the birth of the Self amidst archetypal polarities in the evolution of consciousness

“the light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not”

“The foal that kicked its mother” is the colourful manner, according to Diogenes Laërtius testimony in Lives of the Philosophers, by which Plato once characterized his former student (following the latter’s departure from the Academy and subsequent founding of his own school, the Lyceum). Diogenes’ testimony is almost certainly factitious. Nevertheless, the history of Western Philosophy offers few contrasts so fruitful as that between Plato and Aristotle, his pupil of twenty years. Diogenes’ account, though embellished and hyperbolic, hints at a significant difference in the philosophical emphasis of these two supreme thinkers. In particular, the respective teachings of Plato and Aristotle on the nature of universals has fascinated commentators and theologians for millennia, leading the Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges to remark (in allusion to a similar observation by Samuel Taylor Coleridge) that:

It has been said that all men are born either Aristotelians or Platonists. That is equivalent to saying that there is no debate of an abstract nature that is not an instance of the debate between Aristotle and Plato. Down through the centuries and latitudes, the names change, the dialects, the faces, but not the eternal antagonists.¹

The Renaissance painter Raphael attempted to convey this debate with tempera in an immemorial image: in his School of Athens the two philosophers constitute the central figures.

Plato, old and barefoot, robed in crimson, gestures upwards towards the heaven of the immutable Forms or Ideas. Aristotle, by contrast, painted as a robust figure in the prime of life, shodden and wearing blue, extends his hand toward the viewer signifying the doctrine of immanence, or universalia in rebus. Taken together, the vertical orientation of Plato’s gesture and the horizontal one of his student form a cross that represents the intersection of past and future of the Axial Age. Their combined gesture had, by Raphael’s time, achieved supreme symbolic significance following the advent of Christianity. In our time, some five centuries after Raphael’s composition, Plato’s relationship to spiritual realities may be difficult to comprehend. Indeed, it is supremely characteristic of the post-modern sentiment, which Friedrich Nietzsche so keenly articulated in Thus Spake Zarathustra with his famous phrase “God is dead,”² to regard the lofty ideas of the Platonic philosophers with circumspection if not downright hostility. In our climate of cynicism, ideas like Truth, Beauty, and Goodness are almost never taken at face value and instead, are generally construed as means of control or exerting power³ over the naïve masses. Still, by its own logic, such global skepticism must cast aspersions on its own judgements no less than those of the schools that it seeks to undermine. Is there another way to interpret the evident trend towards disenchantment than a gradual unmasking of pretenses to more noble intentions? I hope to show that the general disenchantment of our time did not emerge spontaneously or as a matter of accident, but instead represents a moment embedded in an organic evolution of human consciousness through the eons, whose basic gesture one may already discern in the transition of philosophic regency from Plato to Aristotle.

Raphael presents this preeminent pair in School of Athens as straddling two eras: the inherited spiritual tradition of the past and the new mode of rational and proto-scientific analysis of the future. In this way, with the two masters descending from the Academy, Raphael offers a picture of an axial moment in the history of ideas. Plato, representing the waning participation mystique of the past, before humanity’s expulsion from the womb of Nature, wears red to symbolize the fading, or darkened light.

As Johann von Goethe demonstrated in his work on colour theory,⁴ light darkened deepens from yellow to red in proportion to the degree of attenuation. So in this way, with the intellectualization of Greek philosophy, the Edenic brilliance of the anterior cosmic unity was sinking into the distance of prior epochs like a setting sun, increasingly dimmed by a fine rationalistic dust that was beginning to accumulate in suspension in the noösphere ever since the advent of sophistry and dialectic. The colour of Aristotle’s toga, conversely, represents the future of western consciousness. As Goethe showed, blue is the phenomenon of dark lightened, as light radiating into unfathomed spaces. Thus, the figurehead of the future, which, from the standpoint of the fourth century B.C., remained a mystery, wears the colour of the unknown.⁵ Raphael demonstrates his “negative capability”⁶ or “sympathetic imagination”⁷ in his recognition that, as we today may not fathom the revelations of three centuries hence, nor even past the event-horizon of the coming Presidential election, so for the paragon of the Greek intellectual tradition, “the light shone in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.”⁸

Aristotle himself characterizes color as a particular condition of transparency once actualized by light.⁹ This is to say that space is in potentia what visible color is as the final cause and light as the efficient one.¹⁰ Taken in the context of Goethe’s colour theory together with the further line from the Gospel of John— “I am the Light of the World”¹¹—this view of light provide for an even deeper appreciation for Raphael’s intuitive genius in his choice of blue for the colour of Aristotle’s robe. Recall that blue is the colour of lightened dark, or “light shining into the darkness.” For Raphael, as for individuals of today, the march of history has illuminated what to Aristotle remained in potential but still unconsummated: namely, the incarnation of Christ. “In him,” wrote the Evangelist, “was life; and the life was the light of men.”¹² So before the event that the esoteric polymath Rudolf Steiner called “the essence and meaning of the whole evolution of the Earth,”¹³ the human being had yet to inwardize the source of this light, which we may call “the individual solar ego.”¹⁴ Instead, in pre-Christian times, this spiritual principle “shined [from without] in the darkness,” and thus disappeared into the blue distance of Aristotle’s toga. With the sacrifice of Christ, the solar principle entered the individual human soul and thus began to radiate from within. In other words, the experience of selfhood, which we assume as a matter of course today, was not present from the outset of cosmic evolution, nor was it a stochastic accident of genetic mutations. Instead, the experience of selfhood represents a sort of telos towards which the arc of cosmic history has been bending.

Having now suggested an artistic and mystical context for the transition from Plato via Aristotle, to the Common Era, I will now attempt to trace the epistemological implications concomitant with this shift. Before I continue, however, I will just indicate that Raphael depicts the Virgin Mary on many occasions and she is dressed consistently in blue and red. In this way, her colours represent a symbol of synthesis of the pre-Christian world. We must turn to the Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi, however, to find the picture of the human being permeated with the newly incarnated ego: in his painting of Mary Magdalene from 1616, we find the subject clothed in a dress of irradiant gold. As the first to see Jesus following the Resurrection, it is fitting that Mary should appear as the herald of the new human condition. 

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From our disenchanted vantage of post-post modernity, it demands an act of true “negative capability” or “sympathetic imagination” on our part to comprehend the experience of the Greek philosophers. Indeed, to the one of today the pre-Socratic words of Heraclitus “Hades is Dionysus,”¹⁵ sound almost as though from a dream. In our ordinary left-brain beta-wave consciousness, we likely respond with the incredulity of one waking from strange visions, and then, gathering our wits, we might remark that such a statement by the Ephesian sage would appear to contradict the laws of formal logic, and that furthermore scientific advancement has demonstrated that, in any case, the statement is not strictly false but meaningless: to wit, gods do not exist. Nevertheless, an ounce of intellectual charity on our part can hardly abide by such dismissal, for just as the sun at high noon renders invisible the innumerable stars, so the individuated ego of the modern man may blind him to the subtler workings of psyche and cosmos.

For Heraclitus, however, the gods still spoke in Nature as Nature, the the human soul still reverberated as one of Nature’s organs. Plato still perceived the world of spirit, though the latter was beginning to withdraw from human apprehension. For this reason, Plato conceives of the immutable Forms as subsisting in an ontological sanctuary outside of space and time. As we indicated above, Plato represents the sunset of this condition, though “Hades [being] Dionysus,” we could just as well conceive of him as a sunrise for the new one. In any case, we recognise an evident metamorphosis from Homer’s worldview, which he expresses in the opening line of The Iliad 

Sing in me, O goddess, of the wrath of Achilles, Peleus’ son.

Here Homer indicates an entirely different experience of personal agency than is familiar to us today: viz., that the goddess possesses Homer’s faculties and supplants his own agency to recount the history of the Trojan War. This relinquishment of autonomy to an indwelling divinity is characteristic throughout Homer’s narratives. In fact, to conceive of divesting oneself of one’s ego represents a retrospective projection of our current condition onto that of the pre-Socratic Greeks in a fallacy of misplaced uniformity. In the time of Homer, the human being had not either received the germ of, nor cultivated to fruition, the autonomous ego. Rather, this spiritual principle, which the human being would later appropriate to herself, was for the Ancient Greeks, distributed over all of Nature and its agency took the forms of manifold deities. Consider, for instance, the immanence of Zeus in the workings of Nature as his agency in meteoric phenomena that the follow passage from Homer’s Odyssey¹⁶ expresses: 

And jealous now of me, you gods,  
because I befriend a man,  
one I saved as he straddled the keel alone,  
when Zeus had blasted and shattered his swift ship with a bright lightning bolt,  
out on the wine-dark sea.

The final line from this quote has achieved recent interest as support for the assertion that the Greeks did not actually experience the colour blue.¹⁷ Indeed, such an argument is eminently convincing given the conspicuous lack of a word for this colour in the Ancient Greek lexicon. As is so often the case, modern scholarship has corroborated observations of Rudolf Steiner (which in this case he made in a lecture in 1922):  

...in the course of history, man underwent considerable changes. You only have to remember how the Greek viewed the world, quite physically. The Greek did not see the colour blue, as we see it now. He only saw the reddish tones of colour. If a modem man contemplates the beautiful blue sky and thinks that the Greek, who was steeped in beauty, must have loved it, he is mistaken. The Greek saw the warm, reddish and yellow tints, and could not distinguish green from blue.¹⁸ 

Nietzsche could not fail to arrive at a similar conclusion in respect to our Ancient forbears. In his little-read book Daybreak published in 1881, he expounds on the subject:

How different nature must have appeared to the Greeks if, as we have to admit, their eyes were blind to blue and green, and instead of the former saw deep brown, instead of the latter yellow (so that they used the same word, for example, to describe the colour of dark hair, that of the cornflower, and that of the southern sea; and again the same word for the colour of the greenest plants and that of the human skin, honey, and yellow resins: it has been shown that their greatest painters reproduced their world using only black, white, red and yellow)  how different and how much more like mankind nature must have appeared to them, since in their eyes the coloration of mankind also preponderated in nature and the latter as it were floated in the atmosphere of human coloration! Blue and green dehumanise nature more than anything else does….¹⁹

It might be objected that the experience colour is a function of the visual apparatus in the human organism and hence the question ought to be settled by evolutionary biologists and not by philosophers and philologists. But the objection is spurious because even if it could be established that the distribution of “cones” in the human retina had remained unchanged since the time of Homer—a proposition that does not permit for empirical verification and hence must be affirmed on the tacit authority of the reigning paradigm in the biological sciences—it would still say nothing in respect to colours per se except insofar as the qualitative experience of colour can be translated to physical or physiological parameters. Retinal cells respond to physical stimuli but do not experience colour and neither does the brain for the same reason. Instead, it is the soul or psyche that is the subject of colour experience. Attempting to shift the discussion to physical or physiological elements displaces the question from the only field in which it can be addressed on its own terms.

If it is true that the experience of colour has transformed over the course of history so that our experience of today presents a marked departure from that of ancient people, how are we to understand this difference? The answer will not be a matter seeking more information, but rather of establishing connections between what we have already indicated. As outlined above, Goethe’s insight into colour theory revealed two polar colour-spectra: one of lightened dark and the other of darkened light. The former we experience as the “cold” colours (i.e. blue, indigo, violet) and the latter as warm (i.e. yellow, orange, red). The true significance of this distinction is that, in the former case, light recedes from the viewer, while in the other it approaches. It is precisely the former phenomenon that the Greeks did not experience. The reason is because Nature had not yet been disenchanted or disillusioned. As a result, light radiated towards them from all quarters. It is likely that the outer sun underwent a similar “consolidation” of its power into a discreet solar body in parallel with the intensification of ego-consciousness in the human soul. In any case, the crucial point to understanding the transition from the pre-Socratics to Plato, and then to Aristotle, is that the former were themselves part of this play of enchanted Nature and thus were themselves bearers of this spiritual warmth, while the latter had finally separated from it. For this reason, Aristotle appears in blue on the steps of the Academy. Nature likely still emanated immanent divine warmth and light but the human soul was no longer the beneficiary of it and neither could it yet had it been kindled from within to become a source of light. Indeed, this spiritual sun of participation mystique had set with Plato and withdrawn from the inner human, to rise again some three-odd centuries later in an individuated form. 

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If one adopt the year zero as a reference point, one may imagine concentric ripples emanating through the noösphere over many centuries. The medieval Scholastics, from the crest of one of these billows, strove in retrospect to descry the nature of this development, and it was from this tradition that we inherit the most lucid characterization of the “dialogue between these eternal antagonists,” as Borges described the conflict between Plato and Aristotle in the quote above. Universalia ante res—literally, “universal before things”—was the Scholastic term for the Platonic doctrine that ascribed both precedence and presidency to the ideal essence of a given object. Thus, to help a grandmother across a busy intersection can be called “good” precisely because the act has partaken of the Form of the Good. In contradistinction to the Platonic philosophy, Aristotle posited that the Form of the Good is immanent in all of its instantiations and not transcendent to them. Thus, we learn about the Good by observing, among other things, charity towards the kinetically disadvantaged in the face of their imminent danger. Nevertheless, if people ceased to perform beneficent actions, the Good would die with their goodness. Philosophers and theologians of the Middle Ages called Aristotle’s conception universalia in rebus—“universal in things.”  A third conception also found foundation and formulation by the Scholastic. This view stood the Platonic doctrine on its head and declared “universalia post res”—“universal after things.” William of Ockham was perhaps the first to articulate this view, which is known as Nominalism.²⁰ In contrast to Realism, which holds that Universals exist, the Nominalist position asserts that the latter are mere mental abstractions formed post factum according to intellectual categories. Thus, one aids an ailing grandmother and we happen to call it “good” by sheer convention according to its external resemblance to other charitable deeds.²¹

We might contrast Realism and Nominalism by describing the former’s virtue as one of “self-difference” and the latter’s as “synthetic similarity.” This is to say that Realists conceive of unity differentiating itself, while Nominalists claim that a synthetic activity of the intellect links differences according to subjectively perceived qualitative similarity. To picture the distinction vis-à-vis the number “5”, we may respectively imagine a geometric figure divided five ways and contrast this to a heap consisting of five different geometric figures. In the former case, the single figure is primary and each section remains in implicate relation to the whole. In the latter case by contrast, difference is primary and the hypothetical quintet forms only according to a synthetic activity of the intellect. Nothing inherent to the heap of shape leads to “5.” Instead, it is a somewhat arbitrary activity of the intellect that groups them and hence the “5” must be thought of not as “real” but as conventional or “nominal.” Plato exemplified the process of cognition through “self-difference” just as the Nominalists exemplified that of “synthetic similarity.” Still recognizing Universals but nevertheless relegating them to particular instances, Aristotle represents an intermediary in this schema.  

We may now “step back,” as it were, and attempt to gain a perspective of this evolution. Such an attempt will at once reveal a transition “down through the centuries and latitudes, the names...the dialects, the faces” of universal to particular. If one were to trace this transition back from Plato into the mists of pre-history, one might posit with intuitive confidence that all was universal. In picture form, one might imagine that before tasting of the proverbial Fruit, humankind lacked Knowledge of Good and Evil. This is to say that humankind had no experience of duality altogether. The moral duality above is itself the expression an epistemic cleft that constitutes the crux of the present human condition: the duality of subject and object. One may imagine, however, a time before human cognition had been bifurcated in this manner. In this state of consciousness, the universe was itself a single universal—between lógos, cosmos, and psyche there was not the slightest difference, for the human being had not yet emerged from the womb of Nature. Instead, one might characterize such a condition as one of oceanic anterior unity.

If one should swing forward to the opposite pole of this spectrum to the disenchanted world of post-modernity, one would be met with quite the opposite picture. Here one would discover an ultra-relativism as the highest ideal and no single universe at all, but rather a pluriverse of variegated opinions and ideologies. Every individual has her multitudinous standpoints whence she measures the myriad issues of the day, and universals are taken to be intellectual abstractions wrought according to one’s particular cultural context and personal ideology and paradigm. Whereas one arrived at the former pole by moving past Platonism and the pre-Socratic into pre-history, one arrives at our contemporary worldview having traversed such philosophical countries as Islamic Aristotelianism, Catholic Aristotelianism, Scholastic Nominalism, Protestantism, British Empiricism, European Enlightenment thought, and Logical Positivism, to mention several definitive waypoints in this journey. In the latter transition we can discern a trend that we may characterise in two ways: as a disenchantment of the natural world in respect to universals, and as a diminution of universals in respect to their epistemological and ontological robustness.

To further illustrate this historical metamorphosis, we may draw on the picture provided by the archetypal processes of Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury from the alchemical tradition of the Renaissance, as Paracelsus articulated it in particular.²² Salt and Sulphur represent polar processes of aggregation/formation and combustion/dissolution respectively, while Mercury represents the fluidic intermediary or balance. In this sense, we may imagine that the Salt process characterized the time before the Common Era in so far as spirit and matter, or universalia et res, tended towards cohesion. The trajectory of the Common Era, by contrast, has been one of preponderating Sulphur. In this process, matter and spirit undergo a sustained separation whose inevitable conclusion is scorched Earth, or “ash,” to use alchemical terminology. As Joseph Campbell observed in an unforgettable interview with Bill Moyers in 1988, “The world without spirit is a wasteland.”²³ Inwardly, this wasteland appears as existential malaise and outwardly as the fumes from a trillion tons of fossil fuel. Indeed, while the Salt process was behind the photosynthetic generation that first bound the ancient sunlight into organic substance, Sulphur is behind the fire that now burns away these forests and fossilized fuels, liberating the light, the warmth, the spirit that was erstwhile enchanted into living matter by means of hydrogen bonds. Given the extremity of the process the alchemists call “Sulphur,” the Scholastics call “Nominalism,” anthroposophers call “materialism,” and Bay Area philosophers call “disenchantment,”²⁴ facts now appear so alien from values²⁵—statistics from moral action—that we no longer experience the identity of these two desolate consequences and are rendered morally impotent while we drive the Earth towards ecological catastrophe.

Having now oscillated in our consideration between the two poles of Salt and Sulphur and their historical expressions in pre-history and post-modernity respectively, we may now finally turn to the balance point between them. The former we may conceive of as a spiritual principle that also incarnated onto the stage of history and became “mystical fact”²⁶  thus representing the healing of the rift between them. In the terms of Paracelsian alchemy, one must call this principle “Mercury,” while in cultural history one might call it “the incarnation of the Christ.” In both cases, we refer to an archetypal virtue of salvation. We need not rely on the specious conflation of the caduceus with the rod of Asclepius to connect Mercury and Christ, for this connection emerges organically from a consideration of their shared project to heal rifts and reconcile opposites. Still, we can find some historical link: Homer, for example, writes of “Hermes the healer,”²⁷ and the Olympian plays the essential role of messenger and intermediary between gods and mortals. The figure of Jesus Christ likewise represents a principle of messenger and intermediary: Jesus as a human being exalted and the Christ as a divine being descended—the former pictured in the scene of Transfiguration and the latter in the descent of the dove at Baptism in the River Jordan. “He was made man that we might be made God,” as Saint Athanasius famously expounded in the 4th century.²⁸  As for Mercury the go-between, Christ’s reciprocity and conjugation also manifests in healing virtue: in the Gospel of John, for instance, we find Christ pose the question to a sick man: “Wilt thou be made whole?” When the man begins to offer Jesus a plaintive litany to rationalize his state, Jesus interrupts him: “Rise, take up thy bed and walk. And immediately the man was made whole, and took up his bed, and walked.”²⁹  

The passage from the Gospel, however, indicated above intimates the crux of the symbol of Christ as healer and gestures towards the heart of this entire consideration as it relates to the contemporary human being: that salvation comes according to one’s own initiative and not as something imposed or accomplished purely on the initiative of a higher power: “Rise, take up thy bed and walk,” Christ enjoins the invalid. The waning spiritual sun of Platonism descended to rise again from within the individual, as the autonomous human ego, the “I AM.”³⁰ The said separation of the universal from the particular which we traced above, being itself a single expression of the general unraveling of spirit and matter, represents one of the most significant trends in the evolution of human consciousness over the last millennia. The concomitant emancipation from the harmony of Nature that this separation entails furthermore constitutes the birth of individual moral responsibility, not according to sentience or instinct, nor according to positive law or social convention, but according to consciousness and conscience. The emanation of freedom from the solar self casts the shadow of evil when the individual fails to honor this connection, while the symbolic light itself is the substance of love, for it is impossible to love a being of which we are unconscious. Thus freedom, love, and potential for evil represent mutually dependent phenomena that arise with the incarnation of the individual ego into the human being. As Steiner expresses this: 

What then is essential for love? ...It is this—that he be in possession of his full self-consciousness, that he be wholly independent. No one can love another in the full sense of the word if this love be not a free gift of one person to another. My hand does not love my organism. Only one who is independent, one who is not bound to the other person, can love him. To this end the human being had to become an ego-being. The ego had to be implanted in the threefold human body, so that the Earth might, through mankind, fulfill its mission of love.³¹

Thus, the Ancient Greeks felt themselves as so many hands to one body, to use Steiner’s metaphor, and hence were of yet without the condition of separateness necessary for love to arise. As indicated above, the human being of Plato’s time still experience warmth wafting forth from all of living Nature around them and enveloping them in a nondual relation with their surroundings. Today, by contrast, one sees only matter in the form of objects, which themselves represent the conclusion of a forgotten chain of Nominalistic abstraction. Figuratively, the world appears cold today (light shining into darkness appears blue, according to Goethe’s discovery) because it is without spirit, the latter which, as we noted, withdrew to reëmerge inwardly, according to the constitution of the modern human being’s experience. This rebirth, however, has gone mostly unnoticed, so remote is its venue from the ordinary bourn of the contemporary man’s extraverted attention. The revolution that Copernicus achieved in regard to astronomy, Kant to the human intellect, Freud to the human psyche, we are called to undertake toward the human spirit. “The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now,”³² as Saint Paul wrote, because of our general failure to recognize the source of this light, and our inclination, instead, to apprehend only its reified reflections. Prophetically, Plato provided the perfect pictorial heuristic to understand our condition in his parable of the cave in The Republic,³³ though it demands new interpretation according to our moment in evolution. Italian esotericist and philosopher Massimo Scaligero captures the pith of this difference when he writes: 

the light which at one time, transcendent to [humankind], lit its path for it, and, as it became individual, withdrew to re-arise from the depths of its soul: as thought which, reflecting itself in the multiple, particularises itself, but of itself (eo ipso) tends to restore the wholeness proper to its unreflected being to the divided world.³⁴

Thus, while Plato experienced something of the ancient identification with this transcendental light, for his pupil, the coëxtension of human being with the universal spirit that was the source of his teacher’s inspiration had largely ceased. Instead, Aristotle’s interest was called by the spiritual light still extant in Nature. This extraverted orientation remains the inheritance of Western culture today, though the universalia in rem that Aristotle sought have now even withdrawn from the world as it appears to human senses. They have not, however, been extinguished. Today, rather, they enter human experience from within. And yet, our eyes remain transfixed to the western horizon, seeking to catch a glimpse of the sun that has long since departed that region of the heavens but which has already begun to rise anew. “Repent ye,” cried John the Baptist, “for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”³⁵ The significance of the Baptist’s injunction will be lost on contemporary readers unless it is grasped that “repent ye” is the phrase by which the Jacobin scholars chose the render the original Greek term Μετανοεῖτε (Metanoeite), which is, literally, “turn about” or “go beyond the mind.” Plato indicated a similar internal revolution when he described a “turning [of the] soul from day that is a kind of night to true day — the ascent to what is, which we say is true philosophy.”³⁶ Until this interior revolution, the world as we are capable of beholding it can only appear “...through a glass, darkly,”³⁷ and all the more so given our conceit of perfect knowledge through quantitative science for, as Socrates never tired of reminding his interlocutors, “knowledge of ignorance is the beginning of wisdom.”³⁸ As the cherry-blossoms charm their pollinators from hibernation with the sight of their gentle beauty, so the world enjoins the human being to awaken from her slumber that she may fulfill her role as honeybee of the invisible.³⁹

Photo by Andy Holmes on Unsplash

Reworked from an essay originally published in 2017.

1. Jorge Luis Borges. Collected Fictions. “Deutsches Requiem,” trans. Andrew Hurley (1946; repr; New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1998),  231. 

2. Friedrich Nietzsche. Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufman. (1888; repr; New York, NY: Penguin Classics Edition, 1969), 41.

3. à la Foucault.

4. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Theory of Colours (Zum Farbenlehre), trans. Charles Lock Eastlake (1810; repr; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982).

5. ibid., 79.

6. John Keats. The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats (Cambridge, UK: Houghton, Mifflin and Company. 1899), 277. 

7. Richard Tarnas. The Passion of the Western Mind. (New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1991). 369.

8. John 1:5.

9. Aristotle. De Anima, Book II.7; 419a 10-12.

10. For a more thorough discussion of Aristotelian causality, please consult The Redemption of Thinking (2020), p. 26-31, and for a more thorough discussion of colour theory, please consult p. 124-136 of the same work.

11. John 8.12.

12. John 1.4.

13. Rudolf Steiner. The Mystery of Golgotha. A lecture delivered in Manchester College Chapel, Oxford, on August 27th. 1922. Authorized translation from the German of Notes unrevised by the lecturer. Published by kind permission of Frau Marie Steiner.

14. The sun consistently served as a symbol of the individuated ego as in the protoscientific disciplines of astrology and alchemy. In the latter tradition, the sun is linked to metallic gold, which notoriously resists oxidation, which is to say, it preserves its individuality.

15. Heraclitus. Fragments. (repr. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2003) 50. 

16. Homer, Odyssey, Book 5.

17. Guy Deutscher. Through the Language Glass. (New York, NY: Metropolitan Books, 2010), 96.

18. Steiner, “The Contrasting World-Conceptions of East and West.” Dornach, June 17.

19. Nietzsche, Daybreak, Aphorism 126.

20. Gordon Leff. William of Ockham: Metamorphosis of the Scholastic Discourse (Oxford Road, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1975), 90.

21. Of course, the Nominalist view begs the question of how similarity is in fact perceived if it is merely conventional, since to establish such conventions of similarity it would have been necessary to draw on a basis other than convention which, ex hypothesi, did not yet exist. For a more thorough discussion of the contradictions inherent in the Nominalist, and by extension, Empiricist epistemology, please consult The Redemption of Thinking (2020), p. 227-229.

22. Walter Pagel. Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance, (2nd Revised Edition, Karger Press: New York, 1982).

23. Campbell, The Power of Myth (1988), 182.

24. Quoting Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

25. Sometimes referred to as “Hume’s fork,” in allusion to on of the primary historical exponents of the schizoid view. I elaborated on the theme during the Corona lockdowns in the lecture below:

26. Rudolf Steiner. Christianity as Mystical Fact. West Nyack, NY: Rudolf Steiner Publications, Inc., 1961.

27. Homer. The Odyssey. Book 24 (1900 Sauer Butler trans., repr; Clayton, Delaware: Literary Touchstone Classics, 2006), 241.

28. On Incarnation. intr. C.. S. Lewis. (4th Century C.E.; repr CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011), 77.

29. John 5:6-8.

30. John 8:58.

31. Rudolf Steiner. “Lecture III,” from The Gospel of John: A cycle of twelve lectures given at Hamburg, May 18–31, 1908. trans from shorthand reports unrevised by the lecturer, from the German edition published with the title, Das Johannes-Evangelium by Maud B. Monges. (1940 by Anthroposophic Press, Inc.), 44.

32. Romans 8:22.

33. Cf. Plato, Republic, Book VII.

34. Massimo Scaligero. A Treatise on Living Thinking. (Trattato del pensiero vivente: Una Via oltre le filosofie occidentali, oltre lo Yoga, oltre lo Zen.) trans. Mark Willan. (Milan: Feriani, 1961), 12.

35. Matthew 3:2.

36. Plato, Republic, 521c.

37. Corinthians 13:12.

38. Cf. Plato’s Apology:

Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is—for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him.

39. “Human beings are bees of the invisible,” wrote the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke in a letter to his friend Witold Hulewicz on November 13, 1925, “passionately we plunder the honey of the visible in order to gather it in the great golden hive of the invisible.”