Two things fill the soul with ever new and increasing awe and admiration, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. —philosopher Immanuel Kant, who walked out of life on this day in 1804
You will like this from Rudolf Steiner's autobiography, chapter two:
“Then one day I passed a bookshop. In the show window I saw an advertisement of Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft.
I did everything that I could to acquire this book as quickly as possible.
As Kant then entered the circle of my thinking, I knew nothing whatever of his place in the spiritual history of mankind. What anyone whatever had thought about him, in approval or in disapproval, was to me entirely unknown. My boundless interest in the Critique of Pure Reason had arisen entirely out of my own spiritual life. In my boyish way I was striving to understand what human reason might be able to achieve toward a real insight into the being of things.
The reading of Kant met with every sort of obstacle in the circumstances of my external life. Because of the long distance I had to traverse between school and home, I lost every day at least three hours. In the evenings I did not get home until six o'clock. Then there was an endless quantity of school assignments to master. On Sundays I devoted myself almost entirely to geometrical designing. It was my ideal to attain the greatest precision in carrying out geometrical constructions, and the most immaculate neatness in hatching and the laying on of colours.
So I had scarcely any time left for reading the Critique of Pure Reason. I found the following way out. Our history course was handled in such a manner that the teacher appeared to be lecturing but was in reality reading from a book. Then from time to time we had to learn from our books what he had given us in this fashion. I thought to myself that I must take care of this reading of what was in my book while at home. From the teacher's “lecture” I got nothing at all. From listening to what he read I could not retain the least thing. I now took apart the single sections of the little Kant volume, placed these inside the history book, which I there kept before me during the history lesson, and read Kant while the history was being “taught” down to us from the professor's seat. This was, of course, from the point of view of school discipline, a serious fault; yet it disturbed nobody and it subtracted so little from what I should otherwise have acquired that the grade I was given on my history lesson at that very time was “excellent.”
During vacations the reading of Kant went forward briskly Many a page I read more than twenty times in succession. I wanted to reach a decision as to the relation sustained by human thought to the creative work of nature.
The feeling I had in regard to these strivings of thought was influenced here from three sides. In the first place, I wished so to build up thought within myself that every thought should be completely subject to survey, that no vague feeling should incline the thought in any direction whatever. In the second place, I wished to establish within myself a harmony between such thinking and the teachings of religion. For this also at that time had the very strongest hold upon me.
In just this field we had truly excellent text-books. From these books I took with the utmost devotion the symbol and dogma, the description of the church service, the history of the church. These teachings were to me a vital matter. But my relation to them was determined by the fact that to me the spiritual world counted among the objects of human perception. The very reason why these teachings penetrated so deeply into my mind was that in them I realized how the human spirit can find its way consciously into the supersensible. I am perfectly sure that I did not lose my reverence for the spiritual in the slightest degree through this relationship of the spiritual to perception.
On the other side I was tremendously occupied over the question of the scope of human capacity for thought. It seemed to me that thinking could be developed to a faculty which would actually lay hold upon the things and events of the world. A “stuff” which remains outside of the thinking, which we can merely “think toward,” seemed to me an unendurable conception. Whatever is in things, this must be also inside of human thought, I said to myself again and again. Against this conviction, however, there always opposed itself what I read in Kant. But I scarcely observed this conflict. For I desired more than anything else to attain through the Critique of Pure Reason to a firm standing ground in order to get the mastery of my own thinking. Wherever and whenever I took my holiday walks, I had in any case to set before myself this question, and once more clear it up: How does one pass from simple, clear-cut perceptions to concepts in regard to natural phenomena? I held then quite uncritically to Kant; but no advance did I make by means of him.
Through all this I was not drawn away from whatever pertains to the actual doing of practical things and the development of human skill. It so happened that one of the employees who took turns with my father in his work understood book-binding. I learned bookbinding from him, and was able to bind my own school books in the holidays between the fourth and fifth classes of the Realschule. And I learned stenography also at this time during the vacation without a teacher.”
According to what Steiner wrote to Edouard Schure about his biography in September 1907, he intensively studied Kant, and then went on to Kant's later 18th-19th century followers. So, indeed, Kant was Steiner's major breakthrough. His bridge with Kant only came later, after studying Ficthe, Schelling, and Hegel. That is how he could be so critical in 1892, with T & K.
Check this out, and it comes out of nowhere in 1879:
Steiner at eighteen is strongly persuaded to study Fichte. How did that come about? He was eighteen and someone encouraged him to sell his books from the Realschule in Weiner-Neustadt
to the antiquarian shops in Vienna, so he could buy books writen by Ficthe. Very important.
As you likely know, Rudolf Steiner was highly critical of Kant's epistemology in his own doctoral dissertation in 1892, which was expanded to become the book, "Truth and Knowledge", the veritable introduction to Steiner's own magnum opus, "The Philosophy of Freedom", which was first published in November 1893, while Steiner was in Weimar working at the Goethe-Schiller.
Steiner would expand upon his criticism of Kant in the first lecture of GA 201, which was previously cited. And here is the reason, which you amplify in your dissertation presented, it seems, to the review panel of the California Institute of Integral Studies. Steiner presented his dissertation to Heinrich von Stein, of the University of Rostock, who was an authority on Plato, and had written a huge volume of several parts on Plato and Platonism. So, he felt he needed to "bone up" on Plato, for the benefit of Professor Stein, and yet Stein agreed on everything Steiner had written about Kant's epistemology as being the path away from Plato. So, Steiner got his PhD very readily. It interests me, Max, that CIIS, as you seem to admit, knows very little about the work of Rudolf Steiner, and even in 2019. How can this be?
Your work described in "The Redemption of Thinking" is well done, but it only describes what constitutes the a priori and a posteriori dimensions of the human being as a physical human being on earth. Steiner also describes the lines of demarcation which describe the etheric body (left-right), and astral body (above and below}. Kant only emphasized the (before-behind) dimension, which accords the physical body. Thus, Spiritual Science is needed for the full spectrum. Thinking, which is seated in the Etheric Body, Feeling, which is seated in the Astral Body, and Willing, which is seated in the Physical Body. Kant is an icon of this third, through his three books, written in 1781, 1788, and 1790. He was definitely knocking on the door.
thanks, as always, for sharing your thoughts on this, Steven
yes, to begin with I benefitted from Steiner’s treatment of Kant but I also felt I had to overcome the prejudices against Kant that it had instilled in me before I could really understand Kant’s work on its own terms. I still side with Steiner but it’s not possible to get a charitable reading of transcendental idealism, or Kantian ethics, for that matter, from his work so you have to supply the good will yourself. That was my experience anyway.
We shouldn’t be too hard on CIIS for not incorporating more of Steiner’s work in their curriculum. I don’t think there’s another comparable college that incorporates more, and as everyone knows, Steiner is “hors categorie” and thus is exceedingly difficult for academia to relate to.
I’m surprised Steiner’s treatment of Plato was embraced by anyone, let alone a scholar of Platonism but I guess shouldn’t be because misunderstanding Plato seems to be par for the course in academia.
I've never submitted anything for academic approval, and so I admire your achievement. I know that Steiner is difficult for many people, and have lost contact with serious scholars because of it, e.g., Eliot Deutsch. Integral Studies has been my focus for many years, of course, outside the classroom due to this lack of interest and encouragement. Aurobindo led to Fourth Way, which led to Steiner, which led to Gebser, and most recently, the wealth of the evolutionary focus of Pierre Teihard de Chardin. For me, it is about making the bodies suitable for the impressions needed for higher consciousness.
You see, Steiner indicates here that what was once alive in the human organism and conscious in the soul back in the Egyptian Mysteries of the 3rd Cultural Epoch, has now died in the organism, like a piece of lignified wood, and also become unconscious in the soul in our 5th Cultural Epoch. So, we have a definite death process to overcome in this day and age. That is why he attributes Parsifal here to the Consciousness Soul, and the Holy Grail to redemption in the modern era. It seems that we all bear the wound of Amfortas, and need to overcome it with conscious apprehension. It has been a long struggle for me.
“Today I shall try to give a wider view of a subject already often touched upon. I have frequently pointed out how, for modern man, moral and intellectual conceptions diverge. On the one hand we are brought, through intellectual thinking, to recognition of the stern Necessity of Nature. In accordance with this necessity we see everything in Nature under the law of Cause and Effect. And we ask also, when man performs an action: what has caused it, what is the inner or outer cause? This recognition of the necessity for all events has in modern times acquired a more scientific character. In earlier times it had a more theological character, and has so still for many people. It takes on a scientific character when we hold the opinion that what we do is dependent on our bodily constitution and on the influences that work upon it. There are still many people who think that man acts just as inevitably as a stone falls to the ground. There you have the natural scientific colouring of the Necessity concept. The view of those more inclined to Theology might be described as follows. Everything is fore-ordained by some kind of Divine Power or Providence and man must carry out what is predestined by that Divine Power. Thus we have in the one case the Necessity of natural science, and in the other case unconditioned Divine Prescience. One cannot in either case speak of human Freedom at all.
Over against this stands the whole Moral world. Man feels of this world that he cannot so much as speak of it without postulating the freedom of the decisions of his will; for if he has no possibility of free voluntary decision, he cannot speak of a morality of human action. He does however feel responsibility, he feels moral impulses; he must therefore recognise a moral world. I have mentioned before how the impossibility of building a bridge between the two, between the world of Necessity and the world of Morals, led Kant to write two critiques, the Critique of Pure Reason in which he applies himself to investigating the nature of simple Necessity, and the Critique of Applied Reason in which he inquires into what belongs to Moral Cosmogony. Then he felt compelled to write also a Critique of Judgement which was intended as an intermediary between the two, but which ended in being no more than a compromise, and approached reality only when it turned to the world of beauty, the world of artistic creation. This goes to show how man has on the one side the world of Necessity and on the other the world of Free Moral Action, but cannot find anything to unite the two except the world of Artistic Semblance, where — let us say, in sculpture or in painting — we appear to be picturing what comes from Natural Necessity, but impart to it something which is free from Necessity, giving it thus the appearance of being free in Necessity.
The truth is, man is not able to build a bridge between the world of Necessity and the world of Freedom unless he finds the way through Spiritual Science. Spiritual Science, however, requires for its development a fulfilment of the aphorism which won respect centuries ago, the saying of the Greek Apollo: “Know thyself!” Now this admonition, by which is not intended a burrowing into one's own subjectivity but a knowledge of the whole being of man and the position he occupies in the Universe — this is a search that must find a place in our whole spiritual life.”
Hi Max,
You will like this from Rudolf Steiner's autobiography, chapter two:
“Then one day I passed a bookshop. In the show window I saw an advertisement of Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft.
I did everything that I could to acquire this book as quickly as possible.
As Kant then entered the circle of my thinking, I knew nothing whatever of his place in the spiritual history of mankind. What anyone whatever had thought about him, in approval or in disapproval, was to me entirely unknown. My boundless interest in the Critique of Pure Reason had arisen entirely out of my own spiritual life. In my boyish way I was striving to understand what human reason might be able to achieve toward a real insight into the being of things.
The reading of Kant met with every sort of obstacle in the circumstances of my external life. Because of the long distance I had to traverse between school and home, I lost every day at least three hours. In the evenings I did not get home until six o'clock. Then there was an endless quantity of school assignments to master. On Sundays I devoted myself almost entirely to geometrical designing. It was my ideal to attain the greatest precision in carrying out geometrical constructions, and the most immaculate neatness in hatching and the laying on of colours.
So I had scarcely any time left for reading the Critique of Pure Reason. I found the following way out. Our history course was handled in such a manner that the teacher appeared to be lecturing but was in reality reading from a book. Then from time to time we had to learn from our books what he had given us in this fashion. I thought to myself that I must take care of this reading of what was in my book while at home. From the teacher's “lecture” I got nothing at all. From listening to what he read I could not retain the least thing. I now took apart the single sections of the little Kant volume, placed these inside the history book, which I there kept before me during the history lesson, and read Kant while the history was being “taught” down to us from the professor's seat. This was, of course, from the point of view of school discipline, a serious fault; yet it disturbed nobody and it subtracted so little from what I should otherwise have acquired that the grade I was given on my history lesson at that very time was “excellent.”
During vacations the reading of Kant went forward briskly Many a page I read more than twenty times in succession. I wanted to reach a decision as to the relation sustained by human thought to the creative work of nature.
The feeling I had in regard to these strivings of thought was influenced here from three sides. In the first place, I wished so to build up thought within myself that every thought should be completely subject to survey, that no vague feeling should incline the thought in any direction whatever. In the second place, I wished to establish within myself a harmony between such thinking and the teachings of religion. For this also at that time had the very strongest hold upon me.
In just this field we had truly excellent text-books. From these books I took with the utmost devotion the symbol and dogma, the description of the church service, the history of the church. These teachings were to me a vital matter. But my relation to them was determined by the fact that to me the spiritual world counted among the objects of human perception. The very reason why these teachings penetrated so deeply into my mind was that in them I realized how the human spirit can find its way consciously into the supersensible. I am perfectly sure that I did not lose my reverence for the spiritual in the slightest degree through this relationship of the spiritual to perception.
On the other side I was tremendously occupied over the question of the scope of human capacity for thought. It seemed to me that thinking could be developed to a faculty which would actually lay hold upon the things and events of the world. A “stuff” which remains outside of the thinking, which we can merely “think toward,” seemed to me an unendurable conception. Whatever is in things, this must be also inside of human thought, I said to myself again and again. Against this conviction, however, there always opposed itself what I read in Kant. But I scarcely observed this conflict. For I desired more than anything else to attain through the Critique of Pure Reason to a firm standing ground in order to get the mastery of my own thinking. Wherever and whenever I took my holiday walks, I had in any case to set before myself this question, and once more clear it up: How does one pass from simple, clear-cut perceptions to concepts in regard to natural phenomena? I held then quite uncritically to Kant; but no advance did I make by means of him.
Through all this I was not drawn away from whatever pertains to the actual doing of practical things and the development of human skill. It so happened that one of the employees who took turns with my father in his work understood book-binding. I learned bookbinding from him, and was able to bind my own school books in the holidays between the fourth and fifth classes of the Realschule. And I learned stenography also at this time during the vacation without a teacher.”
https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c02.html
According to what Steiner wrote to Edouard Schure about his biography in September 1907, he intensively studied Kant, and then went on to Kant's later 18th-19th century followers. So, indeed, Kant was Steiner's major breakthrough. His bridge with Kant only came later, after studying Ficthe, Schelling, and Hegel. That is how he could be so critical in 1892, with T & K.
Check this out, and it comes out of nowhere in 1879:
https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c03.html
Steiner at eighteen is strongly persuaded to study Fichte. How did that come about? He was eighteen and someone encouraged him to sell his books from the Realschule in Weiner-Neustadt
to the antiquarian shops in Vienna, so he could buy books writen by Ficthe. Very important.
As you likely know, Rudolf Steiner was highly critical of Kant's epistemology in his own doctoral dissertation in 1892, which was expanded to become the book, "Truth and Knowledge", the veritable introduction to Steiner's own magnum opus, "The Philosophy of Freedom", which was first published in November 1893, while Steiner was in Weimar working at the Goethe-Schiller.
Steiner would expand upon his criticism of Kant in the first lecture of GA 201, which was previously cited. And here is the reason, which you amplify in your dissertation presented, it seems, to the review panel of the California Institute of Integral Studies. Steiner presented his dissertation to Heinrich von Stein, of the University of Rostock, who was an authority on Plato, and had written a huge volume of several parts on Plato and Platonism. So, he felt he needed to "bone up" on Plato, for the benefit of Professor Stein, and yet Stein agreed on everything Steiner had written about Kant's epistemology as being the path away from Plato. So, Steiner got his PhD very readily. It interests me, Max, that CIIS, as you seem to admit, knows very little about the work of Rudolf Steiner, and even in 2019. How can this be?
Your work described in "The Redemption of Thinking" is well done, but it only describes what constitutes the a priori and a posteriori dimensions of the human being as a physical human being on earth. Steiner also describes the lines of demarcation which describe the etheric body (left-right), and astral body (above and below}. Kant only emphasized the (before-behind) dimension, which accords the physical body. Thus, Spiritual Science is needed for the full spectrum. Thinking, which is seated in the Etheric Body, Feeling, which is seated in the Astral Body, and Willing, which is seated in the Physical Body. Kant is an icon of this third, through his three books, written in 1781, 1788, and 1790. He was definitely knocking on the door.
thanks, as always, for sharing your thoughts on this, Steven
yes, to begin with I benefitted from Steiner’s treatment of Kant but I also felt I had to overcome the prejudices against Kant that it had instilled in me before I could really understand Kant’s work on its own terms. I still side with Steiner but it’s not possible to get a charitable reading of transcendental idealism, or Kantian ethics, for that matter, from his work so you have to supply the good will yourself. That was my experience anyway.
We shouldn’t be too hard on CIIS for not incorporating more of Steiner’s work in their curriculum. I don’t think there’s another comparable college that incorporates more, and as everyone knows, Steiner is “hors categorie” and thus is exceedingly difficult for academia to relate to.
I’m surprised Steiner’s treatment of Plato was embraced by anyone, let alone a scholar of Platonism but I guess shouldn’t be because misunderstanding Plato seems to be par for the course in academia.
I've never submitted anything for academic approval, and so I admire your achievement. I know that Steiner is difficult for many people, and have lost contact with serious scholars because of it, e.g., Eliot Deutsch. Integral Studies has been my focus for many years, of course, outside the classroom due to this lack of interest and encouragement. Aurobindo led to Fourth Way, which led to Steiner, which led to Gebser, and most recently, the wealth of the evolutionary focus of Pierre Teihard de Chardin. For me, it is about making the bodies suitable for the impressions needed for higher consciousness.
You see, Steiner indicates here that what was once alive in the human organism and conscious in the soul back in the Egyptian Mysteries of the 3rd Cultural Epoch, has now died in the organism, like a piece of lignified wood, and also become unconscious in the soul in our 5th Cultural Epoch. So, we have a definite death process to overcome in this day and age. That is why he attributes Parsifal here to the Consciousness Soul, and the Holy Grail to redemption in the modern era. It seems that we all bear the wound of Amfortas, and need to overcome it with conscious apprehension. It has been a long struggle for me.
https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA144/English/RSP1972/19130207p01.html
“Today I shall try to give a wider view of a subject already often touched upon. I have frequently pointed out how, for modern man, moral and intellectual conceptions diverge. On the one hand we are brought, through intellectual thinking, to recognition of the stern Necessity of Nature. In accordance with this necessity we see everything in Nature under the law of Cause and Effect. And we ask also, when man performs an action: what has caused it, what is the inner or outer cause? This recognition of the necessity for all events has in modern times acquired a more scientific character. In earlier times it had a more theological character, and has so still for many people. It takes on a scientific character when we hold the opinion that what we do is dependent on our bodily constitution and on the influences that work upon it. There are still many people who think that man acts just as inevitably as a stone falls to the ground. There you have the natural scientific colouring of the Necessity concept. The view of those more inclined to Theology might be described as follows. Everything is fore-ordained by some kind of Divine Power or Providence and man must carry out what is predestined by that Divine Power. Thus we have in the one case the Necessity of natural science, and in the other case unconditioned Divine Prescience. One cannot in either case speak of human Freedom at all.
Over against this stands the whole Moral world. Man feels of this world that he cannot so much as speak of it without postulating the freedom of the decisions of his will; for if he has no possibility of free voluntary decision, he cannot speak of a morality of human action. He does however feel responsibility, he feels moral impulses; he must therefore recognise a moral world. I have mentioned before how the impossibility of building a bridge between the two, between the world of Necessity and the world of Morals, led Kant to write two critiques, the Critique of Pure Reason in which he applies himself to investigating the nature of simple Necessity, and the Critique of Applied Reason in which he inquires into what belongs to Moral Cosmogony. Then he felt compelled to write also a Critique of Judgement which was intended as an intermediary between the two, but which ended in being no more than a compromise, and approached reality only when it turned to the world of beauty, the world of artistic creation. This goes to show how man has on the one side the world of Necessity and on the other the world of Free Moral Action, but cannot find anything to unite the two except the world of Artistic Semblance, where — let us say, in sculpture or in painting — we appear to be picturing what comes from Natural Necessity, but impart to it something which is free from Necessity, giving it thus the appearance of being free in Necessity.
The truth is, man is not able to build a bridge between the world of Necessity and the world of Freedom unless he finds the way through Spiritual Science. Spiritual Science, however, requires for its development a fulfilment of the aphorism which won respect centuries ago, the saying of the Greek Apollo: “Know thyself!” Now this admonition, by which is not intended a burrowing into one's own subjectivity but a knowledge of the whole being of man and the position he occupies in the Universe — this is a search that must find a place in our whole spiritual life.”
https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA201/English/RSP1972/19200409a01.html
Gedanken ohne Inhalt sind leer, Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind!
Please find a unique Illuminated Understanding of the evolutionary process and why it has come to a screeching halt.
http://beezone.com/2main_shelf/fiveevolutionatystatesoftrueman.html
http://www.integralworld.net/reynolds6.html
The screeching halt!
http://beezone.com/2main_shelf/stresschemistry.html
Two related references.
http://beezone.com/adida/quandramamashikhara/thelawofpleasuredomeEDIT.html The Pleasure Dome Principle
http://beezone.com/shakti/theshaktiherplaywithadida.html Shakti