A Scottish Catholic blogger at Laodicea says, Alas and alack! I am a woman of little philosophical learning, and yet I find my way littered with anthroposophists, gnostics, relativists, and so on, all relying on me to be led from the darkness of error to the luminous splendour of truth. Yesterday I traced down the opinions of this person Rudolf Steiner in his “Philosophy of Freedom”. “Aah!”, you will say, “Steiner. But that is not philosophy, not even erroneous philosophy, but simply esoteric humbug.” I agree in general, yet the “Philosophy of Freedom” was written before he ever turned to theosophy, being, as Wikipedia informs me, strongly influenced by Fichte, Schiller and Franz Brentano.For what would you make of this: Steiner coined the term moral imagination for this act of creative synthesis. He suggests that we only achieve free deeds when we find a moral imagination, an ethically impelled but particularized response to the immediacy of a given situation. This response will always be individual; it cannot be predicted or prescribed. Futile where my attempts to identify the elements of which these statements – building on the thoughts of evil Schiller – are made up. The categories are all wrong, even the terms we have in common, like “will” or “reason” mean something entirely different. Not long and I was so frustrated that, had I read what I read in a book, I would have flung it into a corner, an impulse urgently to be resisted when you are reading things on your laptop. |
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Couldn't agree more. Pity though.
First, one polite quibble: Steiner never "turned to theosophy" as you put it. Strange as it seems he forged the whole conceptual framework of Anthroposophy out of philosophy, study, and reflection-plus a bit of in born spookiness of his own. Sounds unlikely-impossible even, but thats what I have discovered in my own researches. Good job too Theosophy is a museum piece.
As for slinging laptops at the wall:-
I know a couple of professional philosophers and their complaint is a bit like yours, not so much about Steiner but about the whole business of philosophy. Their complaint is that there is just too much stuff coming out to keep up with the current situation in the wonderful world of philosophy.
So everyone has got something to say/write. This means we stop listening. You, Scottish Catholic Blogger at Laodicea, are simply ahead of the game.
No amount of dumbing down by experts is gooing to help either so you'll just have to live with yourself until the moment comes or not when you feel motivated to take your self-development in hand in an intellectual rather than an emotional way. Then you'll have to work it all out for yourself just like me and Dr Steiner did. The bits are all there they just need putting together.
Bit of a blessing really.
Homunculus esq
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