New book out in German by Russian GA Bondarew called Die "Philosophie der Freiheit" von Rudolf Steiner als Grundlage der Logik des anschauenden Denkens .
Purchase book here.
The Philosophy of Freedom "by Rudolf Steiner as the basis of the logic of intuitive thinking
English translation of above link.     Russian review

I wrote the following text a week ago, but
haven't had a chance to post it before now.
It was an invitation to a discussion, but
now it seems that I won't be getting event
the little time online that I normally get.
So I won't be engaging in any discussion,
but you can take this as a think piece or
discuss it without me. RM
***

Now I've had a little while to look over Jeff
B.'s forwarded file of the first part of the
translation of Bondarev's book on *PoF*.  And I
have to say *look over*, for I surely haven't
read it all yet, even though it amounts to only
the beginning of Bondy's huge book.  I would
despair of reading that book even in I had it in
English; I suppose I might need the better part
of a year to work through it. So, for now, about
all I can offer are some of my impressions on
starting to approach the book. -- Perhaps if
others are also starting into the book, we could
compare our impressions?

And I said *impressions*; for me, I might have
said *whimpers of frustration*.  As I said
before, I got the feeling that the book is a
work of genius, and I still have that opinion,
but now I really get the feeling that this is a
*foreign* genius at work -- so foreign that my
mind strains and fails at trying to work my way
into the thoughts of such a genius.

I'll try to explain what I mean by *foreign*. --
This fragment, in Jeff's Word document, is 155
pages long (big pages), but Bondy doesn't
actually start into his close analysis of the
text of *PoF* until page 139.  The pages leading
up to that point are filled mostly with Bondy's
own philosophical foreplay, as it were.  And it
is this philosophy that is so foreign to me.  It
is foreign in a geographical sense, but not only
that; it is foreign in a cultural sense, and
more, in the sense of the mode of consciousness
that is producing the thoughts.  For Bondy seems
to be what the Brits, and by derivation we
Americans, would call a "Continental"
philosopher.  Those of us who have had at least
a brush with academic philosophy in the English-
speaking world will probably have at least a
glimmer on what that term implies.

I'll try to explain a little more. --
Generalizing broadly (and hence somewhat
inaccurately in some cases, but that can't be
avoided when giving just brief impressions), the
philosophical consciousness in the English-
speaking world might be called "nominalistic"
and "sense-bound"; the term *classical British
empiricism* isn't used for no good reason.  (And
of course, it wasn't for no good reason that
Francis Bacon -- who was, as Steiner tells us,
the reincarnated Haroun al Rashid, the main
opponent of Aristotle, who was a previous
incarnation of our very same Steiner -- himself
was a Brit.)  In America this quality is even
intensified; America is, after all, the home of
so-called philosophical "pragmatism".

So, the kind of philosophy that was most in
vogue some 40-odd years ago when I passed
briefly through an American university (very
briefly; if you'd blinked, you would've have
missed me) was "sense-bound"; one might even say
*earth-bound*.  That was during the afterglow of
the heyday of so-called "ordinary language
philosophy", but the atmosphere of modern
"British empiricism" was also ambient.  (The
latter seemed to be in the form of a modified,
patched-up "logical positivism", which itself
had its heyday in 1930s Vienna, but nevertheless
wasn't "Continental" in the sense that I am
using here; it was really more of a transplanted
British empiricism, but that's another story.)
There were differences between "ordinary
language philosophy" and the modernized
empiricism, but they were joined at least in
mutual incomprehension, and even derision,
toward the kind of philosophy that was prevalent
on the "Continent" (of Europe), both in the
present and the recent past.  (And this, 40-odd
years ago, was in the heyday of
"Existentialism", and before the advent of
"post-modernism", "narrative theory", etc.)
Texts from philosophers such as Heidegger or
Sartre might be used as paradigmatic examples of
"philosophical nonsense", for instance.  And
classical "German Idealism" (Fichte and Hegel
especially) was as much or even more
uncomprehended and incomprehensible.

Hegelianism had a vogue in the upper strata of
British philosophical academia in the 19th
Century, but modern, "serious", philosophy was
considered  to have had its start early in the
20th Century when Bertrand Russell and George
Moore rebelled against the prevalent Hegelianism
at Cambridge.  That anomalous British
Hegelianiam was regarded as it were an
embarrassing, perverse lapse between the
classical British empiricism from Bacon through
Hume (let's not talk about Reid now) and the
modern empiricism that began and was exemplified
in Russell, and that lapse was mostly passed
over in silence, and John Stuart Mill seemed to
be almost the only Brit in the 19th Century
worth mentioning.  (Actually, there was in
Russell a little spark of "Realism" in the
Scholastic sense, or "ontological Platonism",
but let's not talk about that now either; I'm
painting the picture in broad strokes here.)

Now, what was so "foreign" in the Continental
thinkers was their practice of using words and
concepts that couldn't readily be nailed down
somewhere in the physical-sensory world.  (One
might object that *physical* and *sensory* are
not equivalent concepts, but I'm allowing myself
to be sloppy with my broad strokes; I'm trying
to present more of a feeling-attitude than a
conceptual analysis.)  And they used such
concepts not in mathematics, which is allowed in
modern empiricism, but in places that . . .
well, seem impossible to "place".  For example,
when Heidegger speaks of *Dasein* (*being-
there*) or the *Nichts* (the *nothing*), or even
the *Nichts* that *nichtet* (*nots*)-- the
average British or American thinker can't do
much but screw up his face and smirk, or laugh
out loud, and shake his head from side to side.
And neither can he do much with German Idealism,
especially Hegel and his "Absolute" and all
that; it's just incomprehensible.  He regards it
as a kind of philosophical sickness that needs
therapy.

Of course, the educated British or American
philosopher will have read the Greeks (Plato and
Aristotle especially, but they're ancient
history) and the "Continental Rationalists"
(Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, but they're
still "history") and Kant (who was "awakened"
from his "dogmatic slumbers" by Hume, so
whatever might be worthwhile in Kant is really
British) -- and he has probably gritted his
teeth and struggled through a survey of modern
Continental currents (e.g. Schopenhauer,
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, maybe a little Sartre) -
- but all these amount to unavoidable, even
irksome, obligations if one is to be "cultured".
"Serious" philosophy, the kind "one does", must
be "analytic":  there's logic and there's the
empirical, the physical-sensory; that's all
that's real; all the rest is fluff and nonsense.
-- I might be exaggerating a little, but not a
whole lot; and this picture might be somewhat
distorted by my subjective peculiarities, but
not entirely.

My basic point is that the kind of consciousness
-- typical on the "Continent", and especially in
the German world --- that produces philosophical
thinking not tied to the logical-empirical is
really "foreign" to the typical philosophical
consciousness in the English-speaking world, and
especially to the typical U-S-American.  And I
am very much a U-S-American in consciousness,
though perhaps not so typical, and especially
not so much since my ongoing encounter with
Anthroposophy.  I surely didn't understand *PoF*
the first time I read it, but gradually (with
help from Kühlewind and from Otto Palmer's
collection of Steiner-saids about *PoF*) I came
to understand (so I allow myself to believe, at
least) what Steiner meant by *pure thinking*,
*living thinking*.  And more importantly, I
learned how to *do* it, and of course "doing" is
very typically "American".

And of course Steiner was very much within the
tradition of German Idealism, and often was at
pains to explain it and uphold it.  Indeed,
during the First World War he wrote a book (*The
Riddle of Man*) defending German Idealism "with
his life's blood".  But he was not merely
"within" that tradition; he was its culmination
and rose above it to the plane of universality.
And that universality comes through in *PoF*;
it, for me, even as difficult as it is, is more
accessible than Teutonic Idealist philosophy;
e.g. Hegel especially.  For in *PoF* thinking
reaches a culmination where it passes from
"philosophy" to something else.  (Bondarev
quotes RS:  "The age of philosophy has been
fulfilled.")  This "something else" is
Anthroposophy; indeed, the title of the final
chapter of Steiner's *Riddles of Philosophy* is
"From Philosophy to Anthroposophy".  For in the
"living thinking" as is taught in *PoF* one is
not merely "thinking about" whatever; one is
*doing* something definite ("intuitive
thinking"), and this "doing" is experienced.
And such experience is as "empirical" as you can
get, though it is not sensory experience.  We
might call the *PoF* thinking *supersensory
empiricism*.

And now my point is that the "empiricism" of
*PoF* thinking is relatively easy to grasp for
this naturally empiricist U-S-American, because
I can do it; I can experience it ("relatively"
as compared to Hegel, Heidegger, etc., I mean).
I'm talking about myself of course, but I would
like to hope that I could generalize to
observation to "Anglophones" in general, and *a
fortiori* to U-S-Americans in general.  For
Anthroposophy is not merely German, or Central
European, or even "Continental", but it is
"universal human".  Anthroposophy offers all of
us, even hard-headed Americans, the opportunity
to rise above the limitations of our *Volk*
nature to the plane of the "universal human", to
the status of a "free spirit", through the
essence of our human-ness experienced in
thinking.

So, what does all this have to do with
Bondarev's book? -- What's so frustrating to me
about this book isn't his treatment of *PoF* as
such; again, in Jeff's fragment he barely starts
his analysis of *PoF* itself.  My difficulty is
with Bondy's 138-page run-up to that analysis.
That run-up seems to me to consist mostly (not
entirely) of the most incomprehensible sort of
"Continental philosophy".  Again:  so far I have
only scanned through it, not read it closely;
it's just so hard to read.  Bondy sweeps through
the history of philosophy from the ancient
Greeks to the present, and in the present
especially employs the kind of non-sensory
concepts that are so foreign to the mind that
lives in the English language and archetypal
consciousness.

Holy unintelligibility, Batman; there's Fichte
and there's Heidegger; there's Husserl and even
Bondy's favorite unknown (to us) Russian,
Nikolai Lossky; there's lots of Kant in his most
"transcendental" aspects; and there's Hegel,
Hegel, and more Hegel.  There're concepts such
as *immanence*, *otherness*, *panlogism*,
*ideal-realism*, *intuitivism*,
*phenomenological*, *trans-individual subject*,
*illusionism*, *hierarchical personalism*,
*voluntarist*, *intentionality of
consciousness*, *absolute givenness*,
*recreationism*, *Dasein*, *Wesen*,
*Bedingtheit*, and so on.  And more:  there's
the most abstract, abstruse, theology of the
Trinity.  And so on. --

So, the question for me is this:  Am I having
such a hard time because I'm stuck in the
English language and English-American *Volk*
characteristics while Bondarev is writing in the
Russian language and from the Russian *Volk*
characteristics, after taking his concepts
(mostly) from the German language and *Volk*
characteristics?  Or is it because I'm under-
educated or maybe just plain dim?

I think that it might be easier for me to accept
that I'm a member of an inferior race, or at
least a mentally impaired race, than to accept
that I'm just plain stupid. -- Well, what do you
think?  Do any Continental Europeans reading
this email have the same kind of difficulties
working through *this* book of Bondy's?
(*Crisis* [*Kreuzung*] isn't nearly as hard to
read.)  Is *anyone* having as much trouble as I
am?

But maybe I am making it sound harder than it
really is?  Bondy, after all, does seem to be
familiar with the "Western" philosophy of
science, and he does work mainly on themes that
should already be familiar to Anthros,
especially *beholding* (*Anschauen*) and
Goethe's familiar (or what should be familiar)
"power of judgment in beholding" (*anschauende
Urteilskraft*). -- But I'm still having a lot of
trouble with it.  Maybe it's just hard to
understand a genius?  But again, Bondy's
*Crisis* book isn't so hard to understand.  So I
really do have to wonder whether much of my
trouble comes from the fact that Bondy's mind is
Russian and my mind is American.  The Russian
*Volk* character is, so Steiner tells us, at the
opposite pole of the trichotomy West-Middle-East
from the American *Volk* character -- the
Russian being the more naturally "spiritual" and
the American being the more naturally
"materialistic".  And here we have a Russian who
has taken concepts mostly from the "Middle"
(German) language and mind into his Russian
language and mind and written this book in
Russian.  And then the Russian has been
translated back into the German language, and
then translated into English.  And more, we have
the complication that this particular Russian
was born in the deepest abyss of Stalin's
hellish tyranny, educated in "dialectical
materialism" in the Ahrimanic (or Asuric) Soviet
state educational system, and lived most of his
life under the pervasive censorship and terror
of the Soviet system.  Only in the last twenty
years or so has he been living (off and on?) in
the Middle (Switzerland) near the headquarters
of the Dornach Society, where he has not been
welcomed with open arms. -- Really, I do have to
wonder whether my difficulties are due not only
to my own inadequacies but maybe also to more
general differences of *Volk* character and
language.

And again, I haven't even yet read all the text
that I have, and I haven't seen the diagrams.
Bondy is often a pictorial thinker, and I would
expect that the diagrams would help a lot.
Still I have understood that his philosophical
ponderings are leading into a deep, close
analysis of *PoF*, and that this analysis
deserves much work and attention.  For instance,
he portrays *PoF* as a great Mystery Drama:

>>. . . . the "Philosophie der Freiheit" is
experienced by anyone who really begins to
understand it, as a Mystery Drama, whose main
hero is the new Dionysos-Prometheus who battles
with all that has become, for the sake of
individual evolution and the overcoming of
inherited sin.  But the Mysteries pursued, at
all times, the goal of bringing about in the
participant catharsis, moral purification.  In
the case at hand catharsis of the soul is
absolutely essential, in order to eradicate
everything that disturbs pure thought and
beholding.<<

More, he outlines a sevenfold process of
dialectics, beyond the familiar threefold
dialectics of Hegel (thesis-antithesis-
synthesis).  He understands this sevenfold
dialectic as "musical" (the seven major notes of
the scale leading to the octave), and he sees
this sevenfold dialectic process as running
throughout the text of *PoF*.  And in this
fragment he starts to show this sevenfoldness in
*PoF* line by line.

>>. . . . the riddles of the "Philosophy of
Freedom", a book written according to the laws
of the sounding word; the latter determine in it
the character of thinking, of the development of
the ideas.  Consequently, they have in the book
their "melodies" and "harmonies", which one can
raise into the light of consciousness.  All this
must be borne in mind from the beginning if we
are to be able to experience with our sense of
thought the character of the thinking in the
"Philosophy of Freedom", when we begin to regard
the work as a collection of practical exercises
which contribute to the development of the power
of judgment in beholding.<<

And he does seek to show how *PoF* is a book of
world-historic, even cosmic, significance -- how
it helps us to grasp and fulfill Man's essential
task at this moment of cosmic evolution.  This
aspect has social implications reaching back
into his previous book that we have in English:

>>. . . . the crisis of culture and civilization
has its roots in the crisis of knowledge.<<

So, I do verily wish to understand how, for
instance, he came to discern this sevenfold
dialectic and how he found it in *PoF* . . . and
maybe even how his philosophic-epistemological
mind works.  I'll be working on it, slowly . . .
and it might help to get some cross-
fertilization from others who are also working
on it.

Bondarev says:

>>[RS] wrote the 'Philosophy of Freedom'
(Spiritual Activity) at the crossing-point of
the philosophy of pure thinking and the
esotericism of thinking; it is, one could say,
written with morphological thinking. This
phenomenon is quite unique and it is so
difficult, for this reason, to find a relation
to it.  The present work is an attempt to remove
some of the difficulties on the path to a
mastery of this qualitatively new thinking,
which forms the central core of Anthroposophical
methodology.<<

Robert Mason