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Vague capacity
Friday, 6 September 2024 at 21:40
Vague capacity
It is the intuitive capacity that enables the ‘unified world of ideas’ to emerge. Steiner is vague about where this capacity comes from, arguing that it is something that resides deep within us. Nevertheless, it is the essential component of freedom.
Only let us not assert that such a man can rightly call his actions his own,seeing that he is driven to them by an external force. But in the midst of all this network of compulsion, there arise free spirits who in all the welter of customs, legal codes, religious observances, etc., learn to be true to themselves. They are free in so far as they obey only themselves; unfree in so far as they submit to control. Which of us can say that he is really free in all his actions? Yet in each of us there dwells something deeper in which the free man finds expression.(Steiner)
Pictured: Rudolf Steiner
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Unified world of ideas revealed
Thursday, 5 September 2024 at 22:07
Unified world of ideas revealed
Let us at this point consider this ‘reality’. Steiner was not referring to the everyday reality of the things around us to which we respond with instinct and feeling. If the conceptions we formulate are merely responses to these things, then we are most certainly not individuated and not free. The free individual me, according to Steiner, is not the body that I occupy. Non-material ideas, he would argue, cannot simply emerge from matter as though secreted from a thought gland in the head and brain:
The individual element in me is not my organism with its instincts and feelings, but rather the unified world of ideas which reveals itself through this organism. (Steiner)
Pictured: Rudolf Steiner
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Intuiting reality
Wednesday, 4 September 2024 at 21:37
Intuiting reality
Nevertheless,Steiner’s point, expressed in The Philosophy of Freedom, is that everything is knowable. He did, of course, dismiss the passive looker-on of Lockean naive realism. But much more importantly, Steiner offered as his major breakthrough a means of getting beyond the Spinozist residue in Kant’s philosophy, without resorting to a simple upending of Spinoza,substituting one unquestioned presupposition for another, the absolute Substance for the absolute I. Steiner went beyond Kant, in that he went beyond the unknowable external agent, the thing-in-itself, but also beyond Fichte and the Romantics; not creating reality, but rather intuiting the emergence of reality.
Pictured: Rudolf Steiner
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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To be free
Tuesday, 3 September 2024 at 22:19
Rudolf Steiner
To be free
Contrary to the Coleridgean third level state of existence, where the creative imagination creates something out of nothing, Steiner tapped into a cosmic thought pool that already exists. Steiner’s point was that the cosmic pool of thoughts needs the free individual I as its means of expression. Free in Steiner's sense does not mean that I can think what Ilike, or create what I like. To him such a view would be no more than a libertarian fantasy. To be free in Steiner’s sense means that my actions are not guided by necessity, i.e. by the limitations of the perceptible world, culture, the state, matter, instincts, nature etc. Instead, I call directly upon the spirit world, or the cosmic fulness of reality. The intuitive ability to draw upon the cosmic pool of thoughts is a capability of the free individual I, which means that a process of individuation must have occurred first, which brings his work fruitfully into a relationship with Jung’s.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Drawing from the cosmic pool
Sunday, 1 September 2024 at 22:12
Rudolf Steiner
Drawing from the cosmic pool
Being the cosmic mediator means that our mental capacity is not to produce thoughts from nothing, creatively so to speak, but rather to channel the thought content of the cosmos. Being universal, the cosmic thought pool drawn upon by the mediating ‘I’ is single and eternal. Having established this critical point, the awe-inspiring step that Steiner takes, and invites us to follow, is to draw intuitively upon the cosmic pool of thoughts without first referring to an externally given percept.It is in this pure intuition, pure conceptual thinking, that freedom is to be found.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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