Jim Cross wrote: ↑Thu Jan 20, 2022 2:05 pm
JustinG wrote: ↑Thu Jan 20, 2022 2:16 am
Eugene I. wrote: ↑Wed Jan 19, 2022 7:05 pm
Well, Steiner's PoF was a good work of philosophy and some contemporary philosophers have been appreciating that (
here is one example). But better ask Justin's professional opinion on that.
I'm not a professional philosopher and am not familiar with Steiner's later work, but I do think he was a brilliant philosopher and that
The Philosophy of Freedom is definitely worth reading and engaging with.
From a skeptical point of view, I think its is most productive to engage with the strongest representatives of views which you oppose or are skeptical of. Steiner was an academically trained philosopher who claimed to have clairvoyant abilities and to have developed a philosophy which grounds the possibility of such abilities. That is pretty rare. Hence, I think there are good reasons for skeptics and physicalists to engage with his work.
Clairvoyance is too easy. Anybody can claim clairvoyance so everything they say is beyond argument. It's even easier if the realized "truths" can't be tested objectively and can only be understood by those who have already bought into the entire philosophy. If you are not understanding, it's because you haven't developed the spiritual organs sufficiently or you're blocked by karmic impurities from previous lives. It's never because the entire framework and belief system is invalid.
It's like the hilarious thread on this forum about why reincarnated people don't usually have memories of previous lives. It doesn't occur to anybody that maybe reincarnation doesn't actually exist and that's why there are no memories? The parsimonious explanation.
As I said, I can see the appeal for some people. People want to think themselves special so belonging to a cult for the spiritually evolved - the special visionaries of our age - will appeal to some people.
Steiner may have some good insights here and there but there is too much other stuff for me to give it much serious consideration.
I don't have anything close to clairvoyance, yet I can test all of the broad spiritual claims, like reincarnation, against my own Reason and constellations of experiential facts to see if they are harmonious. I can see exactly how the nominalism/rationalism/dualism/materialism responsible for the flattened and lifeless view of the Cosmos also makes sense of why soul and spirit processes are completely ignored in modern philosophy and science. Why all of ancient mythology, spiritual tradition, and philosophy which was spiritual, must be written off as "superstitious" by that flattened view, which is the least reasonable or parsimonious explanation. I can see why it even makes sense of my daily experience, from waking to sleeping-dreaming to waking, or contemplating aesthetics, which secular science has no explanation for. It's not as if Steiner was the only person who suggest these things, he was simply the person to most comprehensively harmonize the facts together. Every Western idealist thinker since Plato had something to contribute which secular science is at a complete loss to understand.
What is the explanation for Jung's 'collective unconscious'? What about Bergson's philosophy of intuition? How does secular science explain the evolution of consciousness thoroughly documented by Hegel, Schelling, Emerson, Coleridge, Gebser, Barfield, Steiner, Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, Aurobindo, and quite a few others? There are a million other aspects of human experience which can't be explained by secular science, because they don't even know those aspects exist. Or they think calling them "random" is an explanation. All of these aspects of the
depth structure underlying our flattened perceptions of the world must be completely ignored for secular science to be "parsimonious". It must remove all meaningful data points from consideration before it can say, "we almost fully understand the Cosmos and now we just need to tweak around the edges!" Everyone who is thinking logically can sense how far off from reality that is.