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For the Goethe Curious

Posted: Mon Oct 18, 2021 3:22 pm
by Soul_of_Shu

Re: For the Goethe Curious

Posted: Mon Oct 18, 2021 5:06 pm
by findingblanks
Can't wait to watch this, thanks!

Re: For the Goethe Curious

Posted: Mon Oct 18, 2021 11:12 pm
by AshvinP
Soul_of_Shu wrote: Mon Oct 18, 2021 3:22 pm

Thanks Dana, I will check it out tonight and try to post some feedback. I have been looking at some more Goethe Wisdom for an essay, and it's just endlessly enjoyable to contemplate his poetry, aphorisms, science, etc.

Re: For the Goethe Curious

Posted: Tue Oct 19, 2021 2:20 am
by AshvinP
AshvinP wrote: Mon Oct 18, 2021 11:12 pm Thanks Dana, I will check it out tonight and try to post some feedback. I have been looking at some more Goethe Wisdom for an essay, and it's just endlessly enjoyable to contemplate his poetry, aphorisms, science, etc.

So around 13 min., we come to Sattler's claim that Steiner did not really perceive the holistic nature of Goethe's view. He says that Goethe perceived the usefulness of the "mechanistic view" while Steiner did not. This is a great topic because it is exactly what I am in the process of writing an essay on. For now, I will say Sattler must not be too familiar with Steiner's writings/lectures on "polarity", which he applies not only as abstract metaphysical concept, but a living reality in absolutely every human experience. He applies it across the board, including when discussing human history (from ancient Indian epoch onwards to present), culture, and the philosophical-metaphysical-spiritual development of the modern age. In fact, one thing I found very difficult to get over when first reading Steiner was how much spiritual importance he placed on the development of materialist and mechanistic views. It will easily throw one off if it is assumed Steiner only promotes "organic spiritual idealism" and talks ill of all other perspectives. Materialist mechanistic reductionism really becomes the greatest problem when spiritual impulses are evolving beyond those worldviews in the late 19th century but they are still clinged to by the conscious intellect (which has arbitrarily made it impossible for itself to ever perceive the underlying spiritual impulse). That relates to what was commented on Deep MAL essay recently re: "all evil is truth which is out of season".

I quoted this below from Steiner in my solipsism essay and also to you earlier, but I think it's really important for those who are reading Steiner or will be reading him to understand about his overall approach.

Steiner wrote:This makes it explainable to us how people can have such different concepts, such different views of reality, in spite of the fact that reality can, after all, only be one. The difference lies in the difference between our intellectual worlds. This sheds light for us upon the development of the different scientific standpoints. We understand where the many philosophical standpoints originate, and do not need to bestow the palm of truth exclusively upon one of them. We also know which standpoint we ourselves have to take with respect to the multiplicity of human views. We will not ask exclusively: What is true, what is false? We will always investigate how the intellectual world of a thinker goes forth from the world harmony; we will seek to understand and not to judge negatively and regard at once as error that which does not correspond with our own view. Another source of differentiation between our scientific standpoints is added to this one through the fact that every individual person has a different field of experience. Each person is indeed confronted, as it were, by one section of the whole of reality. His intellect works upon this and is his mediator on the way to the idea. But even though we all do therefore perceive the same idea, still we always do this from different places. Therefore, only the end result to which we come can be the same; our paths, however, can be different. It absolutely does not matter at all whether the individual judgments and concepts of which our knowing consists correspond to each other or not; the only thing that matters is that they ultimately lead us to the point that we are swimming in the main channel of the idea.