mikekatz wrote: ↑Sat Oct 01, 2022 7:09 pm First off, lol, would you set Steiner aside for the undoubtedly racist comments he made?
I think motive is the issue here. Gurdjieff was very good at making money. He could have been a multimillionaire and lived a life of luxury. But he chose to try to impart what he had learned instead. This involved having fulltime pupils, sometimes a hundred or so. He was responsible for accommodating, feeding, and moving them around sometimes, even in the middle of wars. It's said that he once became a spy so that he could get papers to allow him to move his entourage between countries during wartime.In the lectures, published as a book with the English title The Mission of Individual Souls, he writes ”The Black or Negro race is substantially determined by these childhood characteristics. If we now cross over to Asia, we find a point or center where the formative forces of the Earth impress permanently on man the particular characteristics of later youth or adolescence and determine his racial character... If we continue northward and then turn in a westernly direction towards Europe, a third point or center is reached which permanently impresses upon man the characteristics of his adult life.”
Gurdjieff maintained that we are all completely trapped in our ego. We need to be literally shocked out of it, and anything that got you out of the ego was good, even if it looked bad to the outside world. So he lost many people and was heavily criticized during his life and afterwards. Did he sometimes fail as a human being and do things out of personal lust and greed? Maybe, who knows?
There's a Zen story, I forget the details, where a master and his pupil undertake a journey. On the way, the master does some outrageous things. I think he knocks down part of a wall. The pupil is stunned, but the master refuses to explain. On the way back, the pupil sees how the things the master had done had benefitted everyone.
And there's the railway morality question. There are two tracks. On one, there is a person trapped on the track, and on the other there are five people trapped on the track. There is a train coming, and you have a switch to change tracks in front of you. if you don't throw the switch, five people die. If you do, one person dies and you have sent them personally to their death. What do you do?
Gurdjieff gave a talk once about what he called "the money question", and he was unapologetic about ripping people off sometimes. He did it to allow his group to continue existing and learning. There was no personal gain involved. Was he right? Is there such a thing as right when the train is coming?
So would I behave like Gurdjieff? No! Could I behave like him even if I saw the real need for it? I doubt it.
In Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson, Gurdjieff often uses the phrase "conscious labors and intentional suffering" as a necessary activity to evolve. Conscious labours as in the hard work required to be constantly conscious (self aware), and intentional suffering as in doing something completely foreign to your ego, to help you break your false ego. He frequently required pupils and potential pupils to make herculean efforts, and most were not prepared to. He himself accomplished tasks that his pupils deemed impossible to achieve.
Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous is an incredibly detailed exposition of Gurdjieff's system, in Gurdjieff's own words. You cannot doubt his knowledge or his sincerity if you read it.
First, Mike, on idealistic forum ground we don’t set anything aside
Second, what I don’t feel sympathy for in Gurdjieff is his moral conduct in life, not his ideas. Now you are pointing to something that is (supposedly) part of Steiner’s ideas, not his conduct in life, so it’s two different things.
Third, we can still look at this different question you are pointing to, because we don't set anything aside. But for now I have gained no sense of what makes you speak of “undoubtedly racist comments”. If some of Steiner’s comments really sound undoubtedly racist to you, you don’t seem to have done your very best to convey this sense. Is this an anonymous quote of an anonymous quote? What is the language use of reference we should place ourselves in when considering the idea in question? And what was that idea? The idea is the only thing that counts here, of course.
Waiting for these questions to be clarified, I can share what I know right now about Steiner’s ideas, based on what I have carefully read, which is PoF. It's beyond doubt to me that the ideas expressed there are unequivocally incompatible with racism. Doing my best to convey this sense, my invitation is to recall the definition of racism (here below, first up in google search) then read the following passage from PoF. I think that should be about enough.
Oxford Dictionaries wrote:racism
/ˈreɪsɪz(ə)m/
noun
prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism by an individual, community, or institution against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized.
Steiner - PoF Ch. XV. The Individual and the Genus - wrote:The view that man is a wholly self-contained, free individuality stands in apparent conflict with the facts, that he appears as a member of a natural whole (race, tribe, nation, family, male or female sex), and that he acts within a whole (state, church, etc.). He exhibits the general characteristics of the community to which he belongs, and gives to his actions a content which is defined by the place which he occupies within a social whole.
This being so, is any individuality left at all? Can we regard man as a whole in himself, in view of the fact that he grows out of a whole and fits as a member into a whole?
The character and function of a member of a whole are defined by the whole. A tribe is a whole, and all members of the tribe exhibit the peculiar characteristics which are conditioned by the nature of the tribe. The character and activity of the individual member are determined by the character of the tribe. Hence the physiognomy and the conduct of the individual have something generic about them. When we ask why this or that is so or so, we are referred from the individual to the genus. The genus explains why something in the individual appears in the forms observed by us.
But man emancipates himself from these generic characteristics. He develops qualities and activities the reason for which we can seek only in himself. The generic factors serve him only as a means to develop his own individual nature. He uses the peculiarities with which nature has endowed him as material, and gives them a form which expresses his own individuality. We seek in vain for the reason for such an expression of a man's individuality in the laws of the genus. We are dealing here with an individual who can be explained only through himself. If a man has reached the point of emancipation from what is generic in him, and we still attempt to explain all his qualities by reference to the character of the genus, then we lack the organ for apprehending what is individual.
It is impossible to understand a human being completely if one makes the concept of the genus the basis of one's judgment.
Back to Gurdjieff and your questions about moral action in the face of necessity and what is right or wrong in extreme situations. I don’t doubt Gurdjieff's sincerity and knowledge. Sure he was convinced his choices were necessary, but does such a conviction give anyone any credit or justification? It is, after all, perceived necessity we all have to deal with. On your railway morality question: yes, there must be a right thing to do in every situation. It doesn’t make any sense to me that right and wrong course of action only apply when life is easy, but when things get tough, then we are not supposed to be responsible anymore and we can be excused by necessity. The posed dilemma in itself does not make sense, because in real life there is no way the situation could present itself to us in such abstract terms. The question challenges us to consider our concrete behaviors, so it should not constrain us in ways that are impossible to materialize in real life. In real life our behavior would depend on our overall understanding of all the specific constraints and possibilities made available in the unique situation we would be facing. One element of that understanding would be how we answer the question whether we can do the math of the value of life the same way we do the math of our current account.
