 Chapter 3 DAS DENKEN IM DIENSTE DER WELTAUFFASSUNGTHOUGHT AS THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWLEDGE THINKING AS THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWLEDGE THINKING IN THE SERVICE OF UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD THINKING IN THE SERVICE OF KNOWLEDGE THINKING IN THE SERVICE OF APPREHENDING THE WORLD THOUGHT IN THE SERVICE OF WORLD CONCEPTION |
German: DAS DENKEN IM DIENSTE DER WELTAUFFASSUNG
German
DAS: that, the
DENKEN: thinking, thought
IM: at, in
DIENSTE: services
WELTAUFFASSUNG: world view, world perception, world conception, world opinion, world understanding,
Other translators
1916 Hoernle: THOUGHT AS THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWLEDGE
1939: Poppelbaum: THINKING AS THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWLEDGE
1963 Stebbing: THINKING IN THE SERVICE OF UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD
1964 Wilson: THINKING IN THE SERVICE OF KNOWLEDGE
1986 Lindeman: THINKING IN THE SERVICE OF APPREHENDING THE WORLD
1995 Lipson: THINKING IN THE SERVICE OF UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD
2009 Last: Thought As The Basis For Understanding The World
2010 Tmasthenes: THINKING SERVING KNOWING
conception: The ability to form or understand mental concepts and abstractions.
What is Chapter 3 about?
Is Chapter 3 about knowing the world or is that the subject of Chapter 5, "Knowing the World". Chapter 3 ends with questioning if we can know anything about the world. It merely establishes that we can know our own thoughts. Chapter 3 is a study of thought, its role in world conception, and pure thinking.
"The purpose of my reflection is to form concepts of the event."
"Thought may play a minor role in the coming about of world phenomena, but it certainly plays a major role in the formation of a view about them."
"Most people today find it difficult to grasp the concept of pure thinking."
"I can understand someone doubting whether we can come to any conclusion about the world by means of thought, but I find it incomprehensible that anyone can doubt the correctness of thought in itself."
What would you title chapter 3?
On the way
Before answering this question, I am wondering how the line of argument moves through Chapter 2 to Chapter 3.
How does Wissenschaft relate to Weltauffassung?
mindmaps
Hi Tom
Can I find those beautiful mind maps somewhere in big format?
Here is a link to a Google
Here is a link to a Google "image" mind map search.
World Perception
AUFFASSUNG: perception, sense, feeling, intuition, comprehension, understanding
I suggest:
Thought in the Service of World Perception
The concept of thought as perception needs to held up high.
Chapter 3 Title Translation
How about: THINKING SERVING KNOWING
Chapter 3 title: THINKING
Chapter 3 title: THINKING SERVING KNOWING
I think this brief title captures chapter 3 in that thinking isn't used often enough to arrive at knowledge. We all have much knowledge but what is its origin? It also makes a distinction between chapter 5 Knowing the World. Chapter 3 is about thinking while chapter 5 is about knowing. I added this title to the above Journal.
Yes, but...
I also like the above suggestion. It sounds straightforward. But are my own preferences sufficient moral justification for a translator's actions? As Steiner says in the original first chapter of the 1894 edition -- "Everyone likes to believe only what appears to be true in his own mind."
'Thinking Serving Knowing' does not embrace the author's decision not to use the word Wissen, which he made use of in the 1894 edition, Chapter 1. Why did he choose a different word?
What is the difference between Wissen and Weltauffassung?
Does someone have a small image I can use here that moves endlessly round the little clock circle and says THINKING instead of DOWNLOADING?
You raise a good point, but
You raise a good point, but you may be misleading yourself with Steiner's "intentions". Steiner's intention was to relate to the readers of his era, just like ours should be.
Eight translators have come up with 8 different translations for chapter 3, which shows a dissatisfaction on the part of the translators with the German title. Todays reader likes to get to the simple point quickly. Others say this is the result of poor attention span and the internet. I would disagree and say it is the advance to conceptual thinking, which likes to get to the simple point quickly also.
I am reviewing chapter 3 again against the original German so I will refer to the title options during this process to see if this brief title can hold up. One way to check is to see if the 12 views in the chapter all relate to the chapter title.
Misleader
Tom, we may all be misled, but that should not mean we stand on one spot forever.
Let's take Weltauffassung literally and expand a little. Thinking serves for grasping the world. Knowledge also serves for grasping the world. We may say that taking hold of the world is knowledge. Then knowledge is the result of taking hold of the world, not the process. The process is thinking which can result in knowledge. Then thinking does not serve knowledge, but leads to knowledge. Can we say that knowledge is created by thinking?
Chapter 2 tells how Monists and Spiritualists have failed to take hold of the world. Is Steiner saying that they have no knowledge, or that their knowledge is erroneous?
More thinking needed here...
Greetings from Ms. Leder (I used to be a swan)
Thinking As The Instrument Of Contemplation
Here is a chapter 3 title. How does one contemplate the world? In the past they said to ignore thoughts. Steiner's contemplation involves activating thinking and remaining in a world of thoughts. This pure conceptual thinking is described in chapter 3.
Pure Thinking In The Service Of Knowing
I think chapter 3 is a description of pure thinking. It says we can know this thinking with certainty. Rather than thought holding us in bondage, it needs to serve knowing.
thinking and knowing
The term "knowledge" in English can often be thought of as a thing, a noun, or a content, produced by thinking, as in the "knowledge" I regurgitate to a professor to show I read the text ...
In Steiner's Truth and Science (sometimes translated as Truth and Knowledge), it seems that "knowledge" there is meant to refer to a state of being, as in I had biblical/sexual "knowledge" of that girl ...
Sometimes I think Steiner uses "knowledge" this way - the state of being way, which is not quite a noun and not quite a verb (something about the "passive" voice) ... as in "Knowledge of Higher Worlds and How to Attain It".
There is a kind of active thinking, which arises in part because one has renounced any prior conceptualization about the matter which is the object of the thinking ... I am "thinking on my knees" as Tomberg puts it, and as a consequence "it thinks in me" as Steiner puts it. The gap between my I and the object of thought narrows to the point where any content that falls out of that intercourse, in the sense of "concepts", is a consequence of something akin to the bibilical knowing referred to in the 2nd paragraph above ... I've just had an knowing/experience of the object of thought ...
I suspect that Steiner can't help on occasion being a bit ambigious, and that translators also can't help dealing with those problems in confusing ways, because so much depends upon actually having the conscious knowing/experience of an object of thought in its original moment as an "intution" - that is in the form: thinking as perceiving ... Steiner can only use words to point at something that cannot actually be rendered into words ... but rather must be experienced, at which point what he was pointing toward is then "seen" ...
Perhaps the solution to the "translation" problem is not to seek a definite statement (make it rigid in word-form), but (especially for the English reader) lean in the other direction and do what Barfield called posey, or prose leaning in the direction of poetry ... leave the reader to feel the mystery there, and not be too earthly ... for example, in the right circumstances I render books title as The Philosophy of Freedom, not as that, or as The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, but more freely as: The Philosophy of Free Becoming ... I want to appeal to the picture thinking at the border it shares with abstract thinking ... because, ultimately it will never be the words on the page (there he goes again!) but the experience that teaches what Steiner here brought ...
Might I add...
I think that the thing waiting to be known is as personal a being as the knower who striving to know it (him/her) That is a very alien concept to have to put across in a world of people who imagine they are personal beings grasping at an impersonal potential object of knowledge No wonder apt language is hard to find-unless of course one were to come straight out with it! Eg: "Actually, knowledge is a being and you must engage with her as such" I don't think that would help as an opener at all! But, as I say, I too think the assumed impersonality of knowledge is the root of this difficulty of expression.
I am aware of such phrases as "The knowledge ritual", which suggest a more mutually loving embrace between knower and known. I realise ritual has a theological ring. But, for myself, I like this idea of knower and known ritually embracing one another across a difficult void-in freedom, and in love. Such an animistic notion simply isn't present in the word "Knowledge", and probably is impossible to put there, but it sure happens in the lived experience "Knowledge".
Hooray for all
Love
Bryn
Steiner's advice to spiritualists
In chapter 2 Steiner advises the spiritualists in Realism that "when we go into action, we have to translate our intentions into realities".
A philosophy translation requires real English words for a real book. Steiner wanted to make philosophy a science, not abandon it for poetry. I think the failure of Goethean science to produce anything of value (aside from the great break through of flow forms) proves my point.
It is the world
Thank you, Joel.
If I have understood correctly, when I hold the world within me, the world thinks in me. Then Chapter 3 is about how to hold the world in me.
the world
I suppose ... not sure exactly what you mean by "the world" - seems like a pretty big concept ... In my own practical work with pure thinking it has always been important to have modest ambitions when "thinking on your knees". Steiner used in different places the terms (at least in English) "the world thoughts". My experience is that those are mostly small, and pointed, in the sense of a very specific "object of thinking". He also in Occult Science used the terms "the thought world". I'm phlegmatic of temperment, which means I plod rather than leap. It took me 21 years to know the Idea of the social political world as the "logos speaking". I had to build the whole "structure" up bit by bit. Keep in mind this from the preface to Truth and Knowledge:
[The object of knowledge is not to repeat in conceptual form something which already exists, but rather to create a completely new sphere, which when combined with the world given to our senses constitutes complete reality. Thus man's highest activity, his spiritual creativeness, is an organic part of the universal world-process. The world-process should not be considered a complete, enclosed totality without this activity. Man is not a passive onlooker in relation to evolution, merely repeating in mental pictures cosmic events taking place without his participation; he is the active co-creator of the world-process, and cognition is the most perfect link in the organism of the universe. [Emphasis added] Steiner's Preface in Truth and Knowledge]
joel
Grain of sand
Joel wrote: not sure exactly what you mean by "the world"
I was bearing in mind that this thread is about the English 'translation' of the Chapter 3 title, which includes Welt = world.
I first read Steiner's lectures about cosmic this and cosmic that without realising that the 'translators' had often read Welt in the German and written cosmos, cosmic and the vast distant like. Then I woke up to the world in William Blake's grain of sand, and staring at the world in the lines on the palm of my hand, all and all of it and nowhere me. I am many leagues along the path from that time yet the experience is still very close. When Steiner speaks or writes of the world it seems such a mighty yet intimate wonder. I am not now the same stranger to myself, I am a different stranger to somebody else who crept in between my ribs!
When I wrote world in the post above I meant the wonder, possibly the same wonder that Blake remembered in the lines:
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
(Auguries of Innocence)
He also wrote:
Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau.
Mock on, mock on—'tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.
(Mock On)
So I am considering that the title for Chapter 3 could be:
Using thinking to take hold of the world (as a reality)
"take hold of the world" or
"take hold of the world" or understand/comprehend/apprehend the world in chapter 3? All that is taken hold of is thought itself. The chapter raises the question of whether we can understand "anything" of the world with thinking. It concludes with:
3-12 Lipson: I can understand someone doubting that thinking can know something of the world, but it is incomprehensible to me that anyone can doubt the intrinsic correctness of thinking itself.
Chapter 3 doesn't even take up the issue of whether we are brain-washed and our thoughts are controlled by something else.
3-0 We will discuss later whether this activity of mine is really an expression of my own independent being, or whether modern physiologists are right in saying that we cannot think as we will, but rather have to think exactly as determined by the thoughts and thought-connections that happen to be present in our minds at any given moment.
It isn't until chapter 5, Knowing the World, that this is seriously examined.
Taking hold of thought
Is it established in Chapter 3 that thought can be taken hold of by thinking? Do readers generally enter chapter 3 with a quiet assumption that thinking is capable of taking hold of the world?
Is it established in
Is it established in Chapter 3 that thought can be taken hold of by thinking?
We know thought because it is a product of thinking.
[19] There is only one thing I know with absolute certainty, for I myself am the author of its sure existence: and that is my thought.
Then again, to integrate this thought into our knowledge base we need to think about the thought.
[23] We must resolutely plunge straight ahead into thinking and only afterward by introspective analysis gain knowledge of what we have done. In order to observe thinking we ourselves first create the thought, which we then make an object of observation.
Because we can grasp thought, we should be able to grasp the world. But in chapter 3 he doesn't detail out HOW we can grasp the world, as he does in chapter 5.
[25] The reason things seem so puzzling is because I am not involved in their production. I simply find them before me, but with thought I know how it is produced. This is why there is no more basic starting point for the contemplation of all events in the world than thought itself.
Certainty
So the only 'thing' I can be sure of is my thoughts.
Therefore the only sure tool I have to take hold of the world is thinking.
Therefore thinking is going to turn out to be a serviceable tool for taking hold of the world.
Thinking serves to (deliberate/handle questions about) take hold of the world.
This seems to account for the title of this chapter, no?
I think your title,
I think your title, Thinking serves to take hold of the world, is vague. What does "taking hold" really mean? What I am trying to do is have the title reflect the content of the chapter. So I am looking at the chapter topics and trying to word a title that in a few words describes these topics.
The chapter is a study of thinking and thought in itself without seriously examining knowledge of the world other than a brief conclusion "This is why there is no more basic starting point for the contemplation of all events in the world than thought itself."
The detailed content of chapter 3 (mysticism, inner light) shows how thinking serves our conceptualization of the world.
I think the best tech translation of Weltauffassung is World Conception. It is thinking that serves world conception. 3-0 "The purpose of my reflection is to construct concepts of the event."
conception: 1. The ability to form or understand mental concepts and abstractions.
2. Something conceived in the mind; a concept, plan, design, idea, or thought.
Das Denken im Dienste der Weltauffassung
3. Thinking In Service To World Conception
3.0 Reflective Thinking
3.1 Observation Of Thought
3.2 Formation Of Concept
3.3 Contemplation Of Object
3.4 Contemplation Of Thought
3.5 Content Of The Concept
3.6 Content Of Thought
3.7 Content Of Thinking Activity
3.8 Remain Within Thought
3.9 Create Thought Before Knowing It
3.10 Thought Subsists Through Itself
3.11 Start With Thinking
3.12 Application Of Thought
1. Conscious Human Action
1.0 The Question Of Freedom
1.1 Freedom Of Indifferent Choice
1.2 Freedom Of Choice
1.3 Free Necessity Of Own Nature
1.4 Free From External Influences
1.5 Action Resulting From Conscious Motive
1.6 Free When Controlled By Reason
1.7 Free To Do As One Wants
1.8 Unconditioned Will
1.9 Knowing The Reasons
1.10 Action Springs From The Heart
1.11 Expression Of Love
1.12 Seeing Good Qualities
Der Grundtrieb zur Wissenschaft
2. The Basic Urge For Theory
2.0 Seeking An Explanation Of World Phenomena
2.1 Materialism
2.2 Spiritualism
2.3 Realism
2.4 Idealism
2.5 Materialistic Idealism
2.6 Indivisible Unity
2.7 Contrast Self With The World
2.8 Nature's Influence
2.9 Knowing Nature Within
2.10 Something More Than “I"
2.11 Description Of Consciousness
2.12 Facts Without Interpretation
Words that explain themselves
I agree, Tom. Taking hold is only an interim term that has helped me become clear about the chapter title. World conception is equally vague to the general reader and, even after going over your dictionary’s best efforts, it says little to me.
I suggest that the following are more lucid and indicate useful directions to explore:
Thinking’s use in understanding the world
Using thinking to explain the world.
World conception is very
World conception is very relevant since the path of POF is conceptual thinking or pure thinking, which requires that the world be conceptualized, or put in the form of concepts. In most cases we would go with more familar words, but in the case of concepts we need to support the point of the book.
Supoorting the book - many lifelines
I agree that we should support the book, Tom. Have you jumped over the fence here from your post of http://www.philosophyoffreedom.com/node/4174#comment-8728 above?
Using thinking to conceptualise the world
Thinking using world concepts
Chapter 2: "Only when we have made the content of the world into our own thought content will we rediscover the unity from which we have separated ourselves."
The World as Thought Content
None of these suggestions may be good enough for the chapter 3 title, but they lack the impenetrable abstraction that the English term World Conception brings. I am still hanging on for a better solution to this dense chunk of German.
Thinking as Bridge to World Content
Thinking as a Bridge to the World
Thinking Can Grasp the World
Thinking as Conceptual Understanding of the World
The World As Thought jumps
The World As Thought jumps out at me. Each chapter has a domain of observation. Here are some chapter titles that point out what is being observed.
1. Conscious Human Action
2. The Basic Urge For Knowledge
3. The World As Thought
4. The World As Perception
5. Knowing The World As Concept
6. Individual Creation Of The Mental Image
7. Cognizing Reality
Word cloud added to chapter 3
Interesting that object and thought are the two words that have the highest count in chapter 3.
hmmmmmmmmm?
Think on it: how the point becomes a sphere and yet remains itself. Hast thou understood how the infinite sphere may be only a point, and then come again, for then the Infinite will shine forth for thee in the finite." Rudolf Steiner
working with projective geometry, one can learn to actually see this with the picture thinking.
joel
Please select reply when replying
Which comment are you replying to?
Point and Circle
Indeed Joel. The lynchpin of my work with children and young adults has been the point and circle meditation that Steiner gave during the curative education course. if you do not know it the details are here - http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/CuratEducat/19240705p01.html and there are further more specific references here - http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/CuratEducat/19240706p01.html Projective geometry offers a path of experience for many.
Before I get an off-topic troll kick I append some lines from a contemplation of Joel's post above in the mood of Easter that was conjured up in a study group this morning.
This circumstance
Is all circumstance.
This I do now
Is done for all eternity.
Being here now
Is the deed that counts
The highest, one.
THOUGHT AS THE BASIS FOR UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD
chapter 3 [29] I think I have given sufficient reasons for making thought the starting point for my study of the world. When Archimedes had discovered the lever he believed he could use it to lift the whole cosmos out of its hinges, provided he could find a point of support for his instrument.
This line must be what inspired Hoernle to come up with the chapter 3 title: THOUGHT AS THE INSTRUMENT OF KNOWLEDGE
He needed a point that was self-supporting, not dependent on anything else. In thought we have a self-subsisting principle. Let us start here in our attempt to comprehend the world. Thought we can understand through thought itself.
...the philosopher has to seek a sure basis from which to understand what already exists.
Chapter 3 establishes thought as the basis for understanding the world. This should be obvious but maybe not so today. Thought is discredited today by the religious and spiritualists who flee the intellect and thought and seek knowledge various other ways avoiding thinking. This title establishes Steiner's philosophy as based on thought and thinking.
THOUGHT AS THE BASIS FOR UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD
A possible misunderstanding can occur with this title if someone understands it to mean that ones preexisting assumptions are the basis for understanding the world. But the chapter explains what thinking contemplation is:
To become absorbed in the object is to contemplate by thought. My attention is not directed on my activity, but on the object of this activity.
And that We must resolutely plunge straight ahead into thinking and only afterward by introspective analysis gain knowledge of what we have done. In order to observe thinking we ourselves first create the thought, which we then make an object of observation.
But this chapter doesn't really take up the issue of assumptions controling our thinking. We will discuss later whether this activity of mine is really the expression of my own independent being, or whether modern physiologists are right in saying that we cannot think as we will, but rather have to think exactly as determined by the thoughts and thought-connections that happen to be present in our minds at any given moment.
It establishes "thought" as being unique and special compared to everything else.
Rise of stupidity in USA, happening elsewhere?
America seems to be in a rapid decline in intelligence. Rational thought, the thing that separates us from animalism, is being rejected for belief. This is most obvious in politics in the Republican party where misinformation (lies) are now the norm, yet people go along and choose to believe what is a lie, or are so stupid they are easily fooled. I was just wondering if this is solely an American decline? I have not noticed the rest of the world getting dumber.
This is why I think POF can play an important role just by confiming many things that should be obvious, like thinking and thought having a special status compared to other activities of the human being.
re: rise of stupidity
Tom
I am fairly sure what is happening is not a "rise of stupidity", if we are going to use anthroposophical insights.
In The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness, Steiner points out that psychic/spiritual development of the human being in the present peaks (as regards its natural forces) at about age 25. He says that in earlier times this natural development lasted much longer, but in the present and the future it is diminishing. What we get in this regard naturally is less and less, and what we need to get from culture, and even more importantly from our own efforts, is growing in proportion. Less instinctive soul growth, and more conscious growth instead.
With the incarnation of Ahriman, who as Karl Rove is now active in America in the political life, divisive social forces are stronger, because he encourages and supports the Lie as much as possible. A lot of untruth had been common even when he was not incarnate, but in the present he is able to increase this effect by working from within society instead of from outside it.
For complex reasons his sphere of activity in the poltical social included the Republican Party, and he was able just before and then during the Bush II administration to institute a top down system of lies and propaganda called "the Republican talking points". These have been and still today are routinely distributed daily throughout not only the aparatus of the Republican Party, but also through various media outlets as well. This is why conservative talk radio, for example, and a Republican Senator, will from day to day use exactly the same language over and over again. Its as if he is able to make a kind of sound echo over and over again through the body politic.
During the Bush II years he described this process in this way: "That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
The constant sounding of the "talking points", which some have taken to calling the Republican noise machine, has an effect on the immature individuals, whose spiritual development naturally arrested in their early twenties. They are exremely suseptable to being manipulated by this propaganda machine, particularly the emotionally oriented components (it mostly doesn't try to appeal to the intellect at all).
When you couple this with the natural tendency of human beings to relate to the world via likes and dislikes (sympathies and antipathies), the top down directed talking point lies create for undeveloped individuals a "reality" to which they emotionally respond. They are not more stupid than before, but rather the constant repetative effect of Ahriman/Rove's noise machine produces a cumulative effect. Healing effects are produced through rhythmic processes, and in the same way ill effects can also be produced.
As near as I can tell, this will increase (emotional and irrational outbursts) throughout the body politic up until the year 2012, when the great cycle of the Mayan Calender turns over into a new phase. The same things are happening in Greece today, in Africa, and did recently in France, where uneducated jobless youth become violent. This too will continue to rise.
Working from America as a Center, out into the world, Ahriman/Rove is able to radiate his influence of disturbances, with different kinds of effects taking place in different places according to what that place "feels" in relationship to America. He also did not incarnate alone, but has conscious and unconscious pupils everywhere, working together to achieve certain ends. For example, Ahriman/Rove now "works" within the vast international media empire of Rupert Murdock, which includes Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. This grants his "word" and "ideas" an international readership.
About a year ago, the London Times did a piece in which they ranked the influence of American political "pundits", according to their effect and reputation. Ahriman/Rove was number one.
Steiner advised us that nothing can stop Ahriman's incarnation, and that there will be a considerable difficulty in recognizing him. That serves his intentions as well, that we don't see that the Father of Lies is with us, and active. If one follows anthroposophical literature and lecturing on this question, as far as I know I am the only one yet who sees him as incarnate in the present in Karl Rove. I felt alone in this for some time, and then a Scottish seer, who is also an anthroposophist, but who works on the periphery and mostly in silence, contacted me and confirmed my work.
You may recall, Tom, that I had my "heart" attacks while living at your house. The main work I was doing at the time was the work on Ahriman's incarnation, which required of my soul that I let have greater contact with the "dark" side than is normal, something like what a profiler of seriel killers does for the FBI. My Scottish seer friend told me that one of the reasons she and I could not be allowed to work together, something I sought soon after our first meeting, was that we would together be too visible to those who serve Ahriman, and thus in more danger. She too had a "heart" attack" recently.
Lest someone think I am feasting on my own importance here, you need to know that while I don't like the pain, or the lack of recognition, I do consider the whole thing kind of funny. I'd love to meet Rove face to face, but not in public ... just in private. I'd just like to shake his hand in wonder. He and his work plays an important role is the evolution of consciousness, which is why my lengthy essay on his incarnation in my book American Anthroposophy is called: "Outrageous Genius". Think about it - a near-god walks among us confined to an all too human body, and nobody notices (especially the anthroposophists who think they know so much).
joel
Rove applied marketing techniques from business
(Warning: speculative metaphysics) Rove applied marketing techniques for controlling humans developed in the business world. Is it possible that the corporate entity to be the incarnation of Ahriman? The courts are recognizing corporations as "beings" deserving human rights including free speech and the right to control politics with money. These corporate entities are truly taking or have taken over the world implementing a purly materialistic view. The corp. entity has moved beyond the business sphere to control all areas of life.
A being, good or evil, will hover above and influence any group. Aren't corporations an incarnation of some sort of demon heiarchy that has taken over the world? Is this possible according to Steiner's writings?
While I appreciate the
While I appreciate the qualitative landscapes your conclusion invites, Joel, I believe Rove is much too highly recognized (in a negative light by all sorts of right/left groups) to even fit Steiner's external criterion. That said, I have met two other Anthroposophists who see him as a strong candidate. I also know of one who sees Glen Beck as the One.
Anthroposophy teaches me that it is almost "better" for the question to be moot, however I enjoy reading various conclusions, especially the ones that invite qualitative consideration.
Karl Rove has been recognized as a liar by a wide spectrum of people both within the right and left domains of North American Culture. Sure, like Beck, Palin and the big L, Carl has a platfrom and will always be welcomed on news program. But he is also one of the few people who has his words objectively critizied by both large swaths of republicans and democrats each time he speaks.
The Arhiman I'm tracking is much much sneakier. Everybody, so far, is loving h/er....
Yo!
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