seriously engaged in the life of natural science, except that, to the same extent that thinking has had to withdraw from natural processes, the observation of natural processes can indeed strive again and again to arrive at thinking, but it cannot succeed. Thinking, in a sense, just as it is methodically excluded, is also excluded in reality from natural processes; it is condemned to be a mere image which is not a reality.
Not many people today, I believe, are fully conscious of the force of this paradox. But in the subconscious depths of their psyches, countless people today already harbor the feeling that we go through the world with that which truly makes us human (because only as thinking beings can we consider ourselves human and we see our human dignity) as something whose reality we cannot yet acknowledge, something we carry through the world as an imagined existence.
In pointing to the most precious aspect of our human nature, we feel ourselves within a nonreality, in a certain sense. This is something that weighs heavily on the soul of those who have seriously engaged with the scientific research methods of both inorganic science and biology and who, by virtue of their worldview, wish to draw more conclusions from the consequences of these research methods than from the individual results.
