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John Dunn
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I’m grappling with an essay by R. H. Brady on Rudolf Steiner’s Truth and Knowledge.
Rudolf Steiner
In an earlier blog I commented that Steiner discovered that it is the shape in which the world is first given, rather than the shape it attains through theorising activity, that is subjective.
But what the human mind, through theorising activity, can bring into being is the phenomenal world in its intelligible fullness. That is objective. Only the human mind can do this.
The following quotes from Brady’s essay explore Steiner’s understanding that the cognitive ability of man holds the possibility of true freedom.
The act of cognition makes the not-self intelligible and the self conscious. It is a free act, for to be active in this manner the I must create the category of cognition through self- determination. Yet consciousness must still grasp itself, and unless the I also grasps its own self-determination, its role as creator of the idea of cognition remains hidden from it.
The I must realise the idea of its own cognitive activity in order to realise its freedom — to grasp that the “laws of logic” are its own intentions, and knowledge its own creation.
If the I can objectify ideas other than those of cognition, this will also take place through self-determination, for nothing in the world could demand it.
...the task of thinking is not thrust upon us by an enigmatic universe, but is our own free creation, and the manifest intelligibility of the world is a human product.
...the law is not something given, lying outside the object in which the event appears, but is the content of the object itself engaged in living activity. The object in this case is our own I. If the I has really penetrated its deed with full insight, in conformity with its nature, then it also feels itself to be master.
© John Dunn.
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Coleridge - On the Constitution of the State and Church
Through a combination of leadership and educing (Fichte’s terminology was translated as summoning, but had similar connotations), the ‘latent man’ would emerge from his former bestial and sub-human state.
John Dunn
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Quote every hour:
Wars are made to make debt. Ezra Pound
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Coleridge, Vico and Gentile
There are echoes of Fichte and Coleridge in the shift from a Spinozist left radicalism to the political right. For Gentile, as for the others who had followed a similar path of political conversion, this shift was prompted by an urge to defend the ‘I’. But Gentile believed that he had introduced something new into the struggle, something which overcame the failings of all previous idealisms.
John Dunn
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