The Conversation is the most fundamental commonplace of human experience, forever and everywhere being taken up and forever and everywhere being broken off. We sense that within it lies the whole of the human potential, but most often within it we find nothing of lasting value. But we sense that somewhere, somehow within conversation there must be a societal Essence that places the thinking human being not in a deadened and separative state, cut off from imaginative contact with other beings and with Life itself, but in something closer to a dream state, or a state of communion, full of intuition, energy, surprise and of unending exaltation and profundity. We look for this state, full of hope and confidence, each time we enter conversation with another human being, and we repeat that hope and confidence endlessly. But do we really know what to expect of our conversations? Do we know how to draw out that sublime state? Do we understand conversation well enough to justify our perpetual hope in its promise?

These hopes, vicissitudes and disappointments were addressed by the anthroposophist Marjorie Spock in a 1983 essay entitled The Art of Goethean Conversation [3]. Here Miss Spock described the anthroposophist’s intuition of conversation, a meeting of souls directed by spirits “across the threshold, in the etheric world, where thoughts,” as Kant said, “are intuitions in the realm of the First Cause.” The anthroposophical vision of a domain of science in which human experience itself is prepared, studied and ultimately revealed to the senses, or to the transcendental sense organs, as a law of cosmic nature – this was the purport of the M.S. essay. By this vision anthroposophy has since been haunted, hoping but not daring to assert and proclaim the wonderful intuition: transcendental conversation among human beings is a real possibility!

The 2006 essay by Carl H. Flygt, Conversation – A New Theory of Language, followed up on the M.S. picture and gave a framework for building up conversations in practical and workable terms with the anthroposophists we know. It showed us how modern science thinks about language and language use generally, and pointed out the important inventions and discoveries that have come since logic was reformulated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by figures like Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein. In short, it gave us a framework for playing systematic language games in an anthroposophical context, and for opening the human intuition consensually to the spiritual worlds through social methods. Carl Flygt thinks these logical, anthroposophical methods are adequate for a modern initiation science that will keep up with the consciousness studies, brain research and information science currently developing, out of historical necessity, in our secular and materialistically oriented institutions.

Carl lectures and gives workshops on anthroposophical conversation worldwide.